I had a question. This essay was published on February 19, 2024.
In the show Westworld, when one of the android robots that populate the theme park encounters material from the outside world, it is programmed to perceive nothing. The robots (called Hosts) are supposed to be characters in the old American frontier. Modern material, like a guest’s contraband color photograph, doesn’t fit in their story. When presented with the anachronous object, the Host’s sense instruments will convey to its robot brain that something is there, an object with physical extension (the Host won’t accidentally bump into it), but its brain will not pass any assessment of the object’s semantic content to the Host’s conscious awareness. Nor will the Host’s brain pass to awareness the fact that anything is strange about the unexplained gap in its perception. When such an object is brought to the Host’s attention, it will simply remark: Doesn’t look like anything to me.
This programming represents a design choice on the part of the Hosts’ creators: The Hosts’ world must be coherent, regardless whether comprehensive. That is, the Hosts’ world must be internally consistent, even if certain data available to the Hosts must be forcefully excluded to achieve that.
The Hosts’ creators could have made other design choices. For example: The Hosts’ world must be coherent and comprehensive, that is, internally consistent and inclusive of all available data. To a first approximation, that’s the default disposition of a healthy human being: we acknowledge the new data we’re presented with, and we continually revise our model of the world to make the data consistent with one another. As children and young adults, we safely integrate data as foundationally disruptive to our world-model as dreams, hallucinations, and lies. For most of us, that process is manageable and doesn’t injure us—because ultimately, our world is in fact coherent. There is sense to be made. We aren’t trapped in a theme park.
How would that alternative design choice play out for the Hosts in Westworld? A Host presented with material from the outside world would perceive the foreign material as it is, and its robot brain would do its level-best to update its world-model to integrate the new information. Depending on the material, the Host might simply blink, scratch its head, and make a pot of coffee—like you or I might if we saw (really saw) the corner of a ghost’s tattered dress flutter by the window, or the tail of an alien drone drag through a cloud. I think I need to get more sleep. Anyway, what’s for breakfast? If the material were more disruptive, the Host might begin down a path of vigorous and peaceful self-discovery, carefully revising and expanding its world-model until it became an enlightened prophet figure, comfortable in the co-existence of one world within another, some kind of exalted liaison between man and machine.
Or, the Host might react how you’d expect. And that might be dangerous for the guests. How would you behave if you saw (really saw) an angel of the Old-Testament variety descend into your living room? If a stage light labeled Sirius (9 Canis Major) fell from the clear blue sky? If you woke up naked in a pod of red goo?
Cognitive dissonance is toxic, and too much of it can debilitate. Ideas should not be given free passage in your mind. But cognitive dissonance is also necessary, because by construction it precedes learning. In every moment, we participate in the design of our own mind by calibrating the dissonance we allow, by virtue of the data and ideas we choose to seek, evade, and linger on.
Once we’ve updated to a world-model sufficient to safely navigate day-to-day life—that is to say, once we’ve had a successful early childhood and learned that fire is hot, some dogs bite, and the rest—most of us then prioritize coherency over comprehensiveness, along the same lines as the Hosts. Whether we admit it or not, as adults presented with evidence that contravenes our cultural or folk-philosophical understanding of reality, we ignore it. Depending on our intellectual self-concept, we might dress up our response in something a little less embarrassing, but ultimately we react like the Hosts: Doesn’t look like anything to me.
It’s easy to pick out targets for that kind of criticism. Political consumers, or partisans of any stripe, who refuse to acknowledge their tribe’s shortcomings. Parents who refuse to see their children’s misbehavior. Anyone who suspects their loved one has betrayed them and simply avoids thinking about it. Religious types who don’t honestly accept their doctrine’s ontology, but who get squeamish about discussions of foundational physics of any kind. Nonreligious types who sense that the nomological-mathematical language of physics leaves something out about consciousness, but who get squeamish about discussions of the Hard Problem. Anyone who has buried a memory. And so forth.
What does it look like to miscalibrate your tolerance for cognitive dissonance in the other direction? To allow so much of it to accumulate in your blood that it makes you sick? The universe is bigger than the brain—or looked at in a different way, our brain’s memory is smaller than the totality of sense data (and introspective data) we receive. That is to say, compromise on the precision of our model is unavoidable. But even allowing that metaphor and abbreviation must dominate, who could be strong enough to welcome the world as it is? Who has the stomach for it—or the liver?
As I walk through my daily life, I am surrounded by protective lies so deeply installed that I don’t notice them: I am not in space; I am under the sky. No one can reach me; I am behind a locked door. The world is solid, and objects are fundamentally what they appear to be. And built on top of those lies like stones in a tower, at every level of analysis—physiologically, psychologically, socially, economically—there is more deception, more willful ignorance. I walk with my hand tilted over my eyes.
What kind of mental fortitude would it take to allow yourself to accept, really accept, all of the confusing and painful things that show themselves to be true? What kind of a person would that strength produce? Or would it kill them?