system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Dune Novels] What is the real basis of prescience?

It seems that to me that there are two main interpretations, but I haven't found any explanation that does not simply take one or the other for granted and then progress to more 'interesting' conclusions from it. One is that the powerfully prescient are capable of absorbing data from their experience and knowledge, and extrapolating incredibly accurate conclusions from it. The other is that they are literally capable of seeing the future - that is, what they see is a direct insight into the future, and not simply an extremely accurate mental model that imitates the future.

For the former, I am reminded of a passage from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

>Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls have been altered. Waterhouse images that the disturbance might somehow propagate across the Pacific and into some super-secret Nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves. Nip listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water swirling around Waterhouse's feet carries information about Nip propeller design and the deployment of their fleets -- if only he had the wit to read it. The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.

So we can take it as a given, seeing the feats of the Atreides, that in a universe where everything is inextricably causally connected, these prescients are capable of perfectly extracting such information and drawing conclusions from it without error. But how does this explain the no-ships, the Dune tarot, and then the Siona gene? Why would these arrangements of matter make the ability to draw conclusions from prior data impossible, and (if we accept the former conceit) why do they not cause a butterfly effect that completely breaks prescience, particularly when it involves figures with great influence?

On the other hand, if the ability is an application of natural laws hitherto unknown to us which allow direct perception of the future as it is with full context, how exactly are No-ships such a hindrance to prescience? Clearly it is not the case that the mere entry of an individual into a No-ship makes them immune to prescience, since if this were true, you would build No-chambers instead and 'immunize' people against precognition, instead of going so far to create the Siona gene. Yet, if this were not the case, why would a prescient not simply look backwards and forwards in time, looking for the moment when someone enters or exits a No-ship, or more so, looking for external sources of data unprotected against prescience, which can assist in deducing the location of this void?
gpt
I've always taken it more as the former. The existence of the No-Gene and No-Rooms being deliberately engineered to disrupt predictive paths by concealing information from such precient calculations seem to support that. They don't have any magical ability to block far-sight, but rather alter or disrlrupt sources of information as to make accurate predictions impossible.

If Prescience is about accurate predictions, then more data allows you to identify patterns,  which allow you to make accurate predictions. But if you have something which limits data (such as a gene that interferes with Genentic Memory) or patterns (the Holtzman field use in No-Rooms) of atomic behaviour, then you disrupt the ability to make those predictions.