Course Description
This course is an interdisciplinary adventure in Westworld. Our core material is the first season of the television series, a tapestry of science fiction, philosophy, narratology, and machine learning. Our course’s overarching question is: What is the difference between the park’s hosts (androids) and guests (humans)? Over the course of the semester we hope students will come to realize that this difference is not nearly as large, solid, or obvious as may appear. Since we are indeed comparing, the theme of the course is fungibility and to learn about this theme we will study the philosophy of analogy.