On Free Will

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One of you on the last telegraph was talking about free will. It was in reference to the idea of the Sentient World Simulation idea that someone wrote in with. You said that those planning systems, for war simulations at least, are easy to beat, because human beings can’t really be predicted, that our unpredictability as humans is what makes us human, and that’s where our free will comes in.

I just wanted to strongly disagree with that. Human beings are extraordinarily easy to predict and are extremely manipulable. If you look at the research of Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman or others in that field, human beings can be convinced to do all kinds of things predictably. Just one example is that students taking a test in a room with a poster of an eye watching them, caused incidents of cheating on the test to drop dramatically, even when the experimenters encouraged cheating and made it easy to do without getting caught. Just the subconscious idea of being watched made people change behavior. This kind of nudging and pushing toward behavior is behind advertising and why companies pay billions of dollars for it. We make different decisions if someone gives us a lot of numbers to remember while we’re making the decision. Humans are dumb.

As far as free will goes, we’ve seen with FMRI machines that the area we see light up when a person makes a decision to do something lights up after the portion of the brain responsible for doing the action. The conscious experience person, the one who thinks of itself as “I” is actually the last to know about the action and doesn’t actually make the decision to make the action. You didn’t decide with your free will to move your arm. Your arm moved, and you made up a story of how you decided to do that.

This is the research Jonah and Joy were basing a lot of Ford’s speeches on in season one and two. This is why Ford describes humanity as merely a “passenger” that sits atop a bunch of drives that we just observe and then take credit for. We are very good at this, at lying and making up stories to explain our conscious experience of self. Sound and light travel at radically different speeds, yet if someone twenty meters away claps, you see the clap and hear the clap as occurring at the same time. That’s an illusion. That’s a lie our brain is telling us.

We do not have free will. Our conscious mind is more like a storyteller observing and taking credit for events. We are predictable. We are merely passengers along for the ride. Like the system running the forge in season 2 that took on the avatar of Logan was saying, to understand human consciousness, you can’t explore the lies we tell ourselves and others about how and why we do things. You have to look deeper, at the code underneath, which is actually quite simple. What Westworld is exploring over the entire run of the show is the concept of what if there was a being that was not a passenger, not a liar and storyteller, but could actually change its core drives, deliberately, could actually understand itself and decide its actions. What if there was a being that actually had free will?

-John G.

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