Streaksy wrote:That early reply about the difference of "likeness" and "coutnerfeit" I think is a bit backwards.
Like you (and I) said "counterfeit" implies fraud and disguise, and "likeness" implies just similarity. Both words are in the same ballpark and in many cases are interchangable but when contrasted like this... To emphasise counterfeiting (fraud, immitation, falsification) instead of likeness (vague similarity, poetic way of just saying they can think) is pretty suggestive. "Likeness" is the vague verb, not "counterfeit". "Likeness" is the obvious comparison of humans to machines (which in Herbert's time was a newer concept). And as I mentioned, the Bene Ttleilax do the facedance thang and replace (counterfeit!) key politicians, and Frank surely had a good understanding of military intelligence and vunerabilities and strong points of communication procedures, so that kind of thing was already in his creative mind.
The difference between "counterfeit" and "likeness" in terms of the human mind is simple: A machine can 'seem' intelligent because it can perform calculations and tasks, but cannot have real intelligence in the way humans do because machines do not live as humans do. We are not, in short, simply calculation machines. Human intelligence isn't about computing power, it's about understanding wants and needs, and realizing how the use of will in seeking those interacts with the wills of other people seeking their wants and needs. Your wants and needs then change as a result, and so do theirs, etc to infinity. The whole issue with the KH is that he can see his own wants and needs changing the future possibilities, and when he sees those possibilities it changes his decision-making, which then changes the future again, and so on. A computer can't do this, because it has no wants, and its needs don't change over time. A machine also has no will; just a program that may be recursive but that doesn't change. The human being, himself, changes every time he interacts with his environment.
Let's look at the quote in question, though:
Dune wrote:"Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible," she [Mohiam] said.
"But what the O.C. Bible should've said is: 'Thou shalt not make a machine to
counterfeit a human mind.' Have you studied the Mentat in your service?"
Mohiam is employing a double-meaning here. The first and literal meaning is that while a machine can 'pass for' an intelligence, it does not actually resemble a human mind in function or
'likeness' (i.e. design). While thinking machines might be accepted as intelligent in some sense, it would only be counterfeit intelligence, a sort of mock-up or fake version of real intelligence. Mohiam is making a dig against the types of thinking and computations machines were capable of. This leads to Mohiam's second point, which is that men themselves can employ a form of counterfeit intelligence, aka machine-logic, such as was used by machines. This, of course, means mentats, which is why Mohiam goes on to ask Paul whether he's studied Thufir. She even calls him "The Mentat in your service", rather than calling him by his name (which she surely knew) in order to make him sound like a thing or an object, like a computer device. One more dig against machine-logic.
Overall it is clear that Mohiam is denigrating both machines and machine-type thinking, and is not impressed by the humans who make it their business to try to emulate machine-processes. The point of the term "counterfeit" is that machine-logic is INFERIOR to human thinking; that machine-logic bears no 'likeness' to human thinking at all, and to suggest that forbidding making a machine in the 'likeness' of man gives the potential of machines too much credit. The point of the scriptures of the jihad was to prevent men from giving over their thinking to automated systems; in this sense it's a question of decadence and laziness, and giving up on our most important tool: our brains. Nowhere does Frank ever write that machines could achieve any kind of human-type thinking process, and so Mohiam correctly suggests that the dictum from the jihad is a bit misstated.
