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!