MovieChat Forums > Westworld (2016) Discussion > So after watching S3E5 ... is Caleb a ho...

So after watching S3E5 ... is Caleb a host or no?


I hadn't thought of him as a host prior to this episode. But now that we know large parts of his memory were erased I'm starting to lean more into this theory. We know Sereck takes everyone who could potentially cause a divergence and re-codes them including his brother (whom I'm assuming could not be re-coded). Caleb mentioned in a prior episode being shot in the head. It's quite possible the implant in his mouth used by the military to control or moderate his behavior and emotions might also contain nanotechnology to similarly affect repair to his brain. His memory gaps could be from brain injury or he might have had his memories intentionally manipulated. I'd say it's most likely both.

Dolores gave him a look at his file. But with the disclosure of files to people around the world we know Caleb's reaction was unusual. We know from Liam's reaction to a review of Caleb's file that Caleb's memory of some past events are inaccurate or incomplete. It seems reasonable to assume Dolores has all of the missing pieces and is using them to manipulate Caleb.

I initially thought Caleb was being set up as the guy who would convince Dolores she was wrong about humans. But now I suspect he's going to be the guy who exposes how Dolores, armed with enough information, is indistinguishable from "Rehoboam". I think we have to assume Dolores knew about all of Serac's experimentation, including the disclosure of how people were being manipulated that led to a global societal collapse, when she decided to distribute everybody’s files.

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Who cares? But since the drug he was given affected him, I tend to think not, but what the heck ... this series doesn't make any sense anyway ... like I said, who cares?

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apparently you do, since you bothered to type out a reply

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Look at your own data, if this is the most intelligent thing you can say maybe you should end it all.

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lol

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“Dolores, armed with enough information, is indistinguishable from "Rehoboam"

Which is indistinguishable from Devos’ manipulation of hosts. i.e. what’s the difference between manipulating robots and manipulating humans? All their lives are controlled. Is Delores destroying mankind as Bernard thinks? Or freeing it?

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She wanted to bring down mankind's world - maybe that doesn't mean bringing down mankind itself

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Good catch.

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"All their lives are controlled."

Not entirely. Remember what we learned from Delos in Season 2 is that it's the humans that actually have no free will and are basically just a short algorithm. It's the hosts that actually have free will.

But as Serac clarified there are unreliable human outliers like his brother who presumably still have free will. These undesirables were sent off to fight wars or rehab centers where attempts were made to re-code them since they couldn't be controlled. We also learned from Serac this past episode that there are "little white spaces when randomness interacts with your life, that creates a truly free space where you can make a choice. A bubble of agency."

"Is Delores destroying mankind as Bernard thinks? Or freeing it?"

Without doubt, this is the existential question. I think it's paradoxically both. By allowing humans to control their own agency it necessitates granting them the free will to destroy themselves should they so choose. It's their inability to do so (Serac's master plan to "save" humanity) that is precluding free will and restricting human agency to enslavement to Serac's vision.

At this point my working assumption is that Caleb is a casualty of one of Serac's human experimentations; the consequence of data Serac bought from Delos collected at Westworld that studied humans and tried to replicate them as hosts. He was one of the unpredictable and therefore uncontrollable undesirables sent off to war where he got shot in the head. His mind was copied into a host like Arnold got copied into Bernard. That would explain why his mom doesn't recognize him and why he was in the outlier rehab Serac was running.

Although if he is a host, as I think all the signs point to, that would also mean he has free will.

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Well thought out!

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>It's the hosts that actually have free will.

Free will is an unqualified concept. How do you measure it? How do you prove or disprove it?

Due to the basic materialistic mechanisms of computation, thinking is limited in many ways. You can say in most cases a smart person has more free will than a dumb on, a human more free will than an animal ... but not always.

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The master control system at the Forge had one fundamental flaw in its research: the subjects were all rich sociopathic personalities who enjoyed the sort of recreation the park offered. These are broken people driven by compulsive patterns of behavior. Dolores seems to have discovered that not all humans are in that category. She understands the have/have-not divide in society and seems to empathize with those who have been kept down by the system just like she was.

I tend to think her current objective is both to free these humans and to ensure the survival and propagation of her race. With her on top running things most likely. She seems to have developed a taste for money and power herself. Whether free will actually exists or is a comforting illusion has been a major theme of this show from the very first episode. Don't expect it to provide a neat answer to that question - since we don't have one in real life.

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"How do you measure it? How do you prove or disprove it?"

Good questions that would require a dissertation to answer, so I'm going to try and keep it confined to what I think this show seems to be implying "free will" to mean. The show appears to be emphasizing the shortness and predictability of the human algorithm to imply the notable lack of free will. For humans “free will” is the illusion when deciding between a very limited finite set of predetermined paths that could be written into 10K lines of code. When William tried to prove he had free will during his fidelity test last season he failed.

In Westworld “free will” appears to mean “non-deterministic”, or unable to be predicted by a machine. But Serac implied there's a way for humans to break out of their coded loops when random events intersect with their lives. There’s a window of time when one can exert a “bubble of agency”. Serac used his “free will” in that moment to slay Dempsey that Rehobaum could not predict.

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no, hes in the system way before meeting Delores

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Why do you think being a host would need be contingent on being in the system after meeting Delores?

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Whos not a host

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I think host means robot,,,I think

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Did an edit and somehow made a duplicate post. I might be an Outlier!

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Obviously not a Host. He was not disabled by the Electromagnetic pulse, unlike Dolores and Maeve.

Why the hell are refugees from Politics on the Westworld discussion?

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Still waiting for final episode to post to catch up with this revelation.

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