Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

edit I attampt to summerize & add a little

Wheather the ghola brain with preveious mentat training requires an extra push to be a mentat again or not is an arguement to eliminate the mistake. If it does, is there any mistake left? If not, it's still a vote for Hayt.

The other side has made it clear that original means pre-Hayt. A clearly cut NO to the Hayt camp.

Option 3, the idea that FH had something in mind that eliminates the mistake, an underlying premise I can't fathom that spans the existance of all the Duncans.(Mr.Fibble, i'm being broad here to include as many possibilities as I can. Are you ok with this definition?)

I think Duncan married Alia & commited suicide with Stilgars help. There was a time in his life when he died, & then he was Hayt for a while, but he remembered he was Duncan again. A different sort of life by any standard.
Humans make mistakes, even Frank, I doubt this is one of them. I vote Hayt for all the reasons in this thread.

Just to be fair, & if it helps swing anyone who may be on the fence, an arguement for the OD side might lie in the fact that ODs death included a head wound. Freak's probably got the quote handy but while the door to Kynes office was open, Paul noted the 'death blossom' & blood in Duncans goat hair. May or may not be what killed him but the possibility of brain damage could form the basis for a difference with just how original Hayt was.

edit; same body, repaired, reanimated, did the brain require repair also?

Here's a curious fact, you can't get Duncan from a ghola without first conditioning the ghola to kill Paul. Yeah sure, later the BG expiramented with other methods, not so during the time of the Tyrant. Does the definition of tampering include conditioning? I guess if Leto II wanted Duncans he'd allow just that one...

continued

Freak quoted Frank Herbert who wrote:Idaho was a warrior, and the warrior attacks. This reassured Leto that the ghola
was a fully restored original.

As opposed to a Zensunni mentat?

This discussion raises some quite interesting questions - not only about Duncan's capabilities, but also about ghola memories as well.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:This still can't be right, I get what you guys are trying to say, and it's not totally out of the question if there were indeed some kind of physical on-switch that needed to be flipped - but it's a stretch. Those quotes really just point to Paul starting to behave as a mentat subconsciously before his training was complete, it doesn't really allude to everything I think you think it does.

I'd say there's the question of how strong the memories are. We know from our experience that memories of the past are not all equally clear and exact, we can't watch all the memories like a film. Equally, skills can be "unlearned" to various extents, and a person may remember being able to do, and successfully doing something, but having no practice for a long time can lead to a profound loss of a learned ability or skill, although it can be later regained with some training. If the Mentat training is akin to this (and I suppose it is, since it required both conscious and subconscious learning), there's no reason to exclude the possibility of losing this skill in such conditions as ghola memory loss.

As for Duncan still having the memories of his training as a Mentat, I don't think it would be necessarily helpful. Unless he could remember every detail of every lesson and somehow reconstruct the entire learning process from this, the memories of having undergone training themselves wouldn't be of much help. And taking into account that some of the Mentat training was carried out without the student even knowing of it, I find the possibility of self-(re)training as a Mentat from memories alone very unlikely.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:Also - in later books, when Duncan regains his memories from all previous incarnations, he becomes a mentat. No need for retraining or rewiring or anything (I know that was a bit different of a remembering for him, but same concept).

Nowhere is it ever suggested that I can see that being a mentat requires more than training, and training is something that would be passed through to a ghola.

The Duncan in the last two books was trained under Teg, a Mentat himself, and generally received a very rigorous training in various fields of expertise before his mind was awakened. Perhaps his training even surpassed that of Paul.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:

SandChigger wrote:But wouldn't the Mentat mind created by the training be what was reawakened with the memories in the ghola?

Yeah, exactly.

I'm sorry you guys, you're not communicating what you're trying to say very well. He's already had the training, there's no evidence for him needing to be retrained (remember I gave the example already where later in the series he does not need to be retrained) and I'm simply not following your logic as to why exactly he'd need to be retrained.

Other than what Nekhrun said about some sort of physical change to the brain (which is never mentioed by FH and is pure speculation) there's no reason at all he would need to be retrained.n

Duncan would have his Swordmaster skill memories as well, but unless his body and muscles are retrained then he wouldn't be able to use those skills. Same for his brain and mentat methods of thinking. Since we don't know what type of process the training of a mentat requires we have to make some guesses. We do know that under normal circumstances that mentats have to be trained from a very young age. We also know that somehow the Tleilaxu have a method of getting around that and that it must be something related to genetics. Maybe Hayt's mentat training doesn't require memories at all, so he wouldn't necessarily remember anything about his mentatification.

MrFibble wrote: Unless he could remember every detail of every lesson and somehow reconstruct the entire learning process from this, the memories of having undergone training themselves wouldn't be of much help

I couldn't pass my A&P written if I had to take it now, didn't shoot darts for more than a year & came back to it worse than a novice. What we don't use, we lose, generally speaking. Examples of avarage human mental & physical abilities. The mentat school trains the mind to work like a computer, near perfect, superhuman recall & logic. I don't have a problem with a ghola regaining abilities except perhaps bringing some physical aspect up to speed that the new body wasn't prepaired for.

There have been good arguements for the idea that with the restored memories, the newly restored mentat might need a little somthing extra to 'switch on' the computer. This does seem to explain away the last aspect of the mistake, i'm just holding out for something better.

MrFlibble wrote: skills can be "unlearned" to various extents, and a person may remember being able to do, and successfully doing something, but having no practice for a long time can lead to a profound loss of a learned ability or skill, although it can be later regained with some training. If the Mentat training is akin to this (and I suppose it is, since it required both conscious and subconscious learning), there's no reason to exclude the possibility of losing this skill in such conditions as ghola memory loss.

I've never thought that awakening instantly restored a ghola to all of his skills. I don't think a Duncan is instantly restored to the performance level of an Original Duncan. I don't think the ability to be a mentat, or even a swordmaster, is necessarily part of the awakened awareness of being a mentat or swordmaster.

MrFlibble wrote: The Duncan in the last two books was trained under Teg, a Mentat himself, and generally received a very rigorous training in various fields of expertise before his mind was awakened. Perhaps his training even surpassed that of Paul.

I think FH's intention is that mentat capability has to be developed in a ghola, even if the cells originated with a mentat. I think of all the training the young Duncan ghola went through at the beginning of Heretics (even though I realize that you could say he was undergoing a BG training that was new to the Duncans), and I think that a ghola goes through all kinds of training to be able to meet the maximum potential in his awakening.

Ok, now that you guys are wording it more like that it makes sense, and is a lot more plausible. That said, it is of course still speculation and retconning for why he wouldn't still be a mentat - but pretty good retconning if I do say so.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:Ok, now that you guys are wording it more like that it makes sense, and is a lot more plausible. That said, it is of course still speculation and retconning for why he wouldn't still be a mentat - but pretty good retconning if I do say so.

Now, if we can only convince Freak.

merkin muffley wrote:I think FH's intention is that mentat capability has to be developed in a ghola, even if the cells originated with a mentat. I think of all the training the young Duncan ghola went through at the beginning of Heretics (even though I realize that you could say he was undergoing a BG training that was new to the Duncans), and I think that a ghola goes through all kinds of training to be able to meet the maximum potential in his awakening.

Yes, I suppose both the facts that Duncan was trained by Teg and later ghola Teg was trained by Duncan can support this assumption. On the other hand, though, IIRC the BG initially did not know that their Duncan was a Mentat, and he was hiding that from them for some time. Since it is never revealed what exatly did the Tleilaxu do to that Duncan (while obviously they made lots of secret modifications), so perhaps the Mentat capabilities were instilled (or activated?) in this Duncan by the Tleilaxu for their own purposes (even though it is established in Heretics that the Tleilaxu resented Mentats and did not employ any themselves).

before i type anymore i need to say i understand that duncan = hayt. yet what if you needed a different trigger to resurrect hayt and his mentat training and zensunni faith? instead of forcing ghola to almost kill ghola paul, maybe you would need to expose ghola to ghola alia and ghola priest boinking? that could explain original duncan having hayts memories, maybe theyre latent familiarities like with hayt and piloting, he's just too perturbed by everything happening to recognize his schism (especially during siaynoq) EDIT. maybe after you die and are reconstructed you become a liiiiiiiitle bit different of a person

If I recall correctly, Gholas in the DM/CoD days were made by re-animating the old flesh. Using cells to re-generate a body wasn't until GEoD. Therefore the cells of Duncan and Hayt are really the same, the matter is when they were taken. It would make sense for them to take a sample from Duncan's body pre-sending him to Paul, but they could have also just as easily recovered his body sometime after his death in CoD. His memories though seem to indicate the latter.