KWISATZ HADERACH


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Tleszer
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Tleszer »

I think I'd disagree about the Abominations all being potential KHs but would say that being a mentat would be essential. To be an Abomination would mean that the individual would gradually lose himself (and core personality) to his OM, which is what happened to Alia. This change in her was apparent to Duncan and Jessica. They knew she was no longer the Alia they once knew.

Leto II, though described as Abomination, was also a mentat which I believe is what allowed "him" to remain or remain enough, to separate the history/memory and prescient vision from his Now. That could be debated because of the transformation he decided to take. With 3500+ years alive who is to say what eventually befell him. How much was Leto vs Harum?
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Excape Felicity
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Excape Felicity »

Shouldn't another question be, 'What is a Kwisatz Haderach without a spice monopoly?'.

There could be let's say a 0.000001% of of the human population (which is surely counted in the trillions in Duniverse) at any given time possessing the full KH genotype. But how many of them will have access to BG training, socio-economic status, aristocratic resources and knowledge of statecraft?

The KH is only half the story, as is the GE. I mean, what is a small, human-headed worm going to achieve on its own?

The KH is not a set of characteristics of an individual person, it is a 'conjunction' of events and people.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

I believe the Bene Gesserit intended Paul (or the would be KH) to be emperor. This would have given him the ability to hand out the CHOAM directorship to mine the spice, etc...
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by cafihapa »

No further input fellas? That wall of text was for naught?!
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

cafihapa wrote:The debate is whether or not prescience and being a Mentat plays into status as KH. If you don't agree, please register your dissent!
I dissagree that this is debatable.

The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they
labeled "Kwisatz Haderach," a term signifying "one who can be many places at
once." In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers
permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.

They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the
prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts
carefully:

~Dune, Appendix III: Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Frybread »

Freakzilla wrote:
cafihapa wrote:The debate is whether or not prescience and being a Mentat plays into status as KH. If you don't agree, please register your dissent!
I dissagree that this is debatable.

The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they
labeled "Kwisatz Haderach," a term signifying "one who can be many places at
once." In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers
permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.

They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the
prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts
carefully:

~Dune, Appendix III: Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes
And notice that the appendix says "... with SOME of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators." This implies to me that prescience was a neccessity of the KH but not at the level of Paul's or Leto II's. So, the bottom line is the KH was supposed to be a Bene Gesserit-controlled man with the OM of both his father's and mother's sides, powerful Mentat abilities and very limited prescience.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Apjak »

It does make me wonder what FH's thoughts on how the decision to train Paul as a mentat came about. Did Jessica or another BG plant the suggestion. Was it really just Thufir and Leto's idea that a Mentat-Duke would be super-cool, or were there other forces at play?
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Naïve mind »

Paul wasn't supposed to be the KH, so I'm going to go with Thufir, Jessica and Leto deciding it between the three of them (if any of them would've objected, it probably wouldn't have happened)
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by lotek »

These quotes are all from book one.
First Law of Mentat: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.'
Something had happened to his awareness this night--he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness. It was Mentat power and more.
"Paul." Jessica said, "you're not a Mentat yet; you can't know for sure how..."
"I'll never be a Mentat," he said. "I'm something else... a freak."
As Paul fought the 'thopter's controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Mentat awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae.
(from the Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes [...] prepared by her own agents at the request of the Lady Jessica immediately after the Arrakis Affair)
[The BG] were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators.
The reason why Paul got the Mentat training was for his own survival both as a human and as the KH. I can't get hold of book 2 to get the final quotes but Im pretty sure there is an internal monologue by Paul when he realizes everything that's been done to reach the point where he becomes the KH.
The question being whether anyone saw further the evident interest in having a Mentat Duke or if it was the "Prophecy", that force that made it possible for Paul to exist. (quick summary of the concept here)
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

I'm on the fence about the BG having anything to do with Paul's mentat training. Mainly because they didn't seem concerned that he could be the KH a generation early until he was 15 and mentat training starts in infancy.

"Your mother wanted me to be the one to tell you, Son. You see, you may have
Mentat capabilities."
Paul stared at his father, unable to speak for a moment, then: "A Mentat?
Me? But I . . . "
"Hawat agrees, Son. It's true."
"But I thought Mentat training had to start during infancy and the subject
couldn't be told because it might inhibit the early . . . " He broke off, all
his past circumstances coming to focus in one flashing computation. "I see," he
said.

~Dune

However, I suppose Jessica, who seemed to sense the possibility much earlier, could have pushed for it.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by georgiedenbro »

Freakzilla wrote:I'm on the fence about the BG having anything to do with Paul's mentat training. Mainly because they didn't seem concerned that he could be the KH a generation early until he was 15 and mentat training starts in infancy.
As a matter of fact, we have reason to believe that the BG specifically decided to annihilate the Atreides line as a result of Jessica choosing to not have a daughter, Paul included. I'll keep reading through the forum's posts to see if a thread on the topic of the Grand Plan as been made, and if not I'll start it. The Plan I refer to is the conspiracy formulated prior to Dune between The Corrinos, the BG, the Guild and the Harkonnens to destroy House Atreides, to establish the Harkonnens as the fief-lords of Arrakis, to place a BG on the throne after Shaddam IV, and to ensure the continuity of spice production. I can't give proof of this right here, but a small idea of proof: All of those parties would want to avoid a 'rogue KH' from existing or rising to power. If I'm right, however, it would explain a few things: a) Why the BG didn't take Paul themselves to train from a young age (Jessica doing so was, we suppose from Mohiam's comments, in opposition to their orders); b) Why the BG didn't investigate him as a potential KH earlier than age 15; I personally think Mohiam herself only did so out of caring and concern for Jessica, rather than as a BG agent. Her stop on Caladan feels more like a goodbye to Jessica rather than her investigating a potential KH, with the test being more to sate her own curiosty; c) Why they would tolerate the Atreides line being put in jeopardy at all after 90 generations of breeding. So no, I don't think the BG had any hand in Paul's being trained as a mentat. We have every reason to believe, as a matter of fact, that they would have preferred their KH to not be a mentat, so that he could provide prediction and they could sort through the data themselves and choose a path. As a mentat the KH could sort through data himself and come to his own conclusions, which the BG presumably would have cause to fear.

Back to the thread topic: I think the most important question to ask about the KH is this - what is the difference between a KH and a mentat? We know that a mentat compiles data, and can also formulate prime projection based on sufficient data; this means to establish the likeliest line of probability. We accept that a mentat can receive data from many sources; information/comments from others, sensory experience, historical notes, equipment readouts, and OM (!).

We look at the First Law of Mentat as quoted above: "A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it." And yet as we know the procedure of establishing Prime Projection results in the opposite of joining with a flow; it arrests the flow into a single moment of computational statement. So we can see that a mentat, by its own function and definition, is a flawed being, who can compute vast data but the more efficiently he does so the less he is a part of the data itself; he is removed from the equation. As a mentat begins to feel this diminishes his effectiveness. This is part of the reason why machines cannot reason as men do - because they aren't part of a living process. The mentat process is more or less a machine process, which would certainly help to explain why Leto II banned it. I think this is also the reason the BG don't make great mentats; because distancing oneself from the present communion with one's surroundings is antithetical to BG beliefs.

I believe that the KH is called the Super Mentat in the appendix because he is the one who can both process information as well as being a part of it. The KH does not merely observe the universe and interpret it; he instead lives with the universe and understands his own connection with it. This eliminates the inherent weakness an ordinary mentat has in the attempt to distance himself from his data, and instead makes the observer of the data an integral piece of the data being observed. But what does this imply?

The KH is one whose own observations are shaped by himself as he observes them; or in plain terms, the onlooker changes the world by looking at it. This is pure quantum mechanics, as Freakzilla has pointed out, and I do agree with Freak's concept that the KH can effectively observe the standing waveform of upcoming probabilities and can effectively collapse the waveform prior to its actually occurring by continued observation. This is all but proven by how Leto II discusses his GP winking in and out of existence when he simply thinks one thought (suicide) and then another (vigilance); he can 'emphasize' one waveform or another by his thoughts. This is all just a fancy way of saying that the KH is someone who has great influence over events to come through use of his mind.

Here's the cool part: So can anyone, in theory. So what's the kicker? As some here have mentioned, the KH needs the means to change the future, not only the sight and the will to do so. I think the KH's powers can be simplified, in a sense, to be the one whose decisions have a large impact on the future. On the meta-story level we ought to know Frank meant this to be a diagnosis of what men tend to lack - the knowledge that they matter and can change the world by thinking their way there (and acting in accordance). The Guild, for instance, had a very narrow and frightened goal: To maintain their monopoly, and I suppose to pilot ships. So this, in effect, means they have limited prescience, but lacking any kind of grand vision beyond their petty concerns and so could never have the oracular power of a KH.

I'd like to mention a side-effect on my interpretation of what prescience and the KH are: The effect of shielding against prescience is now easily explained as being immune to having one's own destiny controlled by another; once we equate foreseeing someone's future with controlling it this follows. There can be a couple of ways, I think, that immunity to prescience could be effected: 1) Being as 'influential' or powerful as the person attempting to see your future. He can't control your future if you control it more, and can't see what you'll do if your own decisions and perspective may force him to change his. 2) Being sufficiently unpredictable that no orderly thinking process could discern what you'll do next. This is the trait that I believe the Atreides had in their breeding, culminating in Siona. Contrary to what Freakzilla has suggested elsewhere, I think the Siona gene is simply a gene which adds an element of chaos into the behavior of a person, making them hard to predict. We can see evidence of this in Leto I's sneak attack in Dune against the Harkonnen spice hoard; NO ONE saw this coming. We see it again at various times with Paul, whose triumph over the Fremen was equal parts skill, improvising, turning bad luck into good luck, as well as all of Jessica's contributions (she did the majority of it initially). I also think that Leto II was breeding the Duncans to become more and more unpredictable, while yet trying to retain his character as 'Duncan the moral.'

In conclusion: The KH is one whose influence is far-reaching. He is a super-mentat, meaning he can compute data but can do so in a more organic and effective way than a mentat can (which is why Paul denies being a real mentat). He also has, by presumed virtue of his BG training, access to his male and female OM. He also has prescience, which I tend to believe can be equated with knowing he has control over future events and can see his own choices projected into the future so clearly that they appear as realities to him.

On the phrase The Shortening of the Way: I think this is another of Frank's double-entendres. One meaning, I think, is the nature of shortening the apparent distance between the past and the future into a simple 'now' where all appear as one. It would mean in this sense that the path to be taken can be considered to already have been taken once it is thought of, which is just how a planning culture like the BG would think of it. The second meaning is, I think, an allusion to the breeding of the messiah being a 'technological' version of the Jewish waiting for the messiah; in effect, 'we are done waiting around for the messiah, we're going to just breed the damn thing and shorten the waiting period.'

As we know the BG's major mistake was in failing to recognize the contradiction in trying to control someone whose actual function is to control the future. It's the equivalent of suggesting we increase the power of our microscopes until we can overcome the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Paul experienced their failure when he recognized the prescient trap, in which he was trapped just as much as everyone else.

PS - I'd like to say that I LOVE Ayat's suggestion that the KH could influence his own conception. While this doesn't make sense in the physics that we know, we also currently have only a limited understanding of the implication of Einstein's 'space-time' as a continuum. Even the activity of folding space more or less does away with our notion of time, since time is linked only with the physical space in which it inhabits. If this were possible, as I think Frank might be suggesting it is, it would explain two otherwise hard to explain to explain things: 1) Paul saying that looking into male OM will result in him staring back at you, implying that he was already in male OM prior to his birth, i.e. was an identity before his was a living being, and 2) When Mohiam tells Alia to get out of her mind, and wonders how she got there. If Alia, like Paul, had a non-linear existence and was conceived before her own birth, then she, too, might already be in female OM and any RM (such as Mohiam) who saw her would recognize her from OM. This is in the 'conjecture' department, though.

Sorry for the wall of text!
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

I haven't read all of that yet, but I have no problem believing the whole thing was a BG setup to eliminate Paul and Jessica. In fact I've thought this before.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by JasonJD48 »

I think a Mentat pre-disposition is necessary for the KH, yes Paul demonstrated prescience before the Mentat training was complete, but I think it's the pre-disposition that counts, not the formal education.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by georgiedenbro »

JasonJD48 wrote:I think a Mentat pre-disposition is necessary for the KH, yes Paul demonstrated prescience before the Mentat training was complete, but I think it's the pre-disposition that counts, not the formal education.
As it happens we get to see what happens when a KH isn't a trained mentat - in Alia. Granted, she's also a female, which affects her ability to safely interact with her OM, but there is also ample evidence that she had an extremely difficult time handling all the future possibilities and even remembering the ones she'd explored without mentat data-sorting to keep it all in line.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Frybread »

georgiedenbro wrote:
JasonJD48 wrote:I think a Mentat pre-disposition is necessary for the KH, yes Paul demonstrated prescience before the Mentat training was complete, but I think it's the pre-disposition that counts, not the formal education.
As it happens we get to see what happens when a KH isn't a trained mentat - in Alia. Granted, she's also a female, which affects her ability to safely interact with her OM, but there is also ample evidence that she had an extremely difficult time handling all the future possibilities and even remembering the ones she'd explored without mentat data-sorting to keep it all in line.
I'd imagine a non-Mentat KH would be trapped in their visions even worse than Paul, since he would only be able to recall a limited number of visions and only certain details of those visions. Like has been said, being a "super-Mentat" enables a KH to recall the exact details of thousands, if not millions, of visions.

Then, the KH could compare the details from his memory of millions of visions to OM to find patterns.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by machinor »

Ok, I didn't want to open a new thread, since my question - which came up in my mind re-reading CoD - is about the Kwisatz Haderach.

So, how much of the whole Kwisatz Haderach program/project/goal is openly known to the public at the time of CoD? Because in one chapter (don't remember which and couldn't find it) the holiday "Day of the Kwisatz Haderach" is explained. That people celebrate Paul becoming the Kwisatz Haderach by going/dying into/in the desert, thus really being "every place at once".

How "out of the closet" is the BG breeding program by the time of Muad'dibs reign?
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

I don't think the general public know Paul is a BG creation. He forced his religion on them and that holiday was probably his Qizerate's invention.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by machinor »

Sure, but did the other Empire powerbases know about the breeding program? It seemed so at least with the DM conspirators.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

I don't think so. Two of the members of the conspiracy were BG so they could have let the Guild and Tleilaxu in on it.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by georgiedenbro »

I get the sense that even the idea of a breeding program was unknown to most people, even including the Guild. I could see an argument that the Tleilaxu knew about it, because there are too many parallels between what they end up developing and what the BG could do. They were tinkering with genetic memory, for one, and they even utilized an awakening procedure for gholas very reminiscent of the BG agony. I think it was probably integral to the BG program that the nobility didn't see rhyme or reason to the BG's choice of whom to couple with whom, and when choosing a BG spouse the man was likely even led to believe in most cases that the choice had been his all along rather than pre-planned based on genetic needs.
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by Freakzilla »

georgiedenbro wrote:I think it was probably integral to the BG program that the nobility didn't see rhyme or reason to the BG's choice of whom to couple with whom, and when choosing a BG spouse the man was likely even led to believe in most cases that the choice had been his all along rather than pre-planned based on genetic needs.
Very good point :handgestures-thumbupright:
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by distrans »

but given the resources great houses had many would have had to have seen into the game the BG were up to and raised suspicions well founded enough to steer their houses away from the manipulation...
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by georgiedenbro »

Err...what mythos is all of this from? It's certainly not from FH's books...
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Re: KWISATZ HADERACH

Post by The Seed »

It's not for the KH to change the future but get others to do so.
Maybe the Infinity Loop will stop, doing the same thing over and over again is crazy and leads no where.

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