From Bots to Beings: Posthuman Immortality in HBO’s Westworld
From Bots to Beings: Posthuman Immortality in HBO’s Westworld

Summary/Abstract: The narrative dynamics of HBO’s Westworld pivots around the question of biological embodiment and the hard problems of consciousness. Death does not only mean the end of body but also consciousness itself. But the link between brain/mind and its generative aspects for consciousness is breached in strictly representing consciousness via codes or algorithms—programmable and replicable, that may not always emanate from the dynamics of the brain/mind itself. Consciousness can be replicated into codes to create more human-like Hosts. This leads to the possibility of copy-pasting human consciousness in human-like robots to create a temporal continuity of human species defying death and mortality. Here, Westworld exercises transhumanist thinking about human existence and mortality by challenging our evolutionary programming and directives. It also includes robot ethics and theory of consciousness as main issues.The paper investigates transhumanist imaginings regarding post-death experiences and its impacts upon theories of transcendence and immortality via Westworld. The very fact of re-presenting post-death experiences is bound to be a subjective perspective, thereby challenging objective methods of critically analysing such supposed ‘phenomenology’ or quantifying the same. The paper shall attempt to problematize the teleological stance of human embodiment in Westworld in favour of imagining a transcendental-embodied self by applying a transhumanist way of thinking.

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