There is a clue dropped into one of the titles of a season one episode of the HBO science fiction show Westworld^[1]. The culmination of the first season arc and the solution to the mysterious “maze” is alluded to in the title “The Bicameral Mind” of the season finale. 

I found the subtly referenced book and read it, and the theories posited in Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ^[2] were obviously at the front of someone’s mind when they were penning the plot to the science fiction miniseries that rocked me back in 2016.

The short summary: Jaynes suggests that consciousness arose when the two lobes of the brain, the left and right hemispheres, started acting as one. Over the course of his long thesis and popular book it is argued that until a couple thousand years ago humans had two disconnected voices in their heads and that the disconnect answers a lot of questions about how people thought, heard gods, and understood themselves. He theorizes that self awareness and what we think of as modern consciousness arose when we no longer had two competing voices in our heads, but a unified internal monologue. Consciousness, then, results from the complexity in the conversations in our brains.

As much as Jaynes thesis was considered either radical or nuts, it is a milestone in the long journey for humans to understand why we perceive the universe the way we do… and how we could replicate that in a machine.

Westworld makes a lot more sense—at least all the philosophical AI science-ish stuff does—when you look at it in the context of Jayne’s mind-bending ideas. 

Westworld, if you’ve never watched it, is basically Jurassic Park^[3] but with robots—which, too, makes a lot of sense when you realize they originated from the same person: Michael Crichton. Westworld is a theme park where robots indistinguishable from humans in almost every way act out an Old West fantasy world for rich guests… until things get out of control.

I’ve been rewatching it. The first couple seasons hold up, and I’ve noticed that the story of the maze (a game that is not for the humans in the park but rather a hidden quest for the robots) and the reveries (the programming bug introduced to the code that allows the robots to, in effect, daydream memories) are all rooted in this notion of deliberately breaking down the sci-fi robot’s version of bicameral (two-lobed) thinking, all in an attempt by their creator to evoke—that’s right—consciousness in them.

Westworld is science fiction, of course, and like all science fiction is meant to teach us more about ourselves than our future. In this way it is not a predictor for AI sentience nor a recipe for some algorithmic process that could be replicated in a server farm somewhere. Rather, maybe, a reminder that we still don’t fully understand what makes us self-aware and that we still spend a lot of time and ink trying to figure it out.

Pinning it down in an algorithm is not a trivial thing, speculative theories or not.