Westworld. "We wanted to make a show about consciousness; the kind of boastful ambition that works when you're pitching--and then falls apart when you find yourself trying to figure it out. There were few guides. Philosophers who'd lost their tenure. Computer scientists who'd lost their stock options. Guesses. Expletives. Crackpot theories. Hands wrung or simply thrown in the air. Even now , humans know more about what lies at the bottom of a supermassive black hole than the dark center of our minds.

But there are clues: language, semiotics; the distance between the notions rattling around in our minds and the ways in which we share them, and the ways in which humans share ideas between each other.

There's a language older than language, though. One that predates the written word or even the spoken one. Music. Its effects on people are fascinating--raw, direct, like an older interface that bypasses the newer, clunkier inputs. What music may lack in nuance versus spoken language, it more than gains in emotive power, as if transmitting emotion directly into the brain. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the right chord progression might reach nine figures.

So for our series about consciousness, we knew the music would be vital--and that we had the man for the job. Fittingly, Ramin's journey as a composer had been launched, in part, by Elmer Bernstein's achingly brilliant theme for The Magnificent Seven. Here he got to take a detour into the future in order to find his way back to the West.

He wanted to use guitars. We wanted piano (because the player piano had been the original western robot) and he gamely went along. I remember the themes as they came alive, anointing each character, imbuing them with even more depth and power. The craft and performances that came together for the series were all hard won--Ramin's music hooked everything to an undertoe of menace, melancholy and beauty.

As for Ramin's arrangements of contemporary music, they served two purposes; first, as a gentle reminder that our story was being told in the future tense , not the past. And second, as manipulation. If music is evocative, then music you've heard before takes on another dimension, dipping into circuits of lived experience and harnessing their power. A song you've listened to after a triumph or a breakup--even one rendered in a different timbre or arrangement--still has a grip on you. One that Ramin could pluck at, like the strings on his guitar. We spent four seasons exploring these questions and the closest we came to understanding consciousness--at least the variety that afflicts humans--is that any attempt to explain it without incorporating emotion is pointless.

The show is long since over. But I find myself whistling Ramin's timeless theme. Often. And I smile. That's the power of this music: that the indelible experiences of making Westworld, all of the incredible people who were part of it, all the days spent chasing the sun and capturing it on film, can all be conjured, instantly, in 8 perfectly chosen notes.

Westworld never died. It simply became music."

--Johnathan Nolan, Executive Producer

The part you loved in the the incredible shrinking man.

“This was the prize I had won. (he’s talking about the cheese) I approached it in an ecstasy of elation. I had conquered. I lived. But even as I touched the dry, flaking crumbs of nourishment it was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger. No longer the terrible fear of shrinking. Again I had the sensation of instinct. Of each movement, each thought tuned to some great directing force.”

“I was continuing to shrink, to become… What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man’s conception, not Nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero.”

“I still exist.”

THE END

Carpe Noctem

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. -Jorge Louis Borges No man ever steps in the same river twice - Heraclitus A fish winding down the river. How can he have any knowledge of the ocean that awaits him?

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

W. Heisenberg

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness -- shut down one by one. An astonishing story.