Emergence. In his 2001 book by that title, Steven Johnson said that emergence is the macro behavior that results from the interactions of many small active agents operating on simple instructions, and emergence is one of the main themes of Westworld, which has recently returned to television with season four on HBO.  It's been one of the themes that's been ongoing in the show since the very beginning, how the behaviors of the hosts are developed from small interactions. It's continuing into the start of at least the first few episodes of season four, and emergence is one of the themes of this podcast as well because, well, you have to start somewhere, so perhaps it's just best to start with a small interaction and build from there.

We're gonna hit the ground running and explain what we're all about, but let's talk a little bit more about emergence. Before we do, however, I'd like to just offer the customary warning as is the way of our people: because we're talking about a current television show, there may very well be spoilers depending on where you are with the program.  If you wish to avoid these, please feel free to read the transcript of the program or join us once you've caught up, we'll be happy to have you with us. You are of course our most welcome guest here on the Implausipod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and I'm so glad you could join us. This podcast is ultimately about my research interests, which is about how art, science and technology influence each other and are inextricably intertwined, so we'll often end up talking about pop culture or new and emerging technologies, and as we go exploring, we'll see where that path takes us. But for now, Let's get back to Westworld and against all advice of the Old West, I'll show my hand early and put all my cards on the table because with the close of season four, episode two, I found I was really, really liking this show.

Again, I thought it was one of the most interesting episodes of television I'd seen in the last several years, and with the last five minutes of the show, how they brought the close of the episode full circle with the very beginning of the series, I felt that they had created a through-line that drew all the arcs and paths together into a cohesive hole, and that through line has ties to other properties as well, including ones worked on by Jonathan Nolan, like Person of Interest, other properties by HBO, like Oz, as well as other titles within science fiction and popular culture. The Oz tie-in might not be as obvious, but it speaks to the dramatic urgency that took place during the show and to that present on other HBO shows as well, like Game of Thrones.

Within the OZ, there was a number of different factions and each of the characters had motivations about how they related both to the factions as well as within them. We see those factions within Westworld as well. Whether it's Dolores acting through Charlotte's body, or Mae and Caleb and associates, or the various corporations, Delos and otherwise, and the governmental actors within the larger Westworld universe, the complex web of connections between the various players builds up over time with each and every one of their interactions emerging into something new and cohesive. And these interactions give a weight to the episode as the drama feels earned. I'm gonna stop there, however, because this isn't a recap show. Not really.

We're talking about the larger themes and those larger themes are what tie directly to Jonathan Nolan's work. Other authors have likely gone into depth about the parallel ties in both shows, Westworld and person of interest, and how they've both explored the development of artificial intelligence, sentience, and consciousness, and I think that's true. The repeated exploration of those themes through different lenses are what allows us to explore both fully. But it doesn't come from nowhere, and I'd like to take a moment to link Jonathan Nolan's work here to other science fiction titles within the genre, most notably in the early works of William Gibson, as Person of Interest morphed and changed during his tenure with CBS changing from a police procedural to a cyberpunk thriller with an active metaplot, we can see the emergence of the William Gibson tie come to take hold.

A small team of professionals with various military, computing or criminal backgrounds working at the behest of an AI that's in competition with another entity that's possibly also an artificial intelligence. Am I describing Reese, Finch, Root and Shaw working with the Machine against Samaritan, or Case, Molly, Rivera, and the Dixie Flatline working at the behest of Wintermute?  In order to track down our answer, the parallels are there, and it's more than just the teams and the competing sibling AIs. There's more in the five seasons that can be contained within a single 300-page novel, of course. But by the same token, there's more in the novel Neuromancer that ever showed up within Person of Interest.

And that's what leads us to Westworld. 'cause Westworld carries forward some of the themes seen of the Gibson novels, both the Sprawl Trilogy, the Bridge Trilogy, and others. And it's these themes that I like to talk about as we go further into this podcast. The question of whether consciousness or even the human mind could be stored in hardware or software and interacted with as if it was a computer, and if so, will that consciousness grow and change and develop, or is it static and trapped forever? And this brings us back to Westworld once more. Now Westworld: the Series is based on the 1973 film by Michael Crichton and its follow-up Future World, and the parallels are there with the current series, but as I'm arguing, the parallels are just as strong with other science fiction properties that have been produced since, and the current series represents an exploration of consciousness, AI, and sentience that can be found in much of Jonathan Nolan's work. And we're left wondering how it's going to emerge now. 

The concept of emergence that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode didn’t start with Steven Johnson, but he did manage to bring together a number of the various threads that were really extant within academic research and discussion at that time. As I take a quick step over to Dr. Implausible’s bookshelf, there's a number of titles that are directly relevant. In the mid nineties, there was three or four books that were critical to the ongoing discussion on emergence. And those books include Stuart Kaufman's At Home in the Universe, Daniel Dennett’s Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, and N. Katherine Hayle's How We Became Post-Human, and they talked about a host of interrelated topics including self-organization, complexity, evolution, consciousness, and biological, mechanical and social systems. As we proceed with this podcast over the duration of Westworld's season four, we'll take a look at those books in turn, either with the episode recap or inter interpolating them in between the episodes, depending on how things go, so we'll get back to those in a little bit. They're directly relevant to, I think, a deeper understanding of what's going on in the narrative of Westworld. For now, let's define a couple of our terms. When we're talking about emergence, I think the best way to do it is just to think of what happens when we have the accumulation of multiple small events, and there's a couple different ways to think about emergence. 

Theres some examples that we might use to visualize it. The first one is more artistic. If we take a piece of paper and put it on the table and a pencil and hold it above the page and drop it. Each time that pencil lands, it's going to leave a mark on the page. If we do this repeatedly over time with no intentionality about where that pencil might land, over time, those dots will end up forming a larger picture. This is similar to the artistic style of pointillism, even though they don't do that to make the artwork usually, but those collection of dots are going to form some form of pattern that we might see. It's an image that arises to us out of the arrangement of dots on the page, and so this can be seen as how the many small interactions can accumulate to form a larger picture. This printing method is very similar to what we used to see on newspaper images and photographs, as well as if in fax machines and even our inkjet printers, they all used a collection of little dots on the pages just to reveal the larger picture. 

The second method that we can use to think about this is the look at the actual activity that's engaged in by small insects like ants and termites, each individual insect that's part of the colony, will engage in a behavior that benefits the colony as a whole. And the accumulation of these behaviors, whether it's moving a grain of sand or moving around food or other workers clearing out dead bodies, the host of activities that the ants or termites engage in will over time build up to reveal these massive structures, the colonies, the hills, the hives that the insects develop over time.

These processes, these natural analog processes don't have the straight-line precision that we've come to associate with our technological instruments and computer programs, but they still manage to occur with regularity and frequency. But the minor variations allow for some unpredictability. Within Westworld, this can be seen in the reveries that were programmed into the responses that were part of the host's scripts, the minor variations that had caught built on the memories of their past interactions that allowed the hosts to have a little bit more agency or the simulation of reality, the semblance of consciousness that the hosts project to the guests when built up over time.  We can see that this is what directly read to the awakening of some of the hosts, including Dolores and Maeve, and this idea that the algorithmic complexity that the hosts have is directly what leads the emergence of consciousness has ties back to the research as well.

Within Stuart Kaufman's book at Home in the Universe, he gives us the idea that evolution is an incompressible algorithm. It can't get any more dense than it is, and these theories of computation link directly into the idea of emergence. He says “commonly we can express the idea of emergence with the sentence that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. One of those provocative questions that lead us wondering, well, what more could there actually be? The other way to think about is the idea that if you're going to calculate A plus B, you need to include not just the A and the B, but also the plus and probably the spaces around it as well. This would be the sum of all those parts, and even then it's the interactions between all those parts together that are included within that algorithm that give us those emergent properties.

So it's more than just the parts. It's more than just the sum. It's everything included and more; it's how they interact. Kaufman goes on to describe how life is an emergent phenomenon, and I'm gonna read the passage in full because I think it really clearly captures what we mean by emergence. And I quote: 

“life in this view is an emergent phenomenon, arising as the molecular diversity of a prebiotic chemical system increases beyond a threshold of complexity. If true, then life is not located in the property of any single molecule in the details, but it's a collective property of systems of interacting molecules. Life in this view emerged whole and has always remained whole. Life in this view is not to be located in its parts, but in the collective emergent properties of the whole they create. Although life as an emergent phenomenon may be profound, its fundamental. Holism and emergence are not at all mysterious. A set of molecules either does or does not have the property that it is able to catalyze its own formation and reproduction from some simple food molecules. No vital force or extra substances present in the emergent self reproducing whole, but the collective system does possess a stunning property, not possessed by any of its parts. It is able to reproduce itself and to evolve. The collective system is alive. Its parts are just chemicals.”   End quote. 

So that idea that life is an emergent property and it's able to catalyze its own formation, and reproduction can be seen within the hosts in Westworld as well. It has been an ongoing theme throughout the series, beginning with the maze in season one and working through till now, season four, episode two, as Maeve and Caleb bord a train that takes 'em to a new destination, though echoing many familiar tropes, we return once more to the theme park where the stories originally began.

And with that, I think we'll wrap up and look forward to what episode three of the series will bring us. Before we go, I'd like to lay out what the framework for this podcast is going to be going forward for the next seven weeks or so during the duration of the airing of Westworld season four. We'll be posting up short weekly episodes like this one to the best of my ability.  Again, this isn't really a recap show. We're looking at the larger themes and elements of the narrative and tying them to other elements within pop culture and science fiction as well as technology. We'll be bringing in some additional information from academic literature that's relevant to the ongoing themes of the series.  Mostly we'll be drawing from elements that are already on my bookshelf, but if we have to do a deep dive, we will. And if the need arises or timer space warrants it, we may devote single episodes to those texts and possibly to touching on season one, two, and three of the show as well. 

But the podcast is not tied to the show; it was merely the spark that provided the catalytic event that got this podcast rolling. That allowed it to emerge. Once the season wraps up, we'll begin looking at several other arcs that are relevant to my research interests and the overall themes of the podcast. This will include areas that I've researched in the path, including virtual reality, memetics, science fiction, technology and its development, game studies, including both analog and digital gaming. So basically Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer40K, and video games, as well as innovation, emerging technologies, evolutionary economics, new media, and a host of other topics. I've done a few things. 

Until the next time, if you want to contact us, you can reach us at Drimplausible@implausi.blog or check the email with your podcast host. You can also find us at Dr. Implausible on Twitter and various other social media sites. Thank you for joining us and we hope to talk to you again soon.