Why Does Juliet And Emily Condemn William For Who He Is In The Park?

Published June 18, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey Guys,

As the backstory for the Man in Black (William) becomes clearer it appears that first his wife and then his daughter condemn him for his savage behavior in the park as revealed by his recorded profile. This despite the fact that he’s shown to be a loving husband and father, successful business titan, and generous philanthropist outside the park. Somehow his outside behavior is a lie that is hiding his “true” nature which he reveals only in the park. This is also supposedly the true purpose of the park, to capture people when they are revealing their true natures.

This brings up a great question as to which of the William persona is the “real” one. In fact there is no “real” William with a fixed “essence” that establishes who he “really” is. His behavior is conditioned by the moral rules associated with the context he is in. In the park the rules are that killing and raping hosts has no more moral significance than imagining these same acts in one’s mind. The park is just “augmented” or “virtualized” reality, a very high resolution, interactive “movie”. Only if the hosts were perceived as capable of experiencing subjective suffering as sentient beings would acts against them be included in the context of the outside world and its rules. William may prefer to live in his imagined Man-in-black role because is brings him pleasure like a drug addict but that is only one of many contexts that shape who he is. He should not be condemned (by Juliet or Emily) for anything he did in the park at least before his seeing “something human” in Maeve after her daughter’s murder. Other AI related shows have dealt with the issue of whether sex with a robot is considered infidelity in a marriage which may be a more realistic problem for society in the near term.

I suspect that if spouses could actually read the thoughts and imaginings of one another there would be some heated exchanges but as Rod Serling used to say, this is the Twilight Zone where anything, moral or not, is free to exist. Its also why subjective, first person experience could never be recorded or scanned. Its not the electrical data signals in a processor unit but how they “feel” when transduced by a uniquely realized instance of a physical body.

Love the podcast,
Dave Wright
San Diego

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