Currently rereading the series, so I thought I'd point out something. Thanks for the reading suggestions in the text :).
At the beginning of Dune, we are told that the Great Schools come into existence after the Butlerian Jihad to replace the functions served by machines. While these are claimed to be 'human' functions they bear remarkable similarity to the functions of machines, and we can roughly categorize these as follows:
Navigators: Mathematics, pure abstraction.
Mentats: Computation, simulation and rejection of inconsistent alternatives.... (read more)
Currently rereading the series, so I thought I'd point out something. Thanks for the reading suggestions in the text :).
At the beginning of Dune, we are told that the Great Schools come into existence after the Butlerian Jihad to replace the functions served by machines. While these are claimed to be 'human' functions they bear remarkable similarity to the functions of machines, and we can roughly categorize these as follows:
Navigators: Mathematics, pure abstraction.
Mentats: Computation, simulation and rejection of inconsistent alternatives.... (read more)