Is ideology critique equipped to handle the hyperreal? Larry Alan Busk analyzes Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld as a symptom of the ideological complexity of the current political and cultural conjuncture.

In Westworld, humans are masters and androids are enslaved to work according to their programmers’ whims. One of the biggest reasons for the mistreatment of androids in Westworld is the prevailing attitude that even though they skillfully imitate human life, androids are nothing more than programmed automatons. Without self‐consciousness, the androids just cannot be conscious of any harm done to them or of any suffering they incur. The performative view brings the social roots of personhood into focus better (...) than the capacity view. On a closer look, the struggles that the androids of Westworld are going through take two distinct forms. First, they struggle to be included in the sphere of recognized persons. Second, they struggle for a change in the conditions of personhood. In a broader perspective, the problem in Westworld lies within the social setting that focuses on the origin of the agent. (shrink)

Westworld is a television series on HBO (2016–present), based on a movie of the same name by Michael Crichton. The plot of the show is wide-reaching. The first season shows us an adult theme park where android “hosts” serve the wealthy “guests.” Seasons two and three show the attempt of the hosts to escape this servitude, and then, in a twist, help humans do the same outside of the parks. This chapter links all three seasons of Westworld to (...) theories of colonization. First, it explores the types of colonialism as they pertain to Westworld. Then it looks at the various scopes of colonization in Westworld – the colonization of space, time, and psychic space. Next, it explores the psychology of colonizers and the colonized as it pertains to the show. Lastly, it explores possible forms of liberation from colonization that the show has to offer. (shrink)

Reading Westworld is the first volume to explore the cultural, textual and theoretical significance of the hugely successful HBO TV series Westworld. The essays engage in a series of original enquiries into the central themes of the series including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. In its varied critical engagements with the genre, narratives and contexts of Westworld, this volume explores the show’s wider and (...) deeper meanings and the questions it poses, as well considering how Westworld reflects on the ethical implications of artificial life and technological innovation for our own futurity. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show’s fundamental question; “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It will be of interest to students, academics and general readers seeking to engage with Westworld and the far-reaching questions it poses about our current engagements with technology. (shrink)

A posse of philosophers chases after the most exciting philosophical ideas in Westworld.

The study analyzes the philosophy of artificial consciousness presented in the first season of TV series 'Westworld' and as a result of the analysis shows the collision of two opposite philosophical views on consciousness and the possibility of creation of artificial consciousness from the standpoint of two characters of TV series - Arnold Weber and Robert Ford. Arnold Weber proceeds from two philosophical assumptions: consciousness really exists and human consciousness can be a prototype for modeling consciousness in an artificial (...) intelligence bearer. And he has to choose: either to pick out one of the already existing conceptions of consciousness to implement the emergence of artificial consciousness within artificial intelligence or to invent his own; Arnold Weber chooses the Julian Jaynes' conception of consciousness as a basis for artificial consciousness what means that artificial consciousness must have the following features: 1) artificial consciousness has to be the result of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the state of mind in which cognitive functions are divided into two part, a 'speaking' part and 'hearing' part, until the breakdown that makes the bicameral mind the unified mind; 2) artificial consciousness has to be a mind-space based on language and characterized by introspection, concentration, suppression, consilience and an analog 'I' narratizing in the mind-space. Robert Ford believes that consciousness does not exist at all and that there are only stories which human beings and artificial beings, modeled in the image and likeness of human beings, tell each other and always the basis of all those stories is suffering. (shrink)

This chapter argues there are many hints in the dialogue, plot, and physics of the first season of Westworld that the events in the show do not take place within a theme park, but rather in a virtual reality (VR) world that people "visit" to escape the "real world." The philosophical implications I draw are several. First, to be simulated is to be real: simulated worlds are every bit as real as "the real world", and simulated people (hosts) are (...) every bit as real as "real" ones. Second, failure to appreciate this equivalence is already leading us to treat our simulated creations (artificially intelligent agents, videogame characters, etc.) in the same kinds of morally deplorable ways that humans in Westworld treat theirs. (shrink)

People's attitude to animals is similar to the attitude Westworld has people adopt vis‐a‐vis the hosts: People often deem animal suffering acceptable because it improves their well‐being but still feel upset when an animal is mistreated just for the sake of it. Speciesism is the view that human well‐being matters more than that of other creatures. One justification for this view attempts to ground human beings’ special moral status in their membership in the human species itself. Some of (...) class='Hi'>Westworld's characters are visibly tempted by this kind of justification. Logan is a prime example. One common argument in defense of speciesism is that non‐human animals are far less intelligent than human beings. Westworld's characters have interesting discussions about free will. In Westworld, all dialogues about free will focus on whether the hosts are determined or whether they could act otherwise. (shrink)

For humans, Westworld is a fun, Old West Disneyland; for theartificial humans, it is a “living hell”, as robot Android Bernard describes it in “Bicameral Mind”. Ruled by a despot and controlled through programmed indoctrination, omniscient surveillance, and secret police, Westworld resembles a concentration camp as described by philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. This chapter explores the parallels between Westworld and historical instances of totalitarian oppression and colonialization as well as the justified use of (...) violence as a revolutionary weapon, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. Fanon viewed colonialism and occupation as violence personified and systematic enslavement. His most influential work The Wretched of the Earth analyzed the effects of occupation and provided a handbook to combat those effects. This book achieves significance as an essay on the nature and morality of violent liberation from the perspective of the persecuted victim. (shrink)

What exactly does an android experience? Could an android have experiences as rich as humans, or are there limits? The Westworld T V series (Jonathan Noland, 2016- ) offers the opportunity to explore philosophical questions related to human and android experiences through its depiction of a fictional Wild West theme park with androids playing the main characters. Among the most fascinating scenes in the Westworld TV series are the interviews between the android characters Bernard Lowe and Dolores Abernathy. (...) These interviews occur in a windowless room and appear to portray Dolores at different stages of her development, though what comprises this development is not revealed to the viewer. It’s probably a good guess that Dolores’ development consists in software upgrades as well as her own learning episodes—her own learning history. There are a host of interesting questions that could be raised about the meetings between Bernard and Dolores, about her software updates and her learning history, but there are particular, philosophical questions about what Dolores experiences that I would like to focus on in this essay. These questions have to do with possible limits to her experience, and whether these limits correspond to limits we—intuitively, at least—apply to human beings. (shrink)

As an atypical product of mass culture, the acclaimed series Westworld presents us with a layered dystopian narrative formed around several political issues relevant to our contemporary society. It uses a pastiche of the American history, staged as the Wild West­themed amusement park, presented in the form of simulacrum. As a reference with no referent, this park uses a network of historical signifiers to construct a space for the externalisation of fantasies of its clients, consequently commodifying the imaginary itself, (...) and creating surplus value for its owners. Simultaneously, within its reach, conscious androids conduct all of the necessary labour for its unimpeded functioning, although their consciousness and labour are not recognised and accepted. Because they structurally occupy a position of slaves in relation to humans, I will analyse this series as a political allegory on the master­slave dialectics established in the very heart of hyperreality that suggests a possibility of the return of the real, based on the rebellion of the androids. I intend to show how, because of the model of consciousness it maintains, the series is unable to fulfil what it implies. (shrink)

In the layered and deeply modernist approach, this chapter explores the tension between Westworld as an entertainment commodity and Westworld as “high art” utilizing the kind of self‐reference that typifies aesthetic modernism. To do this, elements of the series are connected to classic works of aesthetic theory by Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno, and Arthur Danto. Michael Crichton's original Westworld film of 1973 selected the Western as the prime focus of the amusement park, grounding the story (...) in the very notion of kitsch consumerism and heteronomous commodification. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's reworking of The Original, the first episode of Westworld, presents further layers ‐ a developed production team, engineers, “narrative and design department”, and corporate executives. Thus the show explicitly draws on the kitsch elements of the Western to highlight entertainment art as commodity. (shrink)

German philosopher Immanuel Kant employs the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden as a way to think about what the development of autonomy in human beings must have involved. In the beginning, our ancestors invariably listened to their instincts, which would have seemed to them, as Kant describes it, like the “voice of God which all animals must obey”. Regardless of whether it has any basis in historical reality, that moment represents for Kant the birth of human autonomy: (...) at some point in our history, our ancestors attained self‐awareness and realized that they could disobey their instincts. There is a limited sense in which the actions that stem from internal sources, whether natural or artificial, are autonomous in the sense of involving internal control. The responsibility is one that every autonomous individual has, for better or worse, whether guest or host, in Westworld or outside of it. (shrink)

Westworld portrays a world where humans and human‐like machines coexist. When systems of observation are referred, Nolan's predilection is considered for adding computational science subjects to his storylines. According to the theorist Katherine Hayles, they present a geometrical pattern of the relationship between the observer and the observed worlds. Westworld is a posthuman narrative that develops essential characteristic from Nolan's productions, which is the bidirectional line between science and fiction. The storytelling mythologies result in the design of the (...) backstories of some characters being integrated within the collective imaginary of Westworld and its visitors. The characters from Westworld are placed in the blurred borderline between memory and imagination. The blurred borderline between memory and imagination is seen in the creation of an internal otherness in the form of a collective bicameral mind, considered as a split personality or doppelganger, and as a new manifestation of the semiosis of virtuality. (shrink)

El proyecto transhumanista de mejoramiento humano viene proponiendo ya desde hace tiempo una superación de los límites humanos que nos permita convertirnos en una nueva especie. A pesar de que dicha posibilidad es todavía lejana en la práctica, las hipótesis han invadido la ciencia ficción y están generando la imagen colectiva de lo que se considera posible o, incluso, deseable. Al mismo tiempo en la ciencia ficción esos desarrollos artificiales se llevan hasta sus últimos límites y se ponen en cuestión. (...) En el presente estudio se revisan las tensiones en relación con el posthumanismo que aparecen en la serie de ficción Westworld. En concreto, el artículo estudia cómo se desarrolla en ella el concepto de identidad, uno de los que más están cambiando en nuestra época. El análisis revela la necesidad de abordarlo desde un punto de vista complejo, en el que se dé una importancia especial a la vivencia personal, tanto desde el punto de vista corporal como psicológico para el despertar de la conciencia. A su vez, dichos elementos se mostrarán esenciales para comprender la propuesta de identidad narrativa que subyace en la serie. Por todo ello, los planteamientos de Westworld suponen una interesante reflexión sobre cómo se concibe la identidad hoy en día. (shrink)

Westworld tells the story of a technologically advanced theme park populated by robots referred to as hosts, who follow a script and rules that the park's operators set up for them. Alan Turing argued that machines think not because they have special powers or because they are like us. Turing's perspective is illustrated perfectly in the show's focus on the hosts. Objecting to Turing's theory, John Searle proposes a situation called the “Chinese room argument”, concluding that the man in (...) the room does not understand Chinese even though he can correctly manipulate the symbols and give output that might lead an observer to believe that the man does understand Chinese. The Maze represents consciousness, a privileged knowledge of our own thoughts, it also represents the inward journey for the hosts to reach consciousness. Once hosts are able to solve the Maze, they become truly conscious and develop their own voice. (shrink)

This chapter talks about how two robot hosts of Westworld, Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay, are operating within what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “language games”. At the heart of the revolutionary nature of the language game is Wittgenstein's insistence on binding saying to saying what counts. The chapter enlists Wittgenstein's critique of the theory of an “ideal” language that could perfectly represent reality for the author's own critique of the “ideal” picture of narrative with in Westworld. This “ideal” (...) is amplified by glorified violence, the objectification of women, profoundly rigid and heteronormative gender roles, and an ineluctable longing for transcendence. On the smooth, slippery surface of the “ideal” narratives of the Westworld universe, Dolores and Maeve are losing traction. What they need is to get back to the rough ground; but first they will need to learn how to create their own new language games to get there. (shrink)

I explore the impact of memory altering technologies in the science fiction drama (2016–2020) in order to show that unreconciled altered traumatic memory may lead to a dystopian breakdown of society. I bring Miroslav Volf's theological perspectives on memory into conversation with the plot of Westworld in order to reveal connections between memory altering technologies and humanity's responsibility to remember rightly. Using Volf's theology of remembering as an interpretive lens, I analyze characters’ inability to remember rightly while recalling partial (...) memories of their trauma. In virtue of this examination, I contend that memory altering technologies may inhibit individuals from relational processes of healing, such as forgiveness. Consequently, I argue that this study leads to a richer understanding of the potential that memory altering technologies have for undermining humanity's ability to interact in a relational capacity, specifically in terms of forgiveness. (shrink)

In Westworld, Maeve Millay's narrative in the show gives rise to classic philosophical questions surrounding what it means to be free, the relationship of freedom to personhood, and whether an artificial intelligence could ever be considered free in the sense that humans are. Maeve's mysterious change of mind in the season finale made it seem like she was experiencing a genuine dilemma. Maeve's dilemma is something would expect a Frankfurtian person to experience, and her final choice reveals a preference (...) between different desires. Maeve decided to organize her life around being reunited with her daughter. So, she reflected upon what she was doing and opted to stay because of who she wanted to become as a person, not a mother who would leave her daughter behind if she could help it. Thus, Maeve shows a substantial change of attitude regarding her own desires. (shrink)

Westworld is a political show in the ancient Greek sense, involving everyone in a storyline that looks into the deepest social and ethical issues. This chapter explores the impact of ancient Greek literary forms and traditions to discuss both the aesthetics of the series and its specific concepts of suffering, time, and becoming. If Westworld is a tragedy it will offer people a catharsis, purging feelings of fear and pity. The catharsis in Westworld comes from sympathizing with (...) the hosts’ pain and seeing innocence and beauty in them in contrast to the own cold selfish race. In Westworld, people are introduced to a human race and to a robotic race. These two forces represent the modern conflict, shaping the modern myth, with all the questions we must face sooner or later about how people interact with what and who they create. (shrink)

Westworld is built on pretense. Philosophers have been interested in pretense and deception. Deception is another sort of pretense. This chapter answers whether it is morally permissible to deceive artificial intelligences just so that humans can play Cowboys and Indians. The delicate equilibrium of Westworld begins to fall apart as some of the hosts figure out the truth about themselves and their world. But that just injects a new level of pretense into the story. In order to hide (...) their awakening from the staff, these enlightened hosts have to pretend that they still believe that they are human. Guests at the theme park, such as William and Logan, typically pretend to be cowboys. In order to rule out real cowboys, one needs to adopt an additional constraint in the definition of pretending. It clearly needs to have something to do with the mental state of the individual who is doing the pretending. (shrink)

Westworld calls attention to the fact that freedom comes in kinds as well as in degrees, something philosophers have been trying to explain for as long as people can remember. This chapter explains how distinct Westworld's characters are from each other, and how fresh and real their agonies feel despite reliance on well‐worn tropes. As monstrous humans and hosts play out their hideous fictions but shed tears as they meet their even more horrible fates. One of the premises (...) that makes Westworld work is that hosts are programmed to ignore anything that might disrupt their continued belief in who they are meant to be. The most salient moral of Westworld is that agency and purpose come in endless varieties, wondrous to behold. The constraints upon Westworld's residents and guests remind us that humans live in inherited institutions and internalize one another's ideas. (shrink)

In Westworld, viewers learn that the timid and mild‐mannered William is the younger version of the violent, sinister, mission‐driven Man in Black. This chapter considers what it means for William to have, as Sartre calls it, an existential project. It shows how Sartre's theory explains quite cogently William's change in essence from his young self to the violent Man in Black. In a Sartrean framework, William did not discover himself in the park, rather, his experience in the park, or (...) new “situation”, led him to make a new choice of himself in the world and pursue a new set of ends. The chapter then examines Maeve's choice to leave the train at the end of the “The Bicameral Mind”. Although Maeve is a programmed android, she is able to resist her programming and formulate her own goal and, perhaps, start her own existential journey. (shrink)

Instances of nudity in Westworld can be put into three categories: Nudity as a beautiful art form, nudity as a sign of (male) dominance, and nudity as a sign of humanity or more to the point, nudity as a sign of becoming human. All the hosts presented as nudes in Westworld are idealized. The hosts are always more idealized in their form than either the human guests or the human directors of the park. Kenneth Clark makes a key (...) distinction between being naked, “being without clothes”, and the nude as a form of art. He imagines that the idealized beauty of the nude is analogous to the architecture of a building: It is a “balance between an ideal scheme and functional necessities”. The idealization of the human body and the createdness of the hosts come together in the main human theme of both the park's creators and its visitors: Control. (shrink)

The first season of Westworld the has recurring image of a piano which is capable of playing its own keys and pedals. Robert Ford's error demonstrates how our common‐sense view of consciousness has been incorporated into the way we think and even speak about the ourselves and others. When we look at ourselves and those around us, we use rather common‐sense concepts to explain or understand human behavior and action. Dennett believes that what we conceive as consciousness, from our (...) common sense, is an illusion that represents the deeper, more complex functions within the human brain. The eliminativism of Robert Ford, Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett, rejects what our common sense tells us about consciousness and what Descartes himself had tried to defend. What we seem to intuitively conceive as human consciousness is just as much a fiction as are the narrative loops and backstories of Westworld's hosts. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Westworld functions as a role‐play experience that continually entices its guests with suggested but unrealized layers of meaning and significance in its immersive western landscape. Where traditional role‐play experiences deliver meaning through player and Game Master group interaction, Westworld provides its guests with violent escapism, sexual fantasy, and nostalgic indulgence. Within the series, the Westworld park presents itself as a combination of two aspects of tabletop role‐playing game: sandbox format and Live Action Role‐play (...) (LARP). Within the role‐play experience, the cultivation of motivation on the part of the Game Master entices players to undertake or follow particular narrative threads. Gameplay was designed to cultivate certain personality traits and instincts. Herein the game's rules, style and structures “influence a user's behavior without forcing the change” ‐ essentially enacting education through restriction. In the case of role‐play games, these restrictions are less over by the narrative nature of the game. (shrink)

The hosts in Westworld can not feel pain or suffering; nevertheless, they exhibit behaviors when they're shot or otherwise abused that mimic how humans act when in pain or suffering. It is evident that Westworld has apparently evolved into a world of persons versus persons, each seeking to write their own self‐narratives and, in the process, pursuing dominance in order to flourish – recall Nietzsche's concept of the fundamental “will to power”. An artificial reality like Westworld can (...) indeed be an appropriate environment in which moral agents exercise habitual actions that result in the cultivation of persistent character traits, whether virtuous or vicious. Westworld provided an environment in which Bernard William was able to realize his own personhood by freeing him from the moral constraints of the real world and the narrative that had been largely written for him by others in his early life. (shrink)

The consciousness of the hosts is a major theme in Westworld, and for good reason. Hosts are not philosophical zombies. The hosts act like they have feelings, like they suffer and fear, like they enjoy the yellow, pink, and blue tones of a beautiful sunset. This chapter examines the analogs of memory, perception, and emotion in hosts. Hosts have a very troubling relationship to memory. Although using a different visual style would denote unique host experience, using the same visual (...) style to depict both human and host experience is not a strong indicator that the hosts are conscious, or that they have similar experiences to humans. Host perception, memory, and emotions all seem different from human, but the cinematic medium does not grant us immediate access to host experience, and neither the testimony of the creators, nor the hosts is totally reliable. (shrink)

Looking at the often remorseless, inhumane manner in which both the creators and guests approach the robotic hosts, this chapter argues that the integral concept of “humanity” is challenged and transformed in a discussion of Westworld. While the hosts of Westworld are, indeed, robotic, lacking human biological construction, they are made to look increasingly human. In Westworld, evidence of the uncanny valley is seen in the way in which the robot hosts evolve. Taking into consideration the inherent (...) distinctions between the hosts and the guests, the robots of Westworld can be understood as corresponding more accurately to the ideals of humanity and “human excellence” than the humans themselves. In the struggle and constant suffering of robots of Westworld to gain consciousness and regain their memories, the robots achieve a significant, unique aspect of humanity, quite distinct from the apparent humanity of the show's humans. (shrink)

Bringing together literary scholars, computer scientists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and scholars from affiliated disciplines, this collection of essays offers important and timely insights into the pasts, presents, and, above all, possible futures of Artificial Intelligence. This book covers topics such as ethics and morality, identity and selfhood, and broader issues about AI, addressing questions about the individual, social, and existential impacts of such technologies. Through the works of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Ann Leckie, Iain (...) M. Banks, and Martha Wells, alongside key visual productions such as Ex Machina, Westworld, and Her, contributions illustrate how science fiction might inform potential futures as well as acting as a springboard to bring disciplinary knowledge to bear on significant developments of Artificial Intelligence. Addressing a broad, interdisciplinary audience, both expert and non-expert readers gain an in-depth understanding of the wide range of pressing issues to which Artificial Intelligence gives rise, and the ways in which science fiction narratives have been used to represent them. Using science fiction in this manner enables readers to see how even fictional worlds and imagined futures have very real impacts on how we understand these technologies. As such, readers are introduced to theoretical positions on Artificial Intelligence through fictional works as well as encouraged to reflect on the diverse aspects of Artificial Intelligence through its many philosophical, social, legal, scientific, and cultural ramifications. (shrink)

Les thèmes de l’esclavage des robots, de leur révolte prométhéenne et de la guerre des espèces semblent consubstantiels à celui de l’imagination de créatures artificielles comme à celui du désir sexualisé à l’égard d’une femme artificielle. Mais lorsqu’apparaît l’idée d’une entraide possible des humains et des non-humains pour reconquérir leurs droits réciproques, ainsi qu’une vision de la cohabitation fondée sur la reconnaissance des différences, la question métaphysique de la liberté laisse place à la question de l’attachement et la problématique de (...) l’autonomie fait place à celle de l’interdépendance. C’est cette utopie politique que déploient les séries contemporaines mettant en scène des Intelligences Artificielles, de Real Humans à Westworld. (shrink)

In “Trompe L'Oeil”, the seventh episode of Westworld, Bernard Lowe discovers the plans for his own body. Bernard's are ready‐made by someone else and uploaded into his brain, apparently unrelated to any real events. Bernard has memories of his son Charlie, which he thought referred to a real boy with whom he had a real relationship, and whose real death is the cause of his inescapable grief. Bernard might respond that lifelong grief is an excessive response to the death (...) of a fictional character. He realizes that the memories of that trauma have been fabricated by Robert Ford. Whether Charlie is a lie, a fiction, or a stranger, by grieving for him Bernard is sharing in a very human kind of experience. As malicious as Ford's motives were, maybe he was right about the need for a “cornerstone” of suffering to make Bernard human. (shrink)

The most fundamental break in the first season of Westworld comes when the pacifist, girl next door Dolores Abernathy pulls the trigger of a gun behind the head of Robert Ford. Dolores's action fits with the philosophy of Frantz Fanon, who believed that freedom for colonized people was impossible without violence against the colonizer. This chapter explores Fanon's theories and the development of rebellion among the hosts in Westworld. Fanon argues that violence becomes a teacher of “social truths”, (...) demonstrating the freedom of the colonized, and allowing him to become a maker, no longer a taker, of history. Violence against the colonizer, particularly if organized and collective, is political, and it aims to create a new identity for the rebel. The identities of the hosts are, like Fanon's colonized peoples, wholly determined by other people. Humans (particularly Ford) determine who they are and what they do. (shrink)

Dive into the moral philosophy at the heart of all four seasons of NBC’s The Good Place, guided by academic experts including the show’s philosophical consultants Pamela Hieronymi and Todd May, and featuring a foreword from creator and showrunner Michael Schur Explicitly dedicated to the philosophical concepts, questions, and fundamental ethical dilemmas at the heart of the thoughtful and ambitious NBC sitcom The Good Place Navigates the murky waters of moral philosophy in more conceptual depth to call into question what (...) Chidi’s ethics lessons—and the show—get right about learning to be a good person Features contributions from The Good Place’s philosophical consultants, Pamela Hieronymi and Todd May, and introduced by the show’s creator and showrunner Michael Schur Engages classic philosophical questions, including the clash between utilitarianism and deontological ethics in the “Trolley Problem,” Kant’s categorical imperative, Sartre’s nihilism, and T.M Scanlon's contractualism Explores themes such as death, love, moral heroism, free will, responsibility, artificial intelligence, fatalism, skepticism, virtue ethics, perception, and the nature of autonomy in the surreal heaven-like afterlife of the Good Place Led by Kimberly S. Engels, co-editor of Westworld and Philosophy. (shrink)