Westworld Food For Thought, Dune Series

Published May 20, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey guys, love the podcasts.

Writing to throw out something which may provide food for thought about William’s project with James Delos. As you guys discussed the last episode, it appeared to me that none of you have read (nor have any of your fans written in yet about) Frank Herbert’s Dune series and how it explores the same concepts as the Delos project. The last two books in Frank Herbert’s six-book Dune series (the original Dune book is probably more than most people can and should handle) have the “Delos project” as a major element of the story.

In the series, a major character, Duncan Idaho (played by Richard Jordan in the love-hateable David Lynch shat movie), is cloned over a thousand times during the course of something like 1500 years. The story tells of how the various clone iterations of Idaho attempt to remember the memories of their predecessors through some sci-fi notions of “genetic memory.”

The earlier clones began with the memories of the original Idaho and then over time the memories of later “versions” of Idaho get added to the mix by the clones’ creators. The genetic material carries the memories of all the Idaho clones and are, presumably, passed on to each successive clone by design. (I have to assume the creators somehow managed to “bank” all that genetic material before each clone died). Later clones would then undergo some major experience, trauma, or life event that would “trigger” the prior memories, including how the previous clones died. Many simply go insane from this and are killed or commit suicide. But eventually the last clone is able to remember all these memories, not go insane, and becomes quasi-prescient.

Herbert gets fairly philosophical with all this, describing what it must be like for someone to remember all these memories and assume what amounts to the revived collective consciousness of thousands of lives previously lived. But Herbert makes it a point to show that ultimately the “woke” Idaho is not and will never be the same Idaho that ever lived before, Idaho just assumes their memories like he’s wearing someone else’s clothes which happen to fit perfectly. The last clone does not “wake up” to these memories as if coming back from the dead, he only remembers them like someone having a flashback of moments that happened while they were blacked out. So the message is that the “soul” cannot live on or come back with memories because it is distinct from consciousness, which is just cellular brain matter and DNA wired a certain way. It falls upon the “woke” Idaho clone to wrestle with all this at the end of the last Dune book Herbert wrote.

Had Herbert lived to write more books, maybe he would have expounded more on that. I’ve read he was a Zen Buddhist later in life so maybe these were his ruminations on reincarnation. Herbert wrote the last 2 books in ’84 and ’85, before he died, so he was way ahead of his time with his notions of genetics and neuroscience. The original 1995 Ghost in the Shell anime movie (and even the 5-wipe 2017 ScarJo version) also poses the same basic questions about the “soul” and whether it can ever “come back” from death through biotechnology.

In Westworld, William gives up on the project when he realizes that the Delos clone cannot handle self-awareness after hitting his cognitive plateau and later on the knowledge of what happened to his family. It looks like the last Delos clone had an “Idaho” moment and basically went crazy before Bernard and Elsie stumble upon him. I think William gives up on the Delos project because William comes to the conclusion that even if he managed to perfectly reproduce Delos’ mind and consciousness, the Delos clone doesn’t have Delos’ “soul” and that’s why the clone basically has a mental breakdown after becoming self-aware of that. And even if some semblance of one’s soul was reproduceable, would anyone want to live with all that baggage, after coming back from the void each time? Beric Dondarrion might have lots to say about that.

Anyway, thanks for reading if you’ve come this far, keep doing what you’re doing. You guys are easily the most listenable Westworld and movie review podcast out there. At some point I will have to donate enough to get you guys and Kerri to review Lynch’s Dune.

Steve from Northern Virginia

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