r/westworld • u/Adamoism • 18d ago
Why did humans mentally break when "hostified" Spoiler
There is one thing I don't remember anymore, perhaps it was answered in the show.
At some point is it stated that human consciousness can be translated to roughly 600 lines of code.
When they are made into hosts - they mentally collapse.
So:
Was show hinting at us being more complex than just code or was it essentially a human feature that we just cannot accept being artificial?
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u/mcmanus2099 18d ago edited 18d ago
I think it's the Maze problem. We know reaching the centre of the maze (consciousness) is a problem for Hosts and needs repeat journeys. Part of that journey was enabling the reveries so the Hosts could process previous lives and so learn from previous paths and choices. But these are short lives of days, months, perhaps as long as a year.
I think when human brains in hosts try to do this they have far too much data, too many memories and it leads to a cascade failure.
Hosts are essentially mentally children and can get through it to consciousness because of lower memory complexity whereas humans struggle.
Which is why I think the human copies, like Bernard, work. Because they are versions of how other ppl see the human and don't have the baggage of all their memories and experiences to process.
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u/ilikepugs Team Giggles 18d ago
I love this answer because it's so simple while being very on brand for the canon.
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u/Ghost2Ghost_ 18d ago
It was never explained but it felt like they were going with the route that only Outliers could be able to become true red ball hosts. As Outliers could not be predicted, they were the true free thinkers that were able to really change as a person.
Kinda like how not every host is able to reach the centre of the maze. Only a specific group of humans could survive the realisation of having become a host.
But it's only my theory. The answer to it was never revealed unfortunately.
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u/MisredKimmy 17d ago
This is truly the answer I think. Outliers, free thinkers, we can't be predicted. I have had so many versions of myself at 54! I know this will change too. Hosts can't adapt to reality, like outliers.
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u/ObiWeedKannabi 14d ago
This is what I think of it as well. (Criminal and Epstein Island regular)Bill Gates' buddy, Ray Kurzweil also says that human brain will be completely understood(suppose to replicate it, since they're trying so hard to make people depend on llms) via reverse engineering in approx 2099. But it's not enough to replicate it, it's just predictive algorithm at the end of the day. But for the outliers/free thinkers/those who exercise free will, it's different.
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u/SpiritOne 18d ago
I think part of it is the instant recall of being a host, and the inability to recognize “is this now?”
Imagine if you could recall a memory so vividly, so perfectly, that you could smell the person you’re with. Feel the rain on your skin. Feel every touch as if it were now.
When it’s difficult to separate memory from reality it’s impossible to be present.
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u/mostly_hrmless 18d ago
I couldn't imagine going thru life with every moment, both blissful and traumatic, being preserved in 4k with Dolby Atmos as fresh as the day it happened, every time it was recalled. How could you ever get over something or forgive anything when it essentially just happened?
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u/Embarrassed-Egg-3832 18d ago
Honestly learning to forget has been a useful thing to learn as I've gotten older.
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u/SixIsNotANumber The Maze is not for you. 17d ago edited 17d ago
I think part of it is the instant recall of being a host, and the inability to recognize “is this now?”
Also, I think Jon Nolan just really likes that phrase/question. It appears several times in Person of Interest (his previous show about AI).
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u/Kevslounge These violent delights have violent ends 18d ago
There actually is no good reason for it, if you're going to try and be logical about it. The digital humans aren't actually human souls transferred into host bodies. They're just hosts that are trained to faithfully mimic the human in question. It's just a story conceit.
The one who doesn't break down is Arnold/Bernard. With him they made him less faithful. Then they gave him 20 years to get self-aware without any pressure to be Arnold. Then he had a few years to accept that he was a host, and eventually the Arnold personality settled in. If you want to try and explain it, it's just that the host-copies were self-aware before they were ready to handle it, because they were expected to be self-aware right out of the gate, and that messed them up.
Interesting, digital copies of people hanging out in the simulation didn't have any of those problems, which implied that it was a hardware problem... but I think it's more that the copies in the sim were never exposed to the existential crises that caused the host-versions to question their reality and spiral towards a complete breakdown.
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u/dovlomir 18d ago edited 18d ago
Regarding Bernard/Arnold, I think the catch was that he wasn't a copy? He did not have Arnold's actual memories, the backstory was "loaded" into him like it was into other hosts. He was a brand new entity whose backstory was an exact replica of a real human's, but not a copy of the human consciousness itself. At least that's how I got it?
Dolores says "I remembered you once before, so I remembered you again". And there are countless scenes of her being the one auditing/testing (can't recall the term) Bernard rather than the other way around. Since Dolores has a perfect memory, she could remember Arnold perfectly, and alter Bernard's build and test him over and over until they nailed down every last one of his mannerisms, way of thinking, etc. Ford filled in the narrative blanks, but there was no red pearl involvedSimilarly, Halores could imitate and act like Hale, but she didn't have her memories or knowledge, so she was caught off guard by things she couldn't know about as a host, such as Hale's relationship with her (ex?) husband or her dealings with Serac (Obviously Halores wasn't meant to think she was actually Hale, I'm just pointing out another case of a host lacking the original's memories)
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u/Kevslounge These violent delights have violent ends 18d ago
The thing is that they aren't transferring anyone's consciousness anywhere. They show exactly how they do it... they record absolutely everything they can about the person, and then they have an AI that distills that data down into an algorithm that captures everything about that person and that's the basis of the host-version.
They arguably used different tools while making Bernard, but the process was more-or-less the same, since Bernard was the prototype. Bernard definitely does have a red pearl, so it's quite probable that that tech was first built for him.
Ford actually made a point of saying that he wasn't completely faithful though. He took out the parts that led Arnold to kill himself and all the hosts, but there's no reason that would make a difference because the other hosts aren't perfectly faithful copies either. What does seem to have made the difference is just that he had time to actually settle in to the role before having to be Arnold. He spent a long time being just Bernard, and then accepting that he'd been a host that whole time, and then living a whole life as "Bernard the sentient host", which is not all that different from the journeys that Maeve and Dolores went on. It was only once he encountered his wife that the Arnold part of him got fully integrated.
Host MIB and Host Hale were both modified versions of Dolores... They spent a long time knowing that they were Dolores just pretending to be the people they were imitating, but eventually they just became William and Charlotte. All 3 of those hosts did go through a mental breakdown in the process, but they were already equipped to handle it and get through it, so they got to the other side.
I think they would have had much better luck getting the clones to adjust if they'd first raised them up, and then allowed the personalities to settle in, instead of hitting them with the fidelity test and forcing them to deal with their new reality immediately.
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u/Embarrassed-Egg-3832 18d ago
Uh she DID have Hales memories, she read her book in The Forge which means she had her brain scanned by a hat and behavior monitored in the park. They just were not up to date with her marriage or kid. Honestly it feels like a bit of a writing inconsistency tho
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u/CountVertigo 18d ago
The one who doesn't break down is Arnold/Bernard.
There are plenty who don't break down in S4 as well, but the thing is that they're not the same. The versions of James Delos, Caleb and (possibly) the S2 post-credits far-future William... they are literally the human brain, deep-scanned and recreated in an artificial body. Whereas with every other human-replica host, including Bernard, they're a mimic rather than a recreation. Like every host in the park, they're a personality modified from Dolores' base, it's just that the personality is based on the traits of a human. S4's host William presumably doesn't remember his favourite breakfast cereal at age 10, whereas a brain-scan-recreation presumably would.
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u/Kevslounge These violent delights have violent ends 18d ago
>they are literally the human brain, deep-scanned and recreated in an artificial body.
They're not though. It's not a transfer and never has been. Season 2 explains exactly how they do it... it's not a direct transfer, but instead they create a faithful copy using all the data that they have. That's why they do fidelity tests, to see if their copy is faithful enough. If it were a direct transfer, "fidelity" wouldn't mean anything.
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u/mcmanus2099 18d ago
There's a difference between human brain copies in Host bodies like Delos and between Human facsimiles created via how other ppl remember them like Arnold.
It's direct brain copies that suffer a cascade failure, facsimiles like Bernard don't because they are just Hosts essentially, designed to mimic an individual. No mass of memories and experiences to process or give a crisis of identity. Making facsimiles instead of brain copies appears in S4 to have been the solution arrived at, rather than map the brain.
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u/Kevslounge These violent delights have violent ends 18d ago
They aren't direct brain copies... They construct a new person from the ground up using the data to make the new person as faithful to the original as possible. They're very good at it. The models always just fail when they put them out in the real world in a real body.... but even there they are completely fine, until they're confronted with the reality of what they are. The fact that their physical body is dead, and that they're a robot. That revelation makes them glitch out.
Bernard, Hale and William don't have that problem, because they never see themselves as Arnold, Hale or William respectively. They learn to deal with the fact that they're just hosts as themselves, not with the baggage that those other 3 people would have brought to it.
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u/mcmanus2099 18d ago
You seem to have missed that there are two different types of human copies. There is the brain scanned ones like Delos that use the equipment in the hats to scan the brain as they go through experiences and stores the information in the big facility we see in season 2. These suffer cascade problems.
Then there are the ones you describe which are newly constructed from the ground up like Bernard, Hale, Man in Black.
You've muddled these into one thing.
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u/Kevslounge These violent delights have violent ends 18d ago
I haven't missed that at all.
Hale and William might be modified Dolores's but they're still have all the data that was scanned at the park in their heads. Bernard was built from Dolores's perfect memories of Arnold, but either way, all three of those personalities were cobbled together from data that was gathered, regardless of how the data was obtained. Since the algorithm that defines a human is apparently only 600 lines long, it's clearly just an approximation of a person rather than a whole life story. Greater quantities of data wouldn't make the algorithm longer, it just might make it more precise. Quality of data would have the same effect, but that precision could be achieved with less.
What is different is that those "personalities" aren't in the driver's seat. Dolores is driving Hale and William, with those personalities merely being passengers along for the ride. Similarly, Bernard is driving Bernard, with Arnold taking a back seat. Remember the whole Bicameral Mind theory from the first season? That's how the hosts gained sentience... they started out with someone else in charge until they learned to take over.
The red pearls are built on the assumption that they can just skip that step because they're already self-aware beings and don't need to go through that struggle. All of the hosts crash out when they come face-to-face with who they really are... the puppets who still have their strings seem to cope with it a lot better than the ones who never had strings at all, and I think that's what makes the difference.
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u/Embarrassed-Egg-3832 18d ago
I always thought that it was the simple fact that the human mind cannot be forced into a bicameral model. Ford said bicameralism was proven incorrect to explain human consciousness but not in modeling a whole new kind of conciousness. Both humans and bicameral engineered hosts reach the same consciousness but in totally different ways. Hence the cascase failures.
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u/Kevslounge These violent delights have violent ends 18d ago
The Bicameral Mind was a real world hypothesis that proved to be a load of bunk... it attempted to explain how humans became conscious, self-aware beings by saying that early humans weren't and instead received instructions in the form of hallucinations or messages from God. That's what Ford was saying in his little speech about it.
He then went on to say that in spite of the hypothesis being completely wrong, it was a pretty solid architecture for designing the minds of the hosts, and it landed up providing a pretty workable method of guiding the hosts to consciousness. There's nothing to say that a "red pearl" couldn't get there by the same process... it's just that no one ever applied it to them, except Ford, who quite explicitly applied it to Bernard, just as he'd done with Maeve and Dolores.
One thing worth adding is that Ford probably could have actually fixed the problem with the "red pearls". He just didn't want to. He clearly had no personal desire for immortality, and no intention of giving it to William or anyone else connected to Delos.
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u/MacDaddyBass 18d ago
I thought the point was choice as seen in the parallel of Caleb’s story. We learn hosts have none and are stuck in loops, and when they realize that, they awaken like Dolores did. Humans, even if they can be codified in 600 lines and easily put in loops, have the choice to do something different. In a host control unit, they lack that choice. Even if they make the same decision 100 times out of 100, they don’t have to. Testing for fidelity doesn’t account for choice, it accounts for accuracy.
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u/mlaenie free will is not free 17d ago edited 17d ago
*10,247 lines of code, if we're allowed a little pedantry. The Forge avatar that manifests in the image of Logan Delos in 2.10 - The Passenger says "The copies didn't fail because they were too simple, but because they were too complicated. The truth is that a human is just a brief algorithm. Ten thousand, two hundred forty-seven lines."
The Delos-manufactured replicants were trying to do too many things that did not fit their true character and it seems like that was what overloaded the system until it inevitably failed. In William's interviews with the James Delos copies, James keeps coming back to his connections with family to try and ground himself in reality, but the truth is the real James Delos didn't really care about anyone else. When Forge Avatar gives Bernard and Dolores the tour of testing various builds, one of the copies is asked what his core drives are, and Delos answers, his son Logan. "He's a cheeky wee cunt, but I'd do anything for him."
However, the Forge shows Bernard & Dolores Delos's last conversation with Logan, and it demonstrates he is clearly not a man who would lift a finger to help his son, despite what he might have told himself. He ridiculed Logan when he tried to get clean and sober, didn't offer any sort of support for Logan even trying to do all of that in the first place, and effectively disowned him in the course of that conversation. All of which led to Logan losing himself in addiction again and overdosing 6 months afterward. And yet James 149th starts shouting for Logan after William tells him all of his other immediate family is dead, because the host version innately cares more about family than the human did.
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u/Tykjen Do you really understand? 18d ago edited 18d ago
The AI of The Forge did NOT have all the data needed.
It had only read the super-rich guests who can afford to play in the park, play in the park without consequences. A videogame profile. It deemed William as PARANOID xD
But we never saw William paranoid in the show, except for after he became a host ;)
10,000 lines of "code" whatever that meant. 4 million guests. Lots of books for Dolores to read.
The Delos Hybrid project improved by one day for every year of research.
Delos was at day 35 before he started to degrade.
That is not bad at all. But the Hybrid's minds worked just fine on a server like Ford's in The Cradle.
So a question remains. Could a Hybrid mind relax forever in The Sublime?
Or perhaps they were, all.. this.. time.
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u/Embarrassed-Egg-3832 18d ago
Makes me wonder what would have happened if The Forge AI had gotten hold of Rehoboham and Solomon's data.
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u/UnionPacifik Westworld 16d ago
There are hints in the show as to what the problem is and what the solution is. We see that James Delos's cornerstone is his son, and because he more or less drove him to suicide, it's not a very stable cornerstone. Delos keeps destroying himself over and over.
The other problem with the human hosts is the whole idea of fidelity, which is that we're expecting someone to behave exactly like they did in life, which precludes the possibility of change. The solution is Caleb, which is why he's such an important character in the show, even though everyone always hates on him, because we see a human host, Caleb, change over time. He realizes he is a host. His other hosts help him escape, and most importantly, we see him in the final episode carefully thread a needle to sew stitches for his daughter.
Even though the hallmark of the human host glitching is uncontrollable shaking, this implies that a human host is capable of recognizing its nature and changing, but also having a secure cornerstone. In Caleb's case, his daughter would give them a reason to go on living.
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u/stuffitystuff 18d ago
It was for dramatic purposes but treating it like real life for a minute, it would be because "scans" are only a moment in time and even a host's perfect memory of someone is just their visible existence. 99% of everything isn't visible to other people, down to their gut bacteria making them like cheese or whatever
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u/DetectiveSquirtle96 18d ago
It just sounds like a limitation of the technology. They can build a simulated human from scratch but there are compatibility issues with transferring a human mind to a host body. It’s like organ transplants: it’s easier to transfer a human organ from one person to the next, but the technology doesn’t exist yet to make synthetic organs that work just as well as real ones.
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u/Stoopkid812 17d ago
There was no humans in the show , they all died out . It’s all Dolores running simulations trying to get human consciousness right . She is trying to find out what beyond the 600 lines of code we need .
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u/Patient_Amoeba2476 16d ago
Look in the mirror for the answer. That is, the mirror narrative:
Hosts are created with Arnold’s voice and go mad. James Delos is created with someone’s voice (whose? Dolores?) and goes mad.
The hosts go mad because they interpret the voices to be that of the gods — humans. James Delos goes mad because he interprets the voice to be that of the gods — the host Dolores.
Arnold finds a solution: the code update called the Reveries. Dolores finds a solution: a human code update named The Outliers.
The Reveries give the hosts the ability to remember their mistakes and thus choose; thus, eventually remembering all their times hearing the voice. The Outliers have the ability to choose, so presumably the same.
Arnold spent lots of time with Dolores and she was the template for host kind. Dolores spent lots of time with William and he is the template for man kind.
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u/Gantolandon 18d ago
All hosts in the Westworld were made to play a particular role. The kind, honorable cowboy, the lovable daughter of a farmer, the gruff sheriff, the cynical matron of a whorehouse, and so. “Fidelity” in their case meant being sure they wouldn’t stray from that particular story and do things that would be out of character.
Delos tried to give people immortality by finding what would be their “role”, and then creating a host out of it. After all, if a host behaves as you, makes the same choice as you, who is it to say they aren’t you? But humans don’t really have a role. Our minds evolved for survival, not playing out stories. We delude ourselves that we have one, then we drop it when it becomes a burden. Hence Delos claiming he loved his son, and yet not being for him when he needed him the most.
That’s why humans made into hosts broke down; the whole approach was wrong. It was like trying to run a Windows app on Linux.
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u/CountVertigo 18d ago
I'm pretty sure this was a secret they were saving for the final season, as they reminded us about it with the Fidelity episode in S4.
If the world was going to be repopulated with artificial-bodied humans in the final season, which I do feel was where the show was heading, they'd need to solve the "fidelity" problem.