On Vulcan
[ed. - The private correspondence reproduced below was sent on October 12th, 2023, between two of the world's leading scientists, and especially pertains to the upcoming Solar Eclipse. The text is being published here now, as part of an on-going experiment in consciousness-raising-activities involving Hexbear posters. The scientific views expressed below are erudite, novel, and will be highly controversial once public, and thus, both parties are represented anonymously. The book referred to repeatedly below is the subject of a previous discussion unpublished - *The Minds of Robots*, by Dr. James T. Culbertson.]
Good morning [HEXBEAR], I hope this letter finds you well and in good spirits...
I have been thinking more about new kinds of numbers lately, and more about solar eclipses. Among other things, in the modern fashion: I have spent a lot of time in a lot of old books, and a small fortune collecting them, and have wanted to share some things with company that may appreciate ideas for their own sake, even when one's reach has exceeded one's grasp, as it so often does.
There is an eclipse coming: I do keep track of these things well in advance, and I had hoped to have something put together, but sadly, the necessary research materials only showed up yesterday, and I’m only drafting anything in writing today.
Firstly: I believe you have made an error in equivocation of the work of Dr. Culbertson to others, and a philosophical error in general that should be corrected. One theory is not as good as another, in any case.
In defence of your remark, yes, it would seem as though currently theories in the field of consciousness cannot be tested, and the working scientist is thus in the habit of regarding any theory in the field as an occultism, and elides over the details of each theory as a matter of mental economy.
However, my in my letters, you are always dealing with the exception, and not the rule. Care must be taken: Culbertson’s theory has the unique status of being the only theory of mind so far postulated that could be mechanically and empirically verified through the construction of mind links. Hence the theory has a distinction, and must be set apart from the rest of the field and considered more deeply. That I do not personally plan to or advise constructing the links and animating the robots is beyond the point.
The book is quite lovely, and I should like to send you my copy in the mail, if you’d wish. It is the math that contains a distinction, perhaps unknown to even the author himself.
The rest of the letter could shock you and anyone unaccustomed to the terrain. I do promise to refrain from terrifying everyone with occultism, as much as is possible for me to do.
In order to get to his mathematically-in-theory-conscious-robots, which is a profoundly Platonic assumption of the hypothesis, Culbertson creates a mathematically intuitive, but also consistent and rigorous, “spacetime-reductive materialism”, wherein he assumes with d’Alembert, Einstein, Minkowski, and the modern understanding, that time be considered as the fourth dimension. So far so good.
But Culbertson needs to connect robotic neurons, and needs to create causal transmission networks that constitute his world-lines between these neurons in spacetime; his interest is in connective relations, his world-lines pass through nervous systems, and so he uses topology, which allows him to greatly simplify and quite rightly disregard the complex non-Euclidean chronogeometry assigned to spacetime by relativity mechanics: for these purposes, the topology or connective relations of the world-lines do not depend on geometrical considerations, and can be flattened unto the plane, as thought to paper, or as territory to map, in what Culbertson calls psychospace.
This is so genius that it was beyond everyone. Probably even Culbertson himself.
Spacetime thus simplified, our lovely book is a joy for the reader, and Culbertson, in the manner of a math teacher, is able to include practice problems that summarize each chapter for the aid of the comprehension of the reader, all of which are fully accessible to the non-mathematician and non-specialist, and developed further in his other works.
In order to understand the genius here, one has to be aware of the reductive assumptions of Minkowski et al., carried forward by Einstein, Eddington, and virtually all quantum physicists. In brief, the fourth dimension is spatial, and not temporal, and indeed, certain findings substantiate this conclusion of a physical fourth dimension, and an eighth, and a twenty-fourth.
As a personal aside, if one could see the fourth spatial dimension directly, one would be impressed by the frequency of seeing the Maltese Cross, or the eight-pointed star of the Sumerian Solar Deity Anu within the many tesseracts that occupy the four dimensional reality enveloping our third: this leading thought ought be saved for later development. The same symbol shows up in Peruvian pottery, as well… if you by chance have any old Maltese coins dating to the Phoenician era, or similarly rare books… well I don’t ask for much.
Before Einstein mistook the luminous for the absolute, astronomers empirically spotted something flying far too close to the Sun: infra-Mercurial planet Vulcan, physically visible only during the solar eclipse. Mathematicians, not only Leverrier also obtained rigorous, convincing proofs for the planet, and these to date have not fallen.
If one goes back to the work of Cassini, which has only in modern times been rediscovered and confirmed, one may obtain,against the elliptical orbits of Kepler - a fortiori Newton and Einstein - a quartic law of motion, instead of the quadratic approximation which is now in common use. And if one with Musès, evaluates again the zeros of the zeroth order Bessel function, it is indeed possible to rediscover Vulcan with as high confidence as the same function determined the orbits of all the other planets, including Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto.
Vulcan then appears for the reader in the mental planes, with an orbital period of about 43 days, at 0.1 AU, mass unknown.
That the elusive body has not been captured is not surprising, as few humans have seen Mercury, and even fewer have claimed to have spotted Vulcan, and as long as the current approximation holds its spell over the mind, none bother to look… but if we are willing to look beyond self-conceit, and engage with the solar system with higher mathematics, and against the common intellectual prejudice, we may be amply rewarded, as have been the oft-maligned practitioners of the royal art.
That is enough for this morning. There are further conversations I would like to have concerning the minds of robots, Israel, the ancient and modern animation of statues, and so on, but this is enough stimulation for all parties for now, and I promised to be restrained. Perhaps a phone call soon, or perhaps telepathy, at some point in the future.
With love,
[the editors]
