The Limits of Logic

[GamePlayer]

You mean porn...

No, I mean pron. It's how you say the word on message boards using word filters and has since become an in-joke of sorts. It's like how I always spell "gawd." Same thing.

[Rakis]

You mean porn...

No, I mean pron. It's how you say the word on message boards using word filters and has since become an in-joke of sorts. It's like how I always spell "gawd." Same thing.

Hmmm...you just made me realized i never posted on a site with one of those word filters...

Gawd i'm one lucky pron-loving sob...

[Freakzilla]

Actually, it's pr0n... with a zero, not the letter O.

[DuneFishUK]

Dumbnovels didn't let me use the word 'cock'. That always annoyed me.

Meant I always had to spell it co[b][/b]ck (The tags disappeared)

[cmsahe]

ditto my dear self appointed moderator of Dunenovels and Jacurutu.

Your act has bored me, go to dunenovels to complain about me: "the posts of cmsahe are foolish", "this guy hates me". et cetera; I won't be pay attention to you bullying anymore.

Carlos Santillan

I'm not bullying you. You just get defensive about every little thing. Go cry in a corner if what I type, from across the world, about physics, upsets you.

[GamePlayer]

Hmmm...you just made me realized i never posted on a site with one of those word filters...

Gawd i'm one lucky pron-loving sob...

Consider yourself lucky

Actually, it's pr0n... with a zero, not the letter O.

Actually, in most cases an upper case O was enough to fool the filters

Dumbnovels didn't let me use the word 'cock'. That always annoyed me.

Meant I always had to spell it cock (The tags disappeared)

I don't like using the "c" words

[SandChigger]

Dumbnovels didn't let me use the word 'cock'. That always annoyed me.

My pet peeve over there was cum.

As in cum grano salis.

[Drunken Idaho]

What annoyed me was how we couldn't say "Kevin J. Anderson writes by moaning into a tape recorder while ramming Brian's tight ear-canal."

[Freakzilla]

What annoyed me was how we couldn't say "Kevin J. Anderson writes by moaning into a tape recorder while ramming Brian's tight ear-canal."

Is that so Brian can hear him cumming?

[Rakis]

What annoyed me was how we couldn't say "Kevin J. Anderson writes by moaning into a tape recorder while ramming Brian's tight ear-canal."

Is that so Brian can hear him cumming?

[A Thing of Eternity]

So no one can explain to me the problesm with tmy physics agrument against the theory of multi universes explaining particlae/wave duality?

Sorry about the speeling, bit ddrunk (rare, but it happends)

[Omphalos]

Dumbnovels didn't let me use the word 'cock'. That always annoyed me.

My pet peeve over there was cum.

As in cum grano salis.

That's Latin for "jizz," right?

[SandChigger]

Yes! The whole phrase means "I jizz in gallons!"

[Rakis]

Yes! The whole phrase means "I jizz in gallons!"

Is that quantity or direction ? (fuck i'm tired...)

[SandChigger]

You mean like, into a gallon container? Sure, why not.

Whichever one you prefer.

[SadisticCynic]

Reminds me of a joke I once heard:

A farmer gets a new set of automatic milking equipment for his cows. Looking at the nozzle he gets some ideas. He puts it on his penis and has a great orgasm. Then he tries to remove it but it won't come off no matter how hard he tries. He checks the manual and it says Auto-release after 1 litre.

[SandChigger]

Ba-DOOM-pah!

[Rakis]

Ouch...

[georgiedenbro]

Mentat thinking is on the other end of the spectrum from mechanical thinking.

Mentats were valued for their ability to get accurate conclusions from incomplete data, they are trained to get as much from what is missing as the data they have. The work with patterns. This was a big theme too.

Could a computer ever be taught to recognize a pattern it has never seen before?

I think a big difference between computer AI and a human brain is that a computer is restricted to data in ---> data out, and the data is what's fed to it (like a mentat). Once the AI processes the data it will come to a result and will then be idle as its work is done. The AI's data will be fixed quantities, and once an operation is complete it will need new data for a new computation once the old one is considered obsolete. Its computations will always be about external data sources fed to it, but never about itself, since computers don't 'want' anything and don't involve themselves in their own thinking process.

Now, a person can think "How can milk be obtained?" and also "I want milk!", and those two queries can become correlated as the desire for milk leads to wanting to know how to get it. A computer can also assess how milk is gotten, and even can be fed the premise that it is to collect some. But here's what a computer cannot think: "Wait - does my knowledge of how to get milk lead to my desire for it, or was the desire that which led me to explore how to get it? And now that I know this, does it change either my desire or my decision of the best way to get it? And now that I know THIS, does it change...etc etc." The human brain can constantly modify thinking patterns based on recursive and repeating interaction with the information and desires it possesses. It's a never-ending modifying system, never able to just 'know the answer' and have done with it. Knowing something changes the person doing the knowing, and so the information gained itself becomes changed as the person does, which then changes the relationship between observer and observed on a constant basis. This is the big difference between a mentat and the KH, as the KH includes himself and his knowledge among the data in the universe to study and this relationship leads to a constantly changing perspective and truth-as-relationship. The 'infinite regress' of search for the truth and forecasting future actions and decisions is the speciality of the KH, and is impossible for a mentat, who is reliant on fixed data for projection and who is obliged to eliminate himself from the data being observed. The best mentat is the one most able to bypass his own humanity and to focus on the facts fed to him, and the KH really does the opposite of this.

Frank was concerned, I think, with the fact that 'knowing' and thinking about how to live are a process, not a solution to be found, and that changing how we think is just as important as deciding what to think about. I think mentats are presented as being the human equivalent of thinking machines, as we can see here:

"A mentat!" Mohiam muttered.
Scytale glanced at the old Reverend Mother, seeing the ancient hates which
colored her responses. From the days of the Butlerian Jihad when "thinking
machines" had been wiped from most of the universe, computers had inspired
distrust. Old emotions colored the human computer as well.

I would say this sounds more than just a prejudice, but more like a suspicion that mentats utilize the kind of thinking that machines used, even though the users are human; and the jihad was against machine-logic (ref: Dune Appendix II), not machines. I can certainly see someone astute like Mohiam being wary of humans adopting machine-logic, and indeed, Leto II banned mentat training outright.

In the context of human development, while the KH was a 'super-being' of a sort, his important attribute was the understanding of the ever-changing future and the frail relationship between the thinker and the objects of thought, and therefore between the activity of the present and its relationship to the vision of the future. In real life any of us could work on getting more attuned to this relationship, and in trying to avoid machine-logic - the attempt to make simple answers and finite solutions, as if reality were a logic puzzle to be solved.

In the books the KH's power is eventually nullified by the 'Siona gene', but that doesn't mean the KH's lesson is lost; in the end power over others (which properly ought to be nullified as time goes on) isn't the point, but rather coming to realize what real understanding is: it's not an answer, it's a question!