(警告:剧透!)

At first glance,Westworldis just another show about robots run amok—a simple remake of the 1973Westworldmovie, a newTerminator, or at best a twenty-first-centuryI, Robot. It appears to be solely interested inFrankenstein-style questions about people creating technology that no-one can control, and inBlade-Runner-style questions about artificial life forms evolving into creatures like us, with as much—or as little—autonomy, self-understanding, and feeling as we have. If you look a little closer, though, you find all kinds of other philosophical questions in play, and you find them being explored with impressive seriousness and subtlety. At the level of philosophical reflection, this is golden-age television at its very best.

这是该剧提出的一个哲学问题的例子:人性中有什么特别有价值的东西吗?我们是应该为人类物种的延续而努力，还是应该让自己灭绝?如果有的话，什么是值得拯救的?讲故事的人过去常常编一些关于永生的故事来问这个问题，比如奥林匹斯山的众神;现在我们有了机器人(“主人”)来帮助我们思考。AndWestworld聪明地思考它，部分原因是它故意拒绝偏袒任何一方。宿主是不朽的;他们拥有没有自由意志的存在所拥有的完全的天真;他们缺乏人性中可怕的残忍和自私。因此，这场比赛的比分，似乎是人工智能的3比0。与此同时，人类(或许)可以选择自己的生活，而这些生活——也许正是因为它们不会永远持续下去——承载着真实存在的重量。当梅芙意识到自己已经“死了”很多次时，她的第一反应是“这些都不重要”。德洛丽丝引用伯纳德的话表示赞同:“真实的东西是不可替代的。”

谁赢了?我们应该为我们的人性感到骄傲和快乐，并努力保护它，还是应该为它感到羞耻，并急于把它抛在身后?目前还不清楚。最终的比分是3比3，这部剧给我们呈现了一个令人愉快的交错场景:人类(比如福特)渴望变得更像机器，而主持人(比如德洛丽丝)渴望变得更像人类。

这是另一个例子:是什么让我们成为现在的自己?这部剧在这一点上也非常模棱两可。它花了很多时间告诉我们，每个主持人都有一个“背景故事”，每个故事都有一个“基石时刻”:一个决定性的事件，改变了一切，把Bernard或Dolores变成了今天的他们。但是话说回来，当梅芙想要改变自己的时候，她会怎么做呢?她会找人重写她的背景故事吗?不!她只是告诉技术人员菲利克斯和西尔维斯特，调整他们神奇iPad上的滑块。所以，与其说我们是一个故事，不如说是一组特征。此外，Delos公司不需要了解你的背景故事(它只需要观察你在公园里的行为)，而且每个客人的个性都可以用算法编码。那么，谁赢了呢? Are we our traits or are we our story? Once again the score is tied.

最后一个例子:艺术的价值。Something I love aboutWestworldis that it’s not just a meditation on the danger of technology, on the nature and limits and value of humanity, on identity, on free will, on morality, and on the desirability (or otherwise) of truth—it’s also a meditation on the questionwhat fiction is for. Westworld the park is one giant work of fiction that guests spend days interacting with. AndWestworldthe show is a work of fiction that viewers spend ten hours a season interacting with. Why do we all do it? Is it just a pleasurable waste of our time?

Here too, the show refuses to make things simple for us. At times things look pretty bleak: guests go to the park for mere escapism, and while they’re doing that, rapacious capitalists prey on their vices. Not good. But at times the park looks like a more dignified haven from the failings of the real world: what’s attractive about it—like all good art—is not that it offers cheap thrills but that it is perfectlyordered, with everything in it having a purpose and a significance. At its best, though, the park is a space for self-understanding and self-transformation.

在第一季第五集中，福特和黑衣人之间有一段可爱的对话。黑衣人说他在寻找一种“更深层的含义……创作它的人想要表达的东西”。真的。”福特温和地纠正他说:“我绝不会妨碍自我发现的旅程。”福特表现得很微妙，但他在告诉黑衣人，他对这个公园的目的是错误的，就像他对许多其他事情的错误一样，这个公园的目的不是向我们揭示一些深刻的真相，而是帮助我们了解自己。福特并不是唯一一个这样做的人:在两季的演讲中，其他五位演讲者也表达了完全相同的观点。

Just as for Westworld the park, so too, I think, forWestworldthe show. It too is a fictional world offering a voyage of self-discovery. It is a deeply philosophical show—but not in the sense that it has particular beliefs to transmit to us; rather, in the sense that it raises philosophical questions in a powerful way. It doesn’ttellus whether there’s anything valuable about humanity, or what makes each of us who we are as individuals, or whether being oneself is always the best idea, or whether we have free will, or whether the truth is always valuable, or what goodness looks like in a morally degraded world. Instead it helps us to think about these questions. As Anton Chekhov once said, artists don’t have to solve a problem; they only have to present it correctly. In that way, and in many others, the writers ofWestworld是真正的艺术家。