Our own consciousness is the divine spark, as at least according to Ford. He points out that the cloud upon which Michelangelo’s God sits is in the shape of the human brain. The title of the episode is “The Bicameral Man,” but the thought of God being in your head is resoundingly rejected by Robert Ford. He thinks it’s some hidden riddle left by Arnold for gamers, but he’s no different than the kid on the playground playing Pokémon and thinking that he’ll find Mew if he looks under a truck at the exact right moment.
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any scene without William and Logan, or Dolores and Jeffrey Wright as Arnold).įor the record, this makes Old William’s desperation to find Wyatt even more pathetic.
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The fact that Ford is aware and welcome to the idea of Dolores searching for consciousness also explains why he would allow her to run around the park by herself lost in “memories” of the past during the contemporary events that spanned the last seven episodes (i.e. It is likewise the reason she chases it now in the present. This “loop” is why she chased the maze again with William 30 years ago (and about four years after Arnold’s death). The flaw in Arnold’s plan for Dolores is that he still had to program her to seek out the maze. However, it is really a test that supposedly proved Dolores was cognizant. Technically, the “maze” that Old Man William sought is a toy from Arnold’s son that has been buried in the ground. Hence, he needed Dolores to find her own self-awareness by thinking and solving a puzzle she was not programmed to solve. This meant that Arnold’s coded commands for the hosts would be heard like the voice of God inside their data… but this only drove the hosts to madness. Before the maze, Arnold had attempted in vain to use the Bicameral Mind theory to jumpstart consciousness, as explicitly stated by Ford. Arnold designed it as an elaborate test-far beyond the simile and morality tests replicants faced in Blade Runner-for Dolores to prove her consciousness. The physical “game within a game” that Ed Harris’ Man in Black desperately sought really was not meant for him, nor was it truly physical. The Maze is a Test of Dolores’ Artificial Intelligence And this gives Ford the time to enact a plan that has apparently taken decades to complete. However, Ford is able to weather the loss of his partner and even comes to agree with him about the potential of the hosts by the time that William both proves that Dolores has “memories” of Arnold… and William in turn saves the park.
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Secondly, this means he has created beings that have the ability to outlive us and surpass us if they can truly be sentient.įor these reasons, Arnold attempts to destroy the park and even kills himself by having Dolores shoot him and all the other hosts. The first is that if they are alive, then a park where guests can torture, abuse, and victimize these robots endlessly is a form of slavery at best, and a Sisyphean Hell at worst. Unfortunately, that came with two dreadful realizations. This is a terrifying realization… but not to Ford.Īfter Arnold thinks he has proven Dolores is truly conscious (which we’ll explain how below), he had achieved his goal of making his hosts into living beings.
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Dolores was Arnold’s Adam, but she also very well had the capacity to grow into his Lucifer, a creation that would strike down its Heavenly Father. Not so subtly, it seems Arnold passed to Dolores a taste for the classics, and Michelangelo’s fresco of God imparting the spark of life to Adam in particular.