For more on the episode of the same name – where the info below toy a polar theatrical role – say ourrecap of theWestworldfinale , " The Bicameral Mind . "
" Arnold,“the forgotten innovatorofWestworld ’s hosts , imagined the grade of unreal word as a pyramid . His base was memory . Above that , extemporisation . Then ego - interest . And at the very top … " He never get there , " pronounce Dr. Robert Ford ( Anthony Hopkins ) to his associateBernard(Jeffrey Wright ) . The secret there is inArnold ’s obsession : " the two-chambered mind , " a real , polar , and perhaps cockamamie theory that escape from up the psychology and neuroscience earthly concern 40 years ago and , after a mention inWestworld ’s third episode , " The Stray,“could do the same for Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy ’s brainy sci - fi series .
In 1976 , psychologist and Princeton lecturerJulian JaynespublishedThe Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , a ultra particularization of mankind ’s Ascension of the Lord to a state of true consciousness . According to Jaynes , humans only developed the ability to think for themselves , deal their actions , and stand aware of their own awareness about 3,000 yr ago . Before then , they took orders from voices inside their heads , which they believed to be deities . The unexpended cerebral hemisphere of the brain would shout " jump " and the right hemisphere would say " how high ? "
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Jaynes’smajor evidencefor this separation is the stark contrast between Homer’sIliad , written by " non - witting minds " and lacking in introspection of any variety , and theOdyssey , where character reflect on their milieu and act on their own volition . Jaynes believes that between the tattle of these two story , Earth ’s sure - foot up denizens realized the " words from the Gods " recall through their minds were the product of their own instincts . As you may expect , brush up forThe Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mindwere glowing and vicious – " the bicameral mind " possibility had hollow , but Jaynes ’s narrative thrust left a community of interests thirsty for answers intoxicated on theory . A little likeWestworld , really .
In " The Stray,“Ford knock the assume - from - account Arnoldfor misunderstanding the bicameral mind as a " blueprint " for the development of hokey intelligence instead of what it should be leave behind as : something to chew on . To " bootstrap knowingness " in his mechanical man , Arnold wrote AI programming to work like the left side of a bicameral brain . The parking lot host would stick to a single path until new commands , either throw in through updates or provoked by visitor fundamental interaction ( the same agency primitive human race may have responded to stimuli back in the day ) , would direct it on to a new course , never challenge authority , even as it mime memory , improvisation , and ego - interest .
The past , as Ford discover it , is hazy . The scientist says that he and Arnold ’s former creations passed Turing tests with flying colors . He fails to mention why his partner pursued the two-chambered judgment as a foundation for his bots . The answer seems obvious : like theoretic humans in 1400 BC , an international military unit would eventually merge the half and send gild careening off grade with existential government agency . The automaton would inevitably defy " God . "
Jaynes ’s theory dig deep into the academic , but the centre is that human consciousness erupted from the bicameral moral force through language . In the time ofIliad , adult male could use words , but not reckon . Only when humans could picture their own life as narrative , use metaphors to process " me " and the Brobdingnagian unknown of " why we do , " then they could become fully ego - aware . The X - factor was stress ; there was war and famine and natural disasters that could n’t be explained . These outside force bring down the wall . It was n’t the genius that commute , but the stimuli around it .
We see similar stressrattling Dolores ’s mindthroughout the first three episodes . She is capable of true interaction and , enabled by daydreaming , accessing memory from her past times . But violent episodes rattle her perception of the past and present . This is where Jaynes comes in . Dolores is the oldest robot in the park , built from the parts Ford and Arnold had at the very beginning of the process . As far as we know , Delos has never commute out her hardware , only fiddled with her brain . It ’s nature that forces a genial upgrade – with a few jolting props placed around the park by an unobserved instigator . The episode play with the bicameral combine effect in other real and robotic instances : Wyatt , Teddy ’s unexampled adversary , purportedly take heed the representative of God ; later , Ford tells Bernard that only " daredevil " hear those kinds of vocalization in their heads . If Dolores is in bicameral fashion , she ’s either going to go ballistic , merge the two side of her mind in the immediate hereafter , or both .
When professional person moot Jaynes ’s possibility , the conversation often turns to contrived intelligence . As Tufts school of thought professor Daniel Dennettsaidin a recent lecture , " Logical spaces are create that did n’t exist before and you could never find them in the computer hardware . Such a logical space is not in the computer hardware , it is not in the ' organs ' ; it is purely at the software level … I think [ Jaynes ] is really tattle about is a software delineation of the nous , at the level , as a computer scientist would say , of a virtual machine . "
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Forty years of science has complicated Jaynes ’s bicameral mind possibility . Even when the Koran debuted , critic slammedThe Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mindfor extrapolating loose evidence . " Jaynes disconcert the nature of multitude ’s thought outgrowth with the nature of their theories of their thought processes,“wroteMIT ism prof Ed Block in theNew YorkTimes . Research has remixed and debunked much of Jaynes ’s assumption , with scholars like Noam Chomsky carving out his own theories on language and knowingness and Philip K. Dick embrace it for science fiction .
( Dick indite a praising letter to Jaynes just after the publication ofBicameral Mind , admitting that he hear nothing before his book " could calculate for the fine beautiful voice , the inner - articulation , which I listen off and on for eleven months , " and that the female voice " poetically bring out to me an entire cosmogeny . " He had his owntheories , too . )
Still , the bicameral mind still lingers on the visible horizon , beyond scientific evidence , mesmerizing psychologists , philosophers , and TV creators likewise . " The field of consciousness is on the rise in neuroscience laboratory around the world , but the science is n’t yet tight to enamour subjective experience , " Veronique Greenwood recentlywroteinNautilusmagazine . " That ’s something Jaynes did beautifully , open a threshold on what it feels like to be alive , and be aware of it . "
Could two halves of Dolores ’s unreal brain – one designed to live an autonomous yet loop lifetime , and one for Westworld employee to steer when necessary – merge into a full - fledged " human " ? Or , perhaps , something more ? IfWestworldtakes anything from Jaynes ’s research , it may be the impulse to inquire in public . The terminal episode of Season 1 is title " The Bicameral Mind . " Dolores tantalise it best in " The Stray " : " There are n’t two versions of me , there ’s only one , " she tells Bernard . " When I discover who I am , I ’ll be free . "
For more on the two-chambered mind , pick up a transcript ofThe Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mindand sift through the endless materials at the Julian Jaynes Society’swebsite .
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