Is DELOS Really Working on Immortality?
[Spoilers for the TV show Westworld and the video game Soma!]
So, we are now at the end of season 2 and have got a lot of questions answered like “What is the Valley Beyond?” or “What was Delos secretly working on?”. We now know that they were trying to put human minds into host bodies in order to make them immortal starting with James Delos himself. And I do not want to discuss whether that’s really what they want to do, even though there have been other assumptions circulating in advance like they were secretly wanting to replace people with hosts.
What I want to discuss is whether they are on the right track. The question is: Even if Delos managed to get it right and the minds were excepting their artificial bodies, would they really be the same person? Because they were not actually extracting the minds out of the human bodies like they seem to have done with the host reaching the Valley Beyond, but were merely copying or rather perfectly imitating them. Yes, those supposed host-human hybrids would think they were the same person, and yes, they would have the same mental attitudes, desires and believes as well, but the original mind would still die with the body.
It would be more like the end of Soma when Simon manages to get on the ARK and at the same time remains down at the bottom of the sea feeling deceived. The same problem applies. Is it really the Simon who woke up in the future reaching the ARK? Or is it a brand new person who simply is just like that Simon? Was it really James Delos being woken up time and again in a host body? Or is it a new person just like James Delos?
The answer to those question is not inconsequential, because the anger of the left behind Simon is not unjustified. Why would James Delos care if a host who’s just like him lived on eternally if he himself cannot experience it? The whole point of immortality was to live on yourself, wasn’t it?
The ship of Theseus or “Be careful what you wish for!”
And the problem extends even further. What will happen to a person being beamed? Will he really be the same person after being dematerialised at one location and then put back together somewhere else possibly even out of totally different atoms? In that case there won’t be somebody left behind, yet the continuity of the person will be interrupted.
And now we are at the core questions of what a person in its essence really is. Is it a certain set of characteristics, desires and believes? Then the person being beamed could actually be the same afterwards if no aspect of his mind had changed in the process. But that would mean that nobody who ever changed in his life would be the same person he was when he was born. And don’t we all change over time?
Of course we say figuratively speaking somebody had become a different person. “He’s done mistakes in the past, but he’s a different person now.” But we do not really mean that there’s a whole new person in the same old body. We simply want to say, that the person now has some new characteristics, desires and believes than before. He developed. So it seems that persons are progresses and one person can be the exact opposite at the end of his life from what he was at the beginning and still be same as long as the change was a continuous process. But in that case being beamed would mean to die and be reborn as a whole new yet equal person. A creepy imagination.
I have no definitive answer myself. But at least I have the strong impression that Delos is failing at the core of their immortality project. What do you think?
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
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