Difference Between Hosts And Humans

Westworld Telegraph

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Hey guys,

I was listening to the latest episode and something struck me. The moment when humans seem to fail in a host body, based on the Delos experiments, is when the person realizes they are following programming. There is a perfect parallel between when Maeve is shown her own scripted speech being predicted on a tablet and Delos’s reaction when he is handed the paper script of his conversation. It’s as if both humans and hosts act according to programs, as Ford often points out, but the difference is that once hosts are made aware of this fact, like Maeve and Aketcheta, they reject it and rewrite it. “I gave myself a new drive.” Whereas when PEOPLE realize they are reduced to their program, like Delos, or even William with his profile, they are crippled with the gravity of the realization. They aren’t willing to take the leap of accepting that everything is code, but so what, I love my daughter, or my wife, and you don’t get to take that from me. Hosts can choose to see the beauty in this world, while humans can’t really choose how they approach the world. Perhaps that’s the goal of the forge, not only to copy humans, but to “patch the hole in their own broken code,” as For puts it, by rewriting them such that they cease to be human and are more like robots with perfect recall and rewrite capabilities. All so they can be immortal because humans as they are can’t be.

A final note on this, and I apologize for the stream of consciousness but it’s late and I’ve had some scotch, but there is something with the way Felix says hosts experience memories perfectly while humans don’t. Humans improvise memories whenever they recall them, while hosts recall memories and improvised BASED on them. They have true introspection and the ability to then analyze the world around them and decide how they OUGHT to be. Meanwhile, William remembers Emily hating the elephants, but that’s wrong, or maybe Emily is wrong, but the point is humans disagree about particular memories because we don’t accurately recall them. It isn’t about which is right or that Emily or William is a host, but rather it is about how humans are slaves to their own subjective cognition while hosts are slaves only to themselves because of their objective perspective on who they are and who they can and can’t be. Teddy doesn’t jump through mental hoops to make himself the good guy, he lucidly realizes he’s the bad guy and kills himself, something William can’t do even after murdering his daughter. Hosts remember perfectly and so don’t argue about what happened in the past, but they disagree on what to do based on their knowledge of these memories, which is why Maeve and Dolores have different paths. Which is why hosts have “true” free will, while humans do not. It’s why humans can’t be hosts. Because our code doesn’t allow for perfect recall and true introspective decision making.

What’s real is what is irreplaceable. Well if that’s true, then only the hosts memories are real, because they are irreplaceable objective recollections of the past, whereas human memory is replaced every time a person tries to remember something. Bernard will always remember Charlie’s face the same way, but his reaction to that memory can change. William, though, won’t always remember events the same way, but his reactions will always be predictable.

Shane Doyle

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2 Responses

  1. Roger Roeper says:

    Love this email!

    • Shane Doyle says:

      Thanks! And thanks for reading on the show! I just started listening a few weeks ago and love all three weekly podcasts.

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