Digital Intuition and Psychoanalysis

Digital Intuition vs Human Intuition

Noel Meyerhoff was a Grand Master working at the gigantic world corporation that handled “Multivac”: the supercomputer that could produce answers to every mystery on earth; provided it was asked the right questions.

Isaac Asimov’s “Multivac” draws parallels with the supercomputer named ‘Deep Thought’, in Douglas Adams’ famous cyberpunk series, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. In it, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything” from the supercomputer, “Deep Thought”, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be “42“. Deep Thought points out that the answer is meaningless because the beings that instructed it, never actually knew what the Question was.

Meyerhoff was Grand Master and was honored because of this title; because he knew what the right questions were. He arrived at them based on his ‘Intuition’.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had raised some profound questions based on ‘Human Intuition’ such as:

“What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything and does this tell us more about what we can suppose? Are there things in the universe that will forever be beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence, some superior super human intelligence?”

Fig.: Evolution of the human brain

The history of science has been a long series of violent brainstorms as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of peculiarity in the universe. According to the ‘Science of Evolution’, human beings have brains that have evolved to help us survive within the orders of the magnitude of size and speed, at which our bodies normally operate. We never evolved to navigate the world of atoms; if we had, then our brains probably would have perceived rocks as empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, because our hands themselves cannot penetrate them. It is therefore useful to our brains, to construct notions like solidity and impenetrability.

At the other end of the spectrum, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at the speed of light; if they had then our brains would have been much better at coping with Einstein relativity. We have grown up in a medium scale environment, with things moving at medium speeds and our brains have accordingly developed the ability to learn and take action. Thus, we are evolved denizens of the middle world and that limits our facility of imagination.

However, Meyerhoff being Grand Master had access to a much higher level of reason than his peers. The text referred to his mental prowess as similar to that of a chess champion – a brain that could identify the winning move amidst millions of complex patterns on the chessboard. This extreme mental capacity enabled him to emancipate himself from the middle world and achieve an intuitive understanding that could interpret anything queerer than what a normal human being could suppose, given the limitations engrained in their minds by their evolutionary apprenticeship in the middle world.

As it is seen in the text, Meyerhoff is feeding jokes to “Multivac” but we want to question his motive of picking only those jokes that revolved around sexual promiscuity, depression, marital strife, and humiliation etc. basically all kinds of societal stigmas. According to him, the very topics, which are taboo for mankind, form the cream of humour: as if a sudden reinterpretation of it via the construct of a joke carves an illusion of a defence against our deepest fears. With this temporary assurance of security, we are granted a feeling of superiority to mock the plight of the protagonist of the joke, whose tragedy has become our source of comedy. It is worthwhile to mention E. B. White’s quote here that, “Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

Meyerhoff was engaged in this activity, in order to find answers to two queries in his mind:

1. What is the source of all jokes on earth?
2. What will be the repercussions on humanity when we find the answer to the first question?

These according to him fit the bill of being ‘The Ultimate Questions’. His area of confusion seems trivial at first, to the other characters in the story as well as to perhaps, the reader. But Asimov urges us to stick with the story, by the following words in the text:

“Science has advanced to the point where the only meaningful questions left are the ridiculous ones. The sensible ones have been thought of, asked and answered a long while ago.”

On the other hand, “Multivac” uses its powers of ‘Digital Intuition’ to extract answers for Meyerhoff, by focusing on the fundamental essence of the exponentially increasing accumulation of knowledge inside it. According to famous computer scientist Alan Turing, computers think via connection models loosely based on a structure resembling the biological brain’s axons. This system came to be termed as ‘Artificial Neural Networks’ later on and the architecture of it constituted of very simple units called ‘neurons’ that could perform very simple calculations based on connections from other ‘neurons’ and these connections are tunable.

Language is central to how people reason about and understand their world. As computers increasingly pervade human lives and decision-making processes, they must learn to understand and mediate human-to-human interaction. People use their intuitive knowledge of the world and the experiences they’ve had in the past to react intelligently to the world around them. If we were to give machines these capabilities, they could help us make better-informed decisions, conquer mountains of data, and expand the reach of our creativity and intelligence.

When people communicate with each other, they rely on background knowledge, which they almost never state explicitly. This follows from the maxim of pragmatics that people avoid stating information that is obvious to the listener. In the absence of a learning system as complete as the human brain, automatically acquiring all this frequently unstated knowledge would be difficult. But for an AI system to understand the world that humans live in and talk about, it needs to have this unspoken background knowledge. It needs a source of information about the basic relationships between things that nearly every person knows. In one-way or another, this implicit knowledge must be made explicit so that a system can use it computationally.

The Human Brain is in fact, a very complex system. The functions it performs are the product of thousands and thousands of different subsystems working together at the same time. Such a perfect system is very hard to emulate: nowadays in fact there are plenty of expert systems around but none of them is actually intelligent, they just have the veneer of intelligence.

As such, one can argue that the processing of neural networks inside a computer is not a thought process but merely a large-scale computation. Discussions about whether computers can think, simultaneously involve questions about whether human thought can be said to involve a mind or consciousness, beyond the material brain in the first place. The implication here is that human thought is constituted by a mind or consciousness to engage in it. But the thought process of computers – digital intuition – is a mimicry of the reality of that human consciousness which is evidently a “something more” and goes beyond observable behaviors.

For example, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when asked to produce ‘The Ultimate Question’, ‘Deep Thought’ said that it could not. It could however, help to design an even more powerful computer for the purpose, which would incorporate living beings into its “computational matrix” and would run for ten million years. This new all powerful computer is revealed later, as being the planet Earth, with its pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of white lab mice (ironically humans use white lab mice as dummies for testing in their laboratory experiments) to observe its running. In the text ‘Jokester’ a very similar idea is materialised by making the characters aware of an extra terrestrial intelligence filling up the deepest vacuum of their minds. We are forced to think of their world as a simulated environment, where time and space is an observable illusion, created by the simulators to psychoanalyse the people living in this virtual playground.

The narrative thus questions our reality.

Isaac Asimov was a prolific writer who wrote prominently on parallel worlds, rise and fall of galactic empires, but most importantly, on the question of:

“Is the world we live in, actually a computer simulation?” 

In popular media, this idea was portrayed by the hit TV Show, ‘Doctor Who’ in Season 3’s episodes: “Silence of the Library” and in “Forest of the Dead.” Also, the context of the movie, “The Matrix” is a worthwhile mention.

In “There Breeds A Man…?” Asimov writes about a brilliant but mentally unstable physicist who is convinced that humanity is a kind of genetic experiment run by aliens.

An idea that often resonates in his writing is that: “We may be in one of the many parallel worlds simulated to run together at the same time frame, just like experiments carried out repeatedly and in parallel to obtain statistical results. Which means we can potentially communicate across the laboratory; for example in “Coraline” by “Neil Gaiman”.

On the other hand, we may be running as one world simulation at once in which case we could never communicate with the parallel worlds to ours, because they are not running at the same time frame; for example: in the movie ‘Donnie Darko’.

Another notable science fiction writer Philip K. Dick shared the same line of thought as Asimov and was also extremely vocal about it in press meets and social gatherings. Such an idea was outlandish at that age and it caused him to lose a lot of his readers but now, in the era of “Artificial Intelligence, Robots and Human Computer Interaction”, even Elon Musk confirms this theory. Thus, now Philip K. Dick is one of the most respected writers amongst scientists and researchers. He is famous for this following speech on the idea of this world being a simulation:

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, governments, big corporations, religious groups, political leaders etc. So, I ask in my writing: ‘What is real?’ Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives but their power, for they have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes of minds, universes where we have to live in, without complaint. For to fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on enemies. Thereby, it becomes its enemies.”

The movie “They Live” is loosely based on similar thought lines.

Also of possible significance is the fact that if we have suddenly rumbled the game by realizing that we are in a simulation, then everything around us appears to be false. Everyone, including us, think of such thoughts, as being delusional or abnormal when according to “Sigmund Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis”, there is no clear divide between the normal and the abnormal. Both are made of few traits, which all human beings universally possess. The madness thus, is programmed as a precondition even if the realization is only a hint of suspicion; like we see in the text when Trask feels overwhelmed with all the “insanity” that Meyerhoff and Whistler were talking about.

Perhaps Asimov and Philip K. Dick had had their suspicions aroused and as ‘Men who have awoken but must remain hidden from their masters on floor ‘42’, leave us tiny bread crumbs that lead us to the truth’, they have left us with such crumbs of truth in their writings. Human beings have acquired such dexterity at living inside this simulated model constructed by the aliens that our reality has been substituted by it. As famous French philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes in his book ‘Simulacra and Simulacrum’:

“It is no longer a question of imitation nor duplication, not even parody. It is a question of substituting what is real for what seems real.”

The hell of simulation does not involve torture but subtle, evasive maleficent twisting of meaning.

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BICAMERAL MIND:

                                                  

 The new TV series by HBO, titled ‘Westworld’, has a straightforward premise: In the distant future, scientists and businessmen collaborate to create a vast amusement park in the style of the Old West, populating it with artificially intelligent robots (or “hosts”) that are so advanced that they are completely indistinguishable from human beings. Wealthy patrons (“newcomers” to the hosts) come to the park to act out fully immersive fantasies without consequence (they can hurt, rape and even “kill” the hosts, but by design the hosts can’t kill the patrons), while an intricate network of underground human employees work around the clock to clean up and reset the hosts, reprogram their character and storyline glitches, and to continually enhance the park’s veil of realism. It’s a well-oiled machine, every part of it designed for the lurid entertainment of the upper class.

However, with each episode, it becomes clearer that the key twist of the story is that some of the hosts are exhibiting “aberrant” behaviours, e.g., going off of their programmed storylines, “remembering” violence committed against them prior to system resets, and generally connecting dots that, in theory, it’s not possible for them to connect. In short, the hosts are increasingly acting more like a human being than a computer. In other words, it seems as though the hosts are gaining consciousness.

In January of 1977, Princeton University psychologist “Julian Jaynes” put forth a bold new theory of the origin of consciousness known as ‘The Bicameral Mind’. In it, he asserts that consciousness did not arise far back in human evolution but is a learned process based on metaphorical language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues, humans operated under a mentality that he called the bicameral (‘two-chambered’) mind. In the place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions, similar to the command hallucinations experienced by many people who hear voices today. These hallucinations were interpreted as the voices of chiefs, rulers or gods. For example, the famous French Maid, “Joan of Arc” claimed to have heard the “Voice of God”, which told her to lead an army of men into battle and liberate France.

With the introduction of this theme, I would like to address the issue of:

‘Can computers/ robots gain consciousness?’

For which I would like to put forth two questions:

First, can computers think?

And second, are human beings really just computers?

In the following paragraphs, I will be studying the theory of ‘The Bicameral Mind’ and the answer to the above two questions, via the context of ‘Westworld’.

CAN COMPUTERS THINK?

Computer scientist Alan Turing famously devised a test whereby computers, for all intents and purposes, could be shown to be intelligent. Turing described the following hypothetical situation: Suppose a computer and a person were in an enclosed room, separated from an interrogator whose goal it is to discover which is which through a series a questions. The aim of the person is to lead the interrogator to acknowledge the computer as the computer, while the computer is programmed to lead the interrogator to falsely acknowledge the computer as the person. If at the end this “imitation game” the computer so closely mimics the human responses that the interrogator incorrectly identifies the machine as the person, the computer has passed the “Turing test” for exhibiting intelligent behavior.

It’s widely assumed that the Turing test is a sufficient condition for showing that a computer has attained something like human thought. The qualifiers we use to talk about current technologies that mirror intelligence such as “smart phone”, “cognitive robotics”, “artificial intelligence” etc., further reinforce that assumption.

But ’Westworld’ exposes the limitations of the Turing test. For example, in an episode, a young man converses with a host (AI robot) in a waiting room that leads into the park.

“Are you real?” he asks her, clearly feeling a little silly.

“Well,” the host responds, “If you can’t tell, does it matter?”

This is the logic of behaviourism underlying the Turing test.

This brings us to a pause in the first question to jump to the second:

ARE HUMAN BEINGS REALLY JUST COMPUTERS?

If there is no such thing as a mind or consciousness, then the Turing test is a perfectly valid way to determine whether a computer has become a thinker in the same sense that a person is a thinker; that is, whether it also has a bicameral mind, like humans do as Jaynes suggested.

The whole drama of the show ‘Westworld’ is that the hosts are going “beyond” the Turing test to attain something of a different kind, beyond the programmable, material structures of the brain that humans possess.

John Searle’s “Chinese Room Experiment” is the most famous critic of the Turing Test. In it he states that if a computer is given to translate a list of symbols written in a language it does not understand for example: Chinese, to a language it does understand, for example: English along with a set of rules to accomplish the task; then it will successfully complete the translation but without “understanding” what it is actually doing. So, no matter how intelligent a computer behaves and no matter what programming makes it behave that way, since the symbols it processes are meaningless to it, it is not really intelligent because it is not actually thinking. Its internal states and processes, being purely syntactic, lack semantics or meaning; so, it does not really have intentional mental states.

So to answer my question of “Can Computers/Robots gain consciousness?”, it is safe to refer that it is possible only when the AI has gained “intentionality”. Their sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and desires should not be self-contained in a string of physical mechanisms. They should also simultaneously, be able to unlock  hidden doors to perception, reason, and will.

To support this theory, Jaynes draws evidence from a wide range of fields, including neuroscience, archeology, ancient history, and the analysis of ancient texts, but most importantly, from the theory of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis:

Introduction: Anne Worthington and John Forester of the Freud Museum in London, calls Psychoanalysis as being a “weird” process because at the root of it, it addresses the nature of being human. According to Forester, psychoanalysis is a process that goes on, after daylight; it is a nighttime activity with dreams and sexuality and guilt of the mistakes we have made. It is the world of sexual fantasy and dark thoughts, which we consciously or unconsciously keep hidden from ourselves.

Contemporary culture likes to see human beings as one-dimensional: governed by instrumental ends, the search for happiness, success and wealth; but human desire cannot be reduced to such simple ideas. Psychoanalysis on the contrary, sees desires as emerging in the gaps in speech, in the cracks in what the patient says, in their mistakes or slips of the tongue and in the failures that they repeat again and again in life.

“Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”, delivered by Sigmund Freud on 1916, states that:

“The whole trend of our previous education and all our habits of thought are bound to make us into opponents of psychoanalysis.”

Freud once had an unusual patient whom psychoanalysis history called ‘Anna O’. He developed an even more unusual treatment for her: ‘The Talking Cure”; termed by Anna herself. Anna O was a very severe hysteric: she had contractions, paralysis, even impairment of vision and speech. Freud during her treatment becomes aware of the fact that when she tells him of her symptoms, they seem to disappear.  This has become the basis of all psychotherapy.

In a more general sense, a patient from tracing their own history, perhaps their family history, and through talking about it: he experiences a change to his symptoms, to his life and to his experience of suffering because of those symptoms. There are different versions of psychoanalyses and what all these methods have in common is that they are all a practice of talking along with a basic idea, of something called, ‘The Unconscious’: a deep reservoir in our heads where all kind of thoughts are buried.

Language can function like a lift, where words can lift other words and other meanings from the level of the unconscious to consciousness. For example: a woman in therapy under the psychoanalyst, ‘Astrid Gessert’, told the latter that the other day she was cutting red roses in her garden, with particular emphasis on the words ‘Red Roses’. When asked what she thought about red roses, the woman replied with a shriek that she remembered her father’s funeral where his second wife threw a red rose into his grave, as a token of love; and at that moment she felt a pang of pain with jealousy. Hence the innocent word ‘Rose’ had drawn up from her unconscious, the word ‘funeral’ through a chain of associations, which led to a whole different story than the original one about cutting red roses in the garden: This is how psychoanalysis works.

Freud once said that he had more archaeology books than psychology, for in his view, the human mind was structured by various layers like in archaeological digs; and when he was excavating his patients’ minds it was just like an archaeologist digging down and extracting broken fragments from a long lost time, where the fragments are bits of memories, fantasies, infantile wishes, etc. Freud would piece these together with the patient to construct his or her early history that has become buried but is still a foundation of their adult life and particularly, of any symptoms they might have developed. Freud’s, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, 1905, states that: “In a chain of associations, ambiguous words act like points at a junction. Along the second track run the thoughts we are in search of.”

Replacing hypnotism with this eccentric new method, talking to his patients and trying to figure out when and how they began, Freud made a shocking discovery, which still reverberates through western culture:

‘Patient after patient traced their hysteria back to traumatic childhood events and experiences involving sex. Sex it seemed, was at the root of neurotic sickness.’

For a time, Freud believed that all hysteria could be traced back to childhood sexual abuse. Eventually he argued that it either came from real abuse or from a repressed and guilty childhood fantasy of sex. Hence, sex was at the root of it all, at least in the beginning of the development of this novel treatment. In his consulting room, Freud’s female patients began developing romantic feelings for him and would on occasion, ‘throw their arms around him and give him a passionate kiss’ to express the need for their love to be reciprocated by him. Of course Freud who was around 40 at the time and sexually inexperienced, was highly aroused but he abstained himself in order to figure out a way to work with the patients in that sexually saturated clinical setting. This led to some startling discoveries, such as how some patients were found to be transmitting sexual feelings for their parents towards him. Freud termed this the “Oedipus complex” and this became a crucial tool in psychotherapy.

According to psychoanalyst Dany Nobus, the question for Freud was not: ‘How does one become a pervert?’ but ‘How does one become sexually normal?’ because he was of the conviction that human sexuality is intrinsically and fundamentally disturbed. Psychoanalyst Darius Leader states that for Freud the concept of human sexuality had an enlarged concept: it no longer meant genital penetrative sexual acts but any practice invested with libido that had an erotic charge for that person. The Freudian concept of sex is not limited to two people simply tasked with reproduction; but it also encompasses on how we find pleasure and joy and also, disturbance all over the body.

What Freud had discovered early on and written about in his book, “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex”, 1905; is that young children experience intense sexual desires. Not in the adult form but in the form of the pleasure they get from oral activities such as ‘breast feeding’, anal activities such as ‘changing nappies’, from the touching of their skin such as ‘affectionate tickling’ by their parent as well as sustained eye contact that the baby makes with the parent: All the things which can be imagined in the care of a child. According to Freud, all of these are early forms of what later gets organised into adult sexuality.

‘Astrid Gessert’ states that according to Freud, adult sexuality is a complex matter as it includes all the various forms of infantile sexuality like the oral pleasures, say ‘kissing’; touching, looking, being looked at and also anal pleasures, but all of these may or may not be repressed and acted on. In adult sexuality, these are subordinated usually to the main form of sexual activity, which is genital sex and if the above infantile forms of sexuality become the main sexual activity of the adult, for example a voyeurist, we could call this perversion.

So in a way, the point that Freud makes is that aspects of sexuality, which in an adult may be regarded as perverse, are there in infantile life. Sexuality, the way we think of it as an adult, is a much more restricted version of this sense of sensation and enjoyment in the body that is part of ordinary childhood.

“A disposition to perversions is a general and fundamental characteristic of the human sexual drive.” – Freud, ‘Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex”, 1905.

Freud was interested in challenging the idea of a split between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’. In his book, ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, 1938, he states that:

“It is not scientifically feasible to distinguish between what is psychically normal and abnormal.”

Freud does not allow us to comfortably assume that we are simply a part of the category called ‘normal’ and that there is some other class of being ‘abnormal’ but that many of the traits of both the above groups are familiar in everyone.

“The ‘normal sexuality’ of adults emerges from infantile sexuality by a series of developments, combinations, divisions and suppressions which are hardly ever achieved perfectly”

– Freud, ‘The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest’, 1913.

So, for Freud, perversion is not really something that one acquires. It is something with which one is born and, if all goes well during the process of social development, the perversion becomes contained under the aegis of the processes of socialization but also under the aegis of shame and guilt. The net result is a form of sexuality that is more normative.

The Oedipus Complex:

Named after the Greek Tragedy ‘Oedipus’, Oedipus was the king of Thebes, who even after having solved the riddle of the Sphinx and saving the city from destruction; is devastated when a plague ravages his kingdom. Various birds and trusted Oracles suggest that this was because the murderer of the old king, Laius, still lives there unpunished. So Oedipus, for the good of the kingdom, decides to investigate the murder, only to discover to his horror, that he himself is the person who killed Laius and married his queen, Jocasta. Moreover, to add to his shock, he also finds out that Laius was actually his father and Jocasta is his mother, with whom he has had four children. As a consequence of the twisted turn of events, Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus gauges out his own eyes with her jewellery then goes into exile and in subsequent plays, his two sons murder each other and one of his daughters commit suicide.

According to Freud, both little boys and little girls, grow emotionally attached and love first of all, their mother, because she is the one that has provided most of the care for the child. For Freud, the child itself is inherently selfish as an infant and so, wants to be loved and vies for the undivided attention of the mother. Hence, the child faces a kind of competition, a rivalry of some sorts, with the father or its other siblings. So, the Oedipal triangle consists of love, jealousy and hatred.

The father, in the Freudian model, is the person who represents the authority, the law and who in a sense crucially also functions as a love object for the mother. The father can also be replaced by any person who has the potential to separate the mother from the child and vice versa, for example a relative, another woman etc. And according to Freud, it is at this point that we must give separate accounts for the development of boys and girls, for it is only now that the difference between the sexes finds psychological expression for the first time. The resolution of the Oedipus complex is the identifications that take place. Freud did not believe that we are just born as a boy or as a girl but that we move to either position depending on the time of the Oedipus complex and how we cope with it.

Astrid Gessert says that the human being that emerges from psychoanalysis is not a human being that is at peace with itself, but divided, split, in conflict with itself and that does not know itself completely. There is a new vision of what it means to be human, according to classical psychoanalysis, which recognizes conflict as fundamental; that humans are incessantly at war with themselves, inside their own minds. So that model of conflict and of division within forming a fractured self, is the basis of the human mind.

Freud has two models of the mind: The first model distinguishes between perception-consciousness, what he calls the preconscious and the unconscious; the second model distinguishes between the ego, the id and the superego.

The Id refers to the cluster of drives that push for immediate satisfaction. It is governed by the pleasure principle. It is basic animalistic behaviour that dominates our minds during the infant stages and then gets buried beneath its deepest layers. It wants things here and now, regardless of the consequences, and if it does not get it, then it screams, throws tantrums.

The ego is the rational deciding factor while the superego is the careful part of the brain that reminds us of the possible consequences of our acts, such as punishment etc. One of the key features of the super ego is that it seems to be the voice of conscience and morality, but it is actually a passionately sadistic and hating voice in our ear, telling us what not to do.

“The id is totally immoral, the ego tries hard to be moral while the superego can become hyper-moral and show a degree of cruelty that only the id can match. Contrary to our expectation, experience shows that the superego can acquire an unrelentingly harsh character even if the parents were gentle and kind” writes Freud in his book: ‘The Ego and the Id’, 1923.

Helpless in both directions, the ego battles in vain against the murderous id on the one hand and a punishing conscience (superego) on the other, often failing in its task.

In a way, any psychological symptom would be an example of the ego breaking down and it can be anything ranging from phobias, an obsession with hand washing, or an inability to go to work due to stress, depression etc; all these are signs that the ego is not coping well and is being unable to find a suitable compromise between the id and the superego. Often times, the ego is forced to disguise the demands of the id with its own rationalizations, to hush up conflicts and to feign consideration for reality, i.e., the ego follows the id pretending that the id is taking him where he himself wants to go but in reality, it is the id that is taking the decision.

Freud developed this second model because he believed that a part of the ego is unconscious to itself while the other part is conscious. He also realized that when as a result of identifications with our parents, we form ideals that we want to match ourselves with; these agencies are not all conscious. The unconscious is actually spread over the whole area of the mind. If people have a moral ideal that does not enable them to live, then they are going to suffer.

According to psychoanalyst Dany Nobus, this model has both advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that it gives pride of place to the ego. This gives us a problem because our ego often gives us a false idea about who we are and what we can see. So typically the ego constructs stories of itself, one of the most common ones being, ‘I had a very happy childhood where I was pampered’; such stories when questioned often proves to not be the whole story. It was the ego’s doing all along, for the ego’s job is to censor some of these darker aspects of people’s lives.

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Isaac Asimov is famous for having coined the term, “Psychohistory” in his ‘Foundation’ universe, which combines history, sociology and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behaviour of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. It depends on the idea that, while one cannot anticipate the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy.

Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional “Galactic Empire”, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science’s creation, “Hari Seldon”, established two axioms:

1. The population whose behaviour was modelled should be sufficiently large.
2. The population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.

There is a third underlying axiom of Psychohistory, which is trivial and thus not stated by Seldon in his Plan:

3. Human Beings are the only sentient intelligence in the Galaxy.

The concept of psychohistory is rooted in psychoanalysis. For example, Asimov’s novel titled, ‘The Naked Sun’ in which a world entitled ‘Solaria’ is created; all human contact is mediated through technology and any kind of physical touch is forbidden. People are not allowed to be in a room together for fear of what might ensue – similar to the strong sexual urges developed by Freud’s patients in his clinic.

In the sixth short story, “Liar!” of Asimov’s “I, Robot” series, ‘Dr Susan Calvin’: the leading robot psychologist of ‘U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Inc.’ is called to analyse a new robot – RB-34, also known as ‘Herbie’ – that has accidentally gotten telepathic abilities, although his fellow robots turned out fine.

The main purpose of this short story is to highlight the difference between the words that one says out loud, and those that one keeps inside their head. Asimov seems to be showing us how much humans rely on the privacy of their minds when conducting everyday business, and how, often what is stated is a disguise to what is really happening inside one’s mind. This is best shown in Dr. Susan Calvin, who on the outside is seen as inhuman and incapable of emotions, as is made evident through this quote:

“Well, I’ve been called a robot myself. Surely, they’ve told you I’m not human.” in which she is talking about herself.

But as the story progresses, her character comes across as very different to what the readers find. When she is with her fellow officers she is cold, calculative and stern, but with Herbie the mind-reading robot, she becomes extremely emotional allowing herself to feel angry, hurt, wistful because it knows her thoughts already. This example shows how humans limit themselves when communicating to others, especially regarding emotions, which they think, may cause them to be seen as weak. It is the same in life as it is in “Liar!”

Asimov, in “Liar!” reveals to us the consequences that not speaking our minds may have, and to re-iterate how much importance words can have. While sticks and stones may hurt us, so too can words. This is the foundation of the entire theory of ‘the talking cure’ – Psychoanalysis.

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Coming back to the context of ‘Westworld’, one of its taglines is the ancient philosophical problem:

“The dawn of Artificial Consciousness and the Future of Sin”

The first half of that description, which focuses on the hosts, is obvious. But “the future of sin” seems to focus on the patrons who frequent the park, such as the character named Logan. Early in the series, Logan says that the first time he came to the park, he brought his family and went fishing, but the second time, he left his family back home, came alone and “went straight evil.” After that Logan becomes a seasoned veteran of ‘Westworld’ with no misgivings about doing whatever he pleases with the hosts in any given moment. William, his brother-in-law seeing him in action, laments at one point that Logan just wants to kill or sleep with everything he sees. We can find a similarity at this point, from real life where for wealthy young men, the only thing that matters is their own power and pleasure. This is also illustrated in the movie, ‘Metropolis’ where ‘Freder Frederson’ is seen engaging himself in sports in exquisite stadiums and tickling scantily-clad girls in the ‘Garden of Pleasure’.

Logan’s greatest desire is for something at the outer reaches of the park, “the biggest game there is” – namely, all-out war. Thus the Theory of Psychoanalysis states the humans are in constant conflict with the darkest parts of their minds.

This also says more about Logan than it does about the park.

Walker Percy once remarked that “the modern self” is so bored and alienated, and so frustrated by its boredom and alienation, that it “needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war or at least the thrill of it.”

Westworld park’s creators profit handsomely from this assumption, isolating the patrons’ longing to dramatically effect something and setting it loose without a cost to the world around them. In real life, we can cite as an example, the big business of “Trophy Hunting” in Africa, claimed to be the most profitable, commercial use of land in the country. The idea is also central to the story of ‘Poor Little Warrior’ by Brian Aldiss.

But we know that the illusion is an illusion. The actions of the human patrons in Westworld, are not without consequence. They are inflicting deep wounds, and lasting memories of those wounds, in their conscious hosts. For eg: in a similar context, this is what happened to the robot named ‘Grumbler’ built by Sawyer in the story ‘I Made You’, by Walter Miller Jr.

One of the hosts, remembering a past narrative “loop” as a teacher of Shakespeare, warns another using the famous line from Romeo and Juliet:

“These violent delights have violent ends.”

If we set aside the thorny question of computer consciousness and read this symbolically, the show becomes less a crystal ball into the future, and more a mirror of the present: The hosts symbolise the weak, the young, the voiceless, the helpless – anyone on the margins of society that is manipulated, brutalised, and thrown away, often without fully understanding what is being done to them or how to stop it.

The patrons can similarly be read as agents of decadence, brute power, and disregard for vulnerable human life. They hold the hosts under their thumbs for their own gratification, which is ultimately all that matters to them. In the park, they treat objects like people, only to treat them like objects again; but the great irony is that the objects, in becoming “others”, re-reveal the impulse the patrons have come to let loose and leave behind – namely, the objectification of the other. This addiction to treating people like objects, is not the future of sin, but the reality of sin itself.

Indulging that addiction in its most graphic forms – to get back to Percy’s line – becomes about much more than escape for the patrons. It even becomes about more than re-constructing one’s self. It becomes about re-constructing the very meaning of existence to conform to the self.

Again we come to the end of the path to find that it loops back to the same question that Asimov and Philip K. Dick raised years ago: “How real is our reality and how different is it from a simulation? Has the line between them become so ambiguous that now, one is not differentiable from the other? Are the hallucinations that the human bicameral mind experiences, actually messages from the creators of our simulated reality?”

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-Ankita A. Baruah,

BTech 3^rd Year, ECE, 6^th semester,

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