World of Wires.
It was quite a disturbing play so I left a little early because some scenes triggered. Yet it is worthy to write down what I thought since the play's idea is closely related to what I studied in philosophy.
World of Wires is a theatrical attempt to disguise the boundary between reality and a simulated reality. Under this situation, there are several questions the director posed to the audience: 1. what is reality? 2. do we have free will? 3. what are human individuals? 4. what do others mean to us? All these questions orient upon the classical epistemological question - are our perceptions true? - with a twist of the recent AI trend - do AIs have consciousness?
In the play, there are two layers of reality. The first layer is the stage. The red hallway symbolizes the boundary between reality and simulation, where the right-hand side is the reality and the left-hand side is the simulation (for all the events that take place on the right are more chaotic and less logical while the events on the left are more coherent). The second layer is the audience. Audiences are also integrated into the play through the interactions with actors. This is the director's attempt to suggest, the stage perhaps is the stage of society, the world we live in.
The anarchical events that take place in the play go in a loop. The characters are convinced that they are in the reality at first, then they start questioning the validity, and convinced again, then questioned again. This loop of events also introduces a new model of time into the play. Time is rather circular than linear. Similar events happen in the beginning and at the end of the play, sometimes with a change of characters and other times with locations. This circular idea of time is confirmed by the idea of Zeno's Paradox mentioned in the play, which describes the dilemma that in a running race, the pursuer can never reach the escaper because of the escaper moves ahead at the same time when the pursuers moves. Although the distance between them can be shortened, according to the infinite divisibility of time, the pursuer would never be able to reduce the distance to be zero. The idea of chasing ahead and never reaching, suggests that events occur before one's recognition, yet history nonetheless repeats - the same events take place - that the pursuer reaches where the escaper originally is and he starts chasing again.
To advance this queer concept of time further, we can adopt Heidegger's model of ecstatic temporality. In this model, time is no longer continuous but a culmination of the past, present, and future. It is the coincidence of three moments that give meaning to the current moment one is experiencing. Events can be interpreted as coincidences that are both determined and random - they are determined by the constitution of the three moments; they are random because of how the three moments clash.
The obscurity of determination and randomness, presented by the ambiguity of simulation and reality through the contradictory plots of the play (the wrong temporal order of events and the illogical content of events) lead us to the second question: do we have free will? Once the characters start to realize the world they live in might be a simulation, a fear kicks in - do I not have control over my own fate? Are my actions already determined by the simulation and I am just an object of realizing it? This existential question leads to a despair resulting from the annihilation of meaning, because their meanings are already pre-determined. The characters in the play seem to be able to choose to act in a certain way, yet their choices are always pre-conditioned by their preset personality and the external events. This combination necessary cause the characters to choose what they choose, and consequently determination takes over randomness. As Schopenhauer explains, humans are born with innate personalities, and external events are magnetic forces that merely guide us to realize our actions.
The question of the existence of complete free will leads to the question of human condition - what are human individuals? What characterize us as human beings? What separate us from robots? In the play there is no clear answer.