Mental fortitude of various beings - analysis

LEGO BIONICLE
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Last month we looked at the brute physical strength some of the beings are capable of. This time we shall explore the mental prowess of the artifical nanotech inhabiting Matoran Universe.

As you know, individuals with some sort of psychic abilities are plenty in number, in fact it is so ubiquitous that the Order of Mata Nui requires mandatory training to counteract this. But have you ever wondered how much mental power some of the beings possess? If you have, today you will find out and the results are astounding!

Let’s start with a simple Toa. We know their minds are much more potent than any of the lesser beings of the universe such as Matoran. In the description of stage 5 Kraata of Confusion it states:

Aura is strong enough to leave an entire village helpless with confusion.

The inhabitants in this case being Matoran of course (because these descriptions were written in the context of 2003 story). Matoran here represent the average common people.
If stage 5 Kraata can do this much on such a large scale, what can a stage 6 do?

Extended proximity can reduce even a Toa Nuva to mindless babbling.

As is the case with most Kraata descriptions, it is only the final stage that can begin to affect Toa. This means that Toa’s mental defenses are more powerfull than all of Matoran in a single Koro put together. We don’t know exactly how many Matoran this is, the only number being the vague “thousands” in Metru Nui. This description noticably lacks any ceiling, but for the purposes of this analaysis let’s make a conservative underestimation and say that thousands means each village had one thousand villagers each.
A Toa psyche would then equal 1000 villagers, which is really impressive already.

Now let us realize one important thing - a Toa and other beings of similar tier or above are capable of using Great Kanohi masks and have the mental discipline necessary to control them. The same applies to Makuta. Additionally, the level of feats an individual is able to perform with a mask depends on their mental abilities and concentration they can muster.
With Toa serving as a Great Kanohi user baseline, how much mental fortitude does a Makuta have?

We are going to use Bitil as an example becasue his Mask of Time Duplication provides us with an ideal system to analyze his mental fortitude.

Q: How many more Bitils does Bitil regularly call? Three? Nineteen? A million?
A: In story, the max we ever see him summon is I think 50 or so (I may be wrong, been a while since I wrote Book 10). There is a limit to how many he can summon, for the same reason Tahu Nuva can’t use his Hau to shield everyone in the universe. At some point, you simply don’t have the willpower for that big an effect.

Q: Is there a limit to how many copies of himself Bitil can summon?
A: Doesn’t seem to be
Q: In this case, couldn’t Bitil just make billions of his past self (with shapeshifting and 40+ powers)?
A: Consider this, though – as with any mask , your willpower dictates its effect. Even a Makuta’s willpower would not be enough to summon a million or a billion of anything – his brain would fry. Plus when you deal with those kind of numbers, they will start getting in each others way. In story, he rarely summons more than 50 or so at a time, and as soon as his concentration gets broken, they all disappear.

Not only does this support what I said earlier, but it tells us the maximum number of summons Bitil is comfortable with under normal circumstances = 50. It also let’s us know that the mask itself does not have any known limit so any change in number of summons/mental requirements can be attributed to Bitil’s psyche only.
But how do we figure out how much concentration is needed to summon extra Bitils from the past? Obviously the more he summons, the more concentration is needed, but is this increase linear or exponential or something else? Luckily, we do have an answer:

Q: does the amount of concentration required to maintain the doubles increase exponentially as more doubles are called?
A: Yes

So it is an exponential increase :ok_hand:
Having this piece of information, we can easily estimate concentration equivalent required to summon 50 past selves using the exponential function:
mental fortitude1

That is more than one quadrillion times more than a baseline for Toa level psychic ability! But Wait! Remember that we established a Toa to be equal to at least 1000 Matoran. This means the actual number is:
mental fortitude2

Meaning a mental fortitude of a Makuta is equal to above one quintillion regular individuals. Absolutely insane amount way beyond human comprehension!

But this is not where it ends, oh no. There are few beings even more powerful in terms of psychic abilities than Makuta, a prime example being the one who stood at the beginnings of the domed universe - Tren Krom:

It was amazing… it was horrifying… it was a view into a mind as far beyond mine as mine is beyond a fireflyer’s…

This is Mutran (a Makuta) describing the mind of Tren Krom…

This is where the rigid quantification stops, but we can still get a feel of the implications. We know already how much of a difference is there between a Makuta and a Matoran (a quintillion) and there is bound to be a vast difference of its own between a fireflyer (Rahi) and Matoran. Most Rahi are described to have little in terms of mind and fireflyers seem to be at the lower end of the Rahi spectrum.
To very roughly estimate the fireflyer/Matoran difference I decided to look at the real world, substituting Matoran with humans and fireflyers with fruitflies (a very common insect model). Humans have about 100 trillion synaptic connections in the brain, while fruitflies have 548 000 connections. This makes a complexity difference by a factor of mental fortitude4, which we will consider to also be a difference between Matoran and fireflyers. If we combine this with the Matoran/Makuta difference we get a comparison between fireflyer and Makuta:

mental fortitude5
mental fortitude5814Ă—96 3.12 KB

When we combine th differences between Makuta/Matoran and fireflyer/Makuta, we get the difference between Tren Krom and Matoran:

mental fortitude6
mental fortitude6833Ă—97 3.18 KB

An obscene number.

And now for the final step… the Great Spirit himself. How much mental capacity does Mata Nui have??
He is supposed to be similar to, but still greater than Tren Krom:

Q: Is Tren Krom about Great Spirit level power-wise?
A: Not at Mata Nui’s level, no. To use a kind of crude analogy, Tren Krom is a PC circa 2000, and Mata Nui is one circa 2008 – able to handle more tasks and more complexity than Tren Krom has the power to do.

This is a really nice analogy by Greg F. and we can use it to estimate a difference between them. However I will not use the power of PC (personal computer) from the indicated years as that would become too complicated, but instead I’ll opt for the strongest computers from the time.

This would be 7.226 TFLOPs for 2000 and 1.105 PFLOPs for 2008. Calculating the increase:
mental fortitude7

So Mata Nui has approximatelly 153X stronger mind than Tren Krom.
Final calculation then brings us to:
mental fortitude8

Mata Nui has mental power equal to 354 tredecillion individuals!
No wonder he can control the Matoran Universe!

So there we have it. Admitedly, some of the comparisons are not ideal, but it should be enough for a rough estimation, and everything up to Makuta is pretty robust as a lower estimate.

Small Addition: I made a little thought experiment on how many past selves would Mata Nui be able to summon with his tremendous mind. For this I divided his number by 1000 to convert it back to a Toa equivalent (instead of Matoran equivalent), which only changed the 44 exponent to 41. Turns out, due to the exponential increase of the Mohtrek’s focus, he would be able to summon 138 past versions of himself. Just imagine if somebody handed Mata Nui a Mohtrek while he was on Bara Magna - no prototype reconstruction needed, he would just summon 138 GSRs and be done with it. And Makuta? He would be toast.
That is why I always say Mohtrek is the most powerful mask in existence if you know how to use it.

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That puts an interesting perspective on this line from Legends 8: Downfall:

That Toa had tried to be brave, but there was fear in his heart and he met his end with fear and regret. The Ignika sensed none of this in Matoro — only a will and determination that rivaled even that of Mata Nui himself.

While “willpower” and “mental power” are not necessarily synonymous, they’re certainly used as such a lot in the Bionicle story.

Another thing worth noting is the fact that Teridax was able to control the Matoran Universe himself, though it took him months to figure out how to make it do what he wanted and it is unknown whether or not he was ever able to utilize the true extent of all the intricacies of the robot.

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That certainly is interesting and I feel like the story is contradicting itself a few times as to what is the extent of Makuta’s competence with the robot body. On one hand, many characters surmise (apparently correctly) that Makuta is not really designed to run such a complex machine. And yet, Mata Nui explains how it was always Makuta’s destiny to eventually take control of the MU, but in that case what exactly was the plan here by the GBs? If they meant Makuta to run it, why not design him with the necessary capability? How would he have achieved it were he not impatient about getting the power? We know that his inexpirience with the robot did contribute to his defeat and Makuta was still learning about his systems and how to use them at the time of his demise.

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I think they designed him with the capability to learn how to use this power. However, his haste in taking control meant that events never reached the point whereby he would have been equal to Mata Nui in mental strength. Had events gone as planned, Teridax and the other Makuta would have been proxies for the GBs, overseeing the GSR’s plan to study alien cultures and use that knowledge to return and repair Spherus Magna. Instead of being merely overseers, though, the Makuta rapidly seized control of their world, and thus broke the plan.

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That certainly could be. I find the timing interesting though… Mata Nui was already on his way back when the virus struck, in fact right before the “finish line” (Aqua Magna’s orbit). This would imply whatever destiny lay before Makuta Teridax, he would have needed to be already prepared and ready for it at the time, perhaps just lacking some instructions on what to do.

This way Mata Nui’s task was essentially delayed by 1000 years of sleep, and yet Makuta was still not “ready” when he usurped the universe. What I am trying to say is this does not seem to be a matter of “more time was needed for Teridax to mature into his role”. Unless there are some things he was supposed to be doing during the 80 000 years of planning his takeover that he neglected because of his schemes. Things which would have somehow prepared him better than he was in the story.
OR
Teridax was not really in need to have such a perfect control over the robot when the only thing required of him was to work with Mata Nui and reunite SM. His control over MU wouldn’t be needed after that point.
Whatever the process was, it went smoothly in that one alternate reality that Vezon visited.

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I can come up with two possible explanations.

The first is that Teridax wasn’t using the robot as intended. When he took over, the difficult part was adjusting to being able to “see” and control everything in the universe at once. It also probably didn’t help that he was facing active resistance from the “nano-technology” meant to keep him alive.

The Great Beings, though, would have only intended for Teridax to operate the robot for a brief time to utilize its gravitational powers. This would require much less mental strain, since Teridax would have never needed to be able to see and control everything; the nano-technology should have been taking care of the day-to-day stuff, while Teridax just aimed and activated the gravity beams.

Essentially, Teridax tried to access parts of the robot’s functionality that he was never meant to be able to use.

[EDIT: Now that I’ve read the posts following the one I replied to, I can see this theory is more-or-less the same as what you suggested above]

My second theory is much more headcanon-y.

I’ve talked about this here before, but the short version of my theory is that when the Makuta chose to betray Mata Nui, part of their process was to physically remove the parts of their Antidermis that knew their true purpose (hence why Brutaka gained this knowledge when he fell into the Antidermis pool). If this is the case, then Teridax’s ability to control the Great Spirit Robot could plausibly have been affected.

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Yeah, I pretty much answered my own question there.

I actually like this idea a lot, makes a lot of sense in the context of what possessed Brutaka says:
“I… we are the essence of the Makuta species. We know what they were meant to know, but have forgotten. We see the error. The flaws. So much to repair; but it cannot be done.”
"Spherus Magna, the Shattering. “The three that must be one; the two that must make them one.”

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