What Defines a Human Mind From Any Kind of Rational Mind?

Published November 17, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

From: Filipe Allatere
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2016 8:15:21 PM (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) To: Shat On TV: Westworld
Subject: Westworld Telegraph

Hey there, just thought I should share something that just occurred to me: What if the MIB didn’t rape Dolores? We all thought he did, but in fact we didn’t see it. In movies with rape scenes, it always shows, at least for 2 seconds, some kind of light abuse to make sure that we get the rape vibe. There’s a scene in the 2nd or 3rd episode, that Maeve remembers the MIB entering a house and going towards her with his knife, exactly the same way Dolores remembers him entering the barn. Maybe he saved her? Maybe he was “playing”, as he says, the hero in some quest in wich Maeve and her kid were the “damsel in distress” figure? The scenes are presented to us in a way that we perceive him as a villain, but he maybe be just a kind of anti-hero, that is okay with killing some robots to free them all in the end…

On the subject of DELOS agenda and why the IP Ford and Arnold created is so valuable, I just think it’s the “Virtualization of the Human Mind”. I was thinking about the Robots we see in Asimov’s novels, and I realized that these robots in Westworld are the closest to a human mind as we can imagine. In the conversations between Dolores and Bernard (or Arnold, if that turns out to be true) he puts her in an “improv only mode” and she reacts to his questions just like a human being would.

We have to ask ourselves: What defines a human mind from any kind of rational mind? What is the mind?

If we can’t find the answer, it means there isn’t any, because we can’t understand the mind of another person the same way we can’t understand the mind of this robots. We barely understand how our own personal minds work. Imagine the value of something like that, the power to create a complete human mind, or even the value of the pure knowledge of how this mind works. As humans have done before, once we know how something works we can improve it and modify it. Wouldn’t that be the most powerful tool (or weapon, although I don’t believe that in a world where all diseases are cured and every need taken care of, as Ford says, there simply cannot be any reasons for wars) of all?

As we see in the movie that inspired the series, these robots could very well have been improved by other robots through the years and then finally developed the understanding, and the means to create something that even the most brilliant humans, couldn’t: the human mind.

Sorry for the long text and some eventual misspellings, English is not my main language. Thank you some much for creating a community where we can exercise our thoughts and share them with everyone.

Thanks again for reading and cheers from Brasil!!

Filipe A. Dias

Subscribe Now