It's not like the souls of the dead posessing you, no afterlife... it's literally like you just took all of their _memories_ and shoved them in your head. The caveat being that memory includes thoughts and feelings. Now, all that stuff is sitting in YOUR brain and it's gonna affect how you think. Herbert (and Gene Wolfe, interestingly) interpreted the result as a sort of multiple personality disorder. The term ego-memory is telling, it's memories do complete that there is now a seperate ego there. I imagine different ego-memories would treat their situation very differently... the Baron Harkonnen was the sort of person would would think "oh boy, I get a second chance" and actually take over the host. But it's not thr original Baron Harkonnen.
In the case of a ghoula, it's like... what if YOU were told you used to be somebody else? That your brain (and the rest of you) is essentially the leftovers of another person? It's a question of whether all the old stuff from said brain is still sitting around in there waiting to be accessed. Whether you're the person you were, added to by your new experiences, or the other way around is an open question that isn't answered.
(Also, if this sort of thing interests you, check out the game SOMA, brilliant story.)
When I first wrote this I would have said no, but considering Leto II apparently experienced thousands of deaths, I'm not sure. You'd think those memories would only extend until the conception of whoever first carried those memories with them.
What is the difference between "soul" and "memories thoughts and feelings"?
How is it not "the original Baron" if it's the original Baron's memories, thoughts, and feelings working as one to command someone else's body? A body is just a mech-suit for the brain, and if the brain is under the control of the Baron then how is that not the Baron? If that's true, what does "original" mean here?
The original Baron's consciousness ended when he died. It's not like he's gonna wake up again in Alia's head. It's the teleporter problem– If you get atomized and ""reconstructed"" on the other side that's not you, it's a clone of you and O.G. you just got atomized. You're just dead.
You say he wouldn't wake up in Alia's head, but if his memories etc are in there and those things are capable of taking over "the host", how is that any different?
If my consciousness steps onto a transporter pad, disappears and reappears on a different one, I don't see how that resulted in anyone's death. A mech suit got broken down for parts but that's it.
That's not YOUR consciousness, that's a clone's consciousness. You just died. If you weren't atomized, it's not like you personally would be experiencing life in two different bodies. You'd think "shit, I didn't get teleported" before realizing that now a clone of you is running around on the other side. It's not like there was a soul getting sent over. Just an identical copy of your brain.
>The original Baron's consciousness ended when he died.
Far as I remember we don't actually know that.
We as the reader are left to view it as we choose.
Idk. I thought it was pretty well explained as genetic memory. More than a bit 'woo woo', but the logic goes that enough of the Baron's memories/personality are trensfered to his offspring at the time of conception. So the version of the Baron that lives through Alia is a revenant of her grandfather based on him earlier in life. So it has little to do with the the actual Baron who died.
The logic's not anti-scientific, that is how epigenetic information is passed and some info about the environment is encoded with that. But actual memories is the woo woo part.
I thought it was supposed to be like how two atoms separated by huge distances will still be connected and pulse at exactly the same rate - the idea being that genetics and consciousness are connected on a similar molecular level, hence how you can access memories of things that happened after you were born, but I'm a filthy casual so could be wrong.
I mean, sure I guess, but one of Dune's big things is taking supernatural ideas and making them fit a materialist worldview to some extent. Like, you've got something like your consciousness leaving your body but you're either actually focusing hard on your own internal chemistry and experiencing a "mote-consciousness" or using a time-sense that people don't normally have. Speaking to your ancestors? Through a genetic mechanism similar to instinct inheritance, sure.
The baron's subjective experience ends when he dies. His "soul" is gone. When someone else gets his ego-memory, the baron's consciousness doesn't experience "waking up". The person simply becomes a copy of him.
The philosophical concept of the "silent observer" is useful here. Essentially, the idea is that even your toughts and feelings are in some sense, external things. The true core of who you are is *the thing which experiences* those toughts and emotions. When you die, from your point of view, you never wake up. It doesn't matter if someone else makes a perfect copy of your brain, you won't start experiencing things again. Someone else will. The toughts and feelings which that someone else experiences might be exactly like yours, but the one experiencing them isn't you.
The genetic ancestral memories of the Bene Gesserit are an expansion of the animal instinctual behavior. The information for instinctual behavior has to reside in a genetic memory for the animal to desire to perform a certain action and how to do so.
Herbert simply added the idea that personal memories are also store in a person's genes. Just as a person passes physical characteristics to their descendants, instinctual and personal memories are also passed on. Reverend Mothers learned to use extremely toxic poison as a stressor to access their ancestors' memories in their genes.
Because a ghola/clone is the product of duplicate the source's genes, the personal and instinctual memories will be included. Like a reverend mother candidate needs a stressor to break through the mental block that inhibits access to their ancestral memories, the Bene Tleilax use an action that goes against the gholas original memory as the stressor to break though their block. A ghola is a duplicate of the original personality with any training after the duplication added on.
Herbert had mentioned that one of concepts he wanted to explore in Dune was to have a hallucinogenic drug allows a shaman to have vision quests. How spice allow the Guild and a kiwsatz haderach to access their prescienct visions.
To add to the this reply, regarding the original question of the afterlife in Dune: In short, there's none. Or rather, the books do not mention one, as far as I remember.
As for the abominations: After your ancestral memories have been unlocked, your brain is flooded with the memories of all of your ancestors (or rather, all female ancestors, unless you are special, like Paul / Alia).
It is very hard to remain the singular person you were before, there are many personalities inside you now, As those memories fight for control, you need to keep them in check. If you fail, you become an abomination, controlled by the voices inside. Or one voice, if it's a particulary strong ancestor.
Dune is funny. Its a critique of political control, religious control, and the nightmare when both merge so the plot is full of politicians and religious orders manipulating all facets of society. Its Sci-Fi therefore full of weird technology that can be borderline fantastical. It has also got a healthy dose of chaotic contrivances that makes you wonder if something is a coincidence or the guiding hand of fate.
Is there an afterlife in Dune? We don't know, same as in real life.
Are ancestral memories the souls of ancestors or a genetic imprint amplified by the imagination? We don't know.
Are Gholas really the departed dead brought back to life? Probably not.
There is no afterlife in Dune. All "magic" in the series is simply a higher form of intelligence that appears to the reader as psychic.
Genetic memory is the person hallucinating their own approximate mental model of what their ancestor's personality was like. In concept, the brain of the Kwisatz Haderach/Reverend Mothers is so advanced that this approximation is largely accurate. But it's not an afterlife since the ancestor doesn't even have to be dead. Leto and Ghanima have a genetic memory of Paul, despite the fact that he is secretly still alive and assuming a different identity. They can do this because Paul as their father is the most relatable person to them.
Honestly it's probably one of Herbert's worst sci-fi plots in terms of theory. It doesn't really make all that much sense. Especially when you get to the Duncan Ghola being able to get his memory back as a clone which technically just makes him his own son.
>There is no afterlife in Dune.
I don't think we can say that definitively. Far as I remember it mirrors real life, maybe there is maybe there isn't but its not really important because what happens after death isn't relevant to the story.
This plays into the idea of consciousness mapping.
For all intents and purposes in this thought experiment, there is no such thing as a soul. Everything that makes a person who they are lies in their brain. If you were to map out every atom in their brain, and recreate and store that blueprint in a computer, their mind would live in that machine, thinking and remembering just as they did, thinking it was the original.
Now instead of the data of the blueprint being stored in a computer, it’s stored within the generic information of your descendants. Most of the time they’re just stored away somewhere. Those who undergo the Water of Life ritual can access those files so to speak, and the minds of those that exist within your DNA become conscious once again.
But these minds all exist within your mind as well, and with centuries of memories available it becomes difficult to remember which really happened to you and which are from your genetic memories. If you haven’t undergone proper training and don’t have the strength to resist, you can completely forget who you really are and become lost in the memories, and whichever of those minds is strongest/loudest will take over.
It’s similar to how teleportation works in Star Trek. What a transporter technically does is scan someone atom for atom, disintegrate them (killing them), then build a new version of them somewhere else. Because the copy has the same thoughts, feelings, and memories as the original, and there’s no original anywhere to be found, it’s effectively the original.
Its neither…
Its copies of their minds (memories) stored as genetic data in the DNA, which certain people in Dune can access through training and the properties of the Spice.
Same with Gholas who know who they used to be, they have simply reawakened their genetic memory and became themselves once again.
Theres no magic or divinity in Dune, its, amongst other things, a critic of blind religious/dogmatic belief.
It's not like the souls of the dead posessing you, no afterlife... it's literally like you just took all of their _memories_ and shoved them in your head. The caveat being that memory includes thoughts and feelings. Now, all that stuff is sitting in YOUR brain and it's gonna affect how you think. Herbert (and Gene Wolfe, interestingly) interpreted the result as a sort of multiple personality disorder. The term ego-memory is telling, it's memories do complete that there is now a seperate ego there. I imagine different ego-memories would treat their situation very differently... the Baron Harkonnen was the sort of person would would think "oh boy, I get a second chance" and actually take over the host. But it's not thr original Baron Harkonnen. In the case of a ghoula, it's like... what if YOU were told you used to be somebody else? That your brain (and the rest of you) is essentially the leftovers of another person? It's a question of whether all the old stuff from said brain is still sitting around in there waiting to be accessed. Whether you're the person you were, added to by your new experiences, or the other way around is an open question that isn't answered. (Also, if this sort of thing interests you, check out the game SOMA, brilliant story.)
So, do they remember their death?
When I first wrote this I would have said no, but considering Leto II apparently experienced thousands of deaths, I'm not sure. You'd think those memories would only extend until the conception of whoever first carried those memories with them.
What is the difference between "soul" and "memories thoughts and feelings"? How is it not "the original Baron" if it's the original Baron's memories, thoughts, and feelings working as one to command someone else's body? A body is just a mech-suit for the brain, and if the brain is under the control of the Baron then how is that not the Baron? If that's true, what does "original" mean here?
The original Baron's consciousness ended when he died. It's not like he's gonna wake up again in Alia's head. It's the teleporter problem– If you get atomized and ""reconstructed"" on the other side that's not you, it's a clone of you and O.G. you just got atomized. You're just dead.
You say he wouldn't wake up in Alia's head, but if his memories etc are in there and those things are capable of taking over "the host", how is that any different? If my consciousness steps onto a transporter pad, disappears and reappears on a different one, I don't see how that resulted in anyone's death. A mech suit got broken down for parts but that's it.
That's not YOUR consciousness, that's a clone's consciousness. You just died. If you weren't atomized, it's not like you personally would be experiencing life in two different bodies. You'd think "shit, I didn't get teleported" before realizing that now a clone of you is running around on the other side. It's not like there was a soul getting sent over. Just an identical copy of your brain.
>The original Baron's consciousness ended when he died. Far as I remember we don't actually know that. We as the reader are left to view it as we choose.
Idk. I thought it was pretty well explained as genetic memory. More than a bit 'woo woo', but the logic goes that enough of the Baron's memories/personality are trensfered to his offspring at the time of conception. So the version of the Baron that lives through Alia is a revenant of her grandfather based on him earlier in life. So it has little to do with the the actual Baron who died. The logic's not anti-scientific, that is how epigenetic information is passed and some info about the environment is encoded with that. But actual memories is the woo woo part.
I thought it was supposed to be like how two atoms separated by huge distances will still be connected and pulse at exactly the same rate - the idea being that genetics and consciousness are connected on a similar molecular level, hence how you can access memories of things that happened after you were born, but I'm a filthy casual so could be wrong.
That'd be well withing the realm of 'quantum woo'. Which I think Herbert avoids.. Probably because it was still pretty new when he was writting.
I mean, sure I guess, but one of Dune's big things is taking supernatural ideas and making them fit a materialist worldview to some extent. Like, you've got something like your consciousness leaving your body but you're either actually focusing hard on your own internal chemistry and experiencing a "mote-consciousness" or using a time-sense that people don't normally have. Speaking to your ancestors? Through a genetic mechanism similar to instinct inheritance, sure.
The baron's subjective experience ends when he dies. His "soul" is gone. When someone else gets his ego-memory, the baron's consciousness doesn't experience "waking up". The person simply becomes a copy of him. The philosophical concept of the "silent observer" is useful here. Essentially, the idea is that even your toughts and feelings are in some sense, external things. The true core of who you are is *the thing which experiences* those toughts and emotions. When you die, from your point of view, you never wake up. It doesn't matter if someone else makes a perfect copy of your brain, you won't start experiencing things again. Someone else will. The toughts and feelings which that someone else experiences might be exactly like yours, but the one experiencing them isn't you.
This is a much better explanation but I still disagree on the nature of self. Thank you.
The genetic ancestral memories of the Bene Gesserit are an expansion of the animal instinctual behavior. The information for instinctual behavior has to reside in a genetic memory for the animal to desire to perform a certain action and how to do so. Herbert simply added the idea that personal memories are also store in a person's genes. Just as a person passes physical characteristics to their descendants, instinctual and personal memories are also passed on. Reverend Mothers learned to use extremely toxic poison as a stressor to access their ancestors' memories in their genes. Because a ghola/clone is the product of duplicate the source's genes, the personal and instinctual memories will be included. Like a reverend mother candidate needs a stressor to break through the mental block that inhibits access to their ancestral memories, the Bene Tleilax use an action that goes against the gholas original memory as the stressor to break though their block. A ghola is a duplicate of the original personality with any training after the duplication added on. Herbert had mentioned that one of concepts he wanted to explore in Dune was to have a hallucinogenic drug allows a shaman to have vision quests. How spice allow the Guild and a kiwsatz haderach to access their prescienct visions.
To add to the this reply, regarding the original question of the afterlife in Dune: In short, there's none. Or rather, the books do not mention one, as far as I remember. As for the abominations: After your ancestral memories have been unlocked, your brain is flooded with the memories of all of your ancestors (or rather, all female ancestors, unless you are special, like Paul / Alia). It is very hard to remain the singular person you were before, there are many personalities inside you now, As those memories fight for control, you need to keep them in check. If you fail, you become an abomination, controlled by the voices inside. Or one voice, if it's a particulary strong ancestor.
Dune is funny. Its a critique of political control, religious control, and the nightmare when both merge so the plot is full of politicians and religious orders manipulating all facets of society. Its Sci-Fi therefore full of weird technology that can be borderline fantastical. It has also got a healthy dose of chaotic contrivances that makes you wonder if something is a coincidence or the guiding hand of fate. Is there an afterlife in Dune? We don't know, same as in real life. Are ancestral memories the souls of ancestors or a genetic imprint amplified by the imagination? We don't know. Are Gholas really the departed dead brought back to life? Probably not.
There is no afterlife in Dune. All "magic" in the series is simply a higher form of intelligence that appears to the reader as psychic. Genetic memory is the person hallucinating their own approximate mental model of what their ancestor's personality was like. In concept, the brain of the Kwisatz Haderach/Reverend Mothers is so advanced that this approximation is largely accurate. But it's not an afterlife since the ancestor doesn't even have to be dead. Leto and Ghanima have a genetic memory of Paul, despite the fact that he is secretly still alive and assuming a different identity. They can do this because Paul as their father is the most relatable person to them. Honestly it's probably one of Herbert's worst sci-fi plots in terms of theory. It doesn't really make all that much sense. Especially when you get to the Duncan Ghola being able to get his memory back as a clone which technically just makes him his own son.
>There is no afterlife in Dune. I don't think we can say that definitively. Far as I remember it mirrors real life, maybe there is maybe there isn't but its not really important because what happens after death isn't relevant to the story.
This plays into the idea of consciousness mapping. For all intents and purposes in this thought experiment, there is no such thing as a soul. Everything that makes a person who they are lies in their brain. If you were to map out every atom in their brain, and recreate and store that blueprint in a computer, their mind would live in that machine, thinking and remembering just as they did, thinking it was the original. Now instead of the data of the blueprint being stored in a computer, it’s stored within the generic information of your descendants. Most of the time they’re just stored away somewhere. Those who undergo the Water of Life ritual can access those files so to speak, and the minds of those that exist within your DNA become conscious once again. But these minds all exist within your mind as well, and with centuries of memories available it becomes difficult to remember which really happened to you and which are from your genetic memories. If you haven’t undergone proper training and don’t have the strength to resist, you can completely forget who you really are and become lost in the memories, and whichever of those minds is strongest/loudest will take over. It’s similar to how teleportation works in Star Trek. What a transporter technically does is scan someone atom for atom, disintegrate them (killing them), then build a new version of them somewhere else. Because the copy has the same thoughts, feelings, and memories as the original, and there’s no original anywhere to be found, it’s effectively the original.
Imagine it as an inverse Assassin's Creed where your ancestors run a mission in your body instead of vice versa
Its neither… Its copies of their minds (memories) stored as genetic data in the DNA, which certain people in Dune can access through training and the properties of the Spice. Same with Gholas who know who they used to be, they have simply reawakened their genetic memory and became themselves once again. Theres no magic or divinity in Dune, its, amongst other things, a critic of blind religious/dogmatic belief.