I had forgotten the Dune Encyclopedia had that same type of origin of the Bulterian Jihad that the Hacks used. They just betray themselves in every way in that interview.
And speaking of interviews. From the grave, Frank smack's down the hacks.
Found some audio ones with Frank, I think I may have posted here a few years ago where Frank talks about computers, thinking machines and the Butlerian Jihad.
Source:
https://bobbogle.wordpress.com/2014/07/ ... ure-tapes/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Part 17 about 6 minutes in - I transcribed these as best as I could.
(Appears to take place early 80s around the release of GEoD and prior to Heretics)
(Concept of the Butlerian Jihad) "arises out of the mythology of computers, that they can think, that they can become pseudo-human, there are limits on that of course"
"My view of it is at root they are machines and one of the pitfalls of machines is they tend to condition the people who use them to treat their fellow humans as other machines. "
"You carry that on too far and that becomes so abrasive, the treatment of your fellow humans as machines, that the whole society will turn against what they see as the instrumentality supporting this attitude. They will focus on a particular thing, the computer. "
"Of course they are hanging an innocent man (laughs) because no computer can think, it will never think like a human"
"I'll say this flatly, I'll go way out on a limb, computers deal with discrete bits, no matter rapidly they deal with them, they are discrete bits like exposures of movie film, each frame"
"In human beings, if we deal with discrete bits, if that is the basis of our operation, our behavior, that they are so fine, so rapid, so multi-linked, that I despair of our every separating a bit out. The best description of what we do is we operate in a continuum where there is no starting and stopping. It's a flow, it's unbroken, it's a continuum. "
"When you try to copy that, make an image of that in a system that is confined to discrete bits, you are reduced to a system that will never really reach the continuum level however they can do some things automatically, very rapidly which is the advantage of computers ... they do things automatically, without thinking. "
"We have 2 modes of mental operation at least, many more really, but I'll just address myself with 2. One is the so-called instinctual level we do things automatically.... we respond to behavioral input. And the other is a kind of pattern recognition which gives us language, art, great inventions... these are patterns, they are imposed patterns. "
(Were there certain things to incite the Butlerian Jihad) "Excesses, I thought of great war machines being made that automatically kill people, machines that would simulate great masses of people .... and predict their behavior. I thought of all of these uses of machines to maneuver people or to replace them. So the living organism rebelled and you could begin at a very small level but if there were a lot of resentment all through society it could steamroll ... look at what happened in Iran. "
"I didn't have a planet of origin in mind" (out of the 50 - 60 named planets in the first 3 Dune books) "it (the Jihad) would spread very rapidly (throughout the galaxy) yes"
"This isn't really an anti-intellectualism, the specific is stated, Thou shall make no machine in the image of the human mind "
(Any thought as to how long the Jihad lasted) "I hadn't even thought about it ... long enough to accomplish it's purpose. I'm dealing in such magnitudes of time that I can put it way back there where now they only have a memory of it but its a very important memory because it still carries the weight of law. " (An approximately modern analogy we in the West might have the racial memory of the Black Death ) "Oh yes, exactly"
(Was there a formal end to the Jihad where they came down with some sort of Constitution?) "Yeah it was incorporated into what has now become The Great Convention and of course it was also incorporated into religious prohibitions. Also for the Jihad to be successful over this length of time, there had to be some substitute for that which had come to depend upon the computer ... and therefore we have the Mentat. Otherwise you would have had people getting computers and doing it all over again (laughs)"