The professor’s laboratory was centered by a walk-in freezer, where he stored his collection of cube-shaped pseudobrains. Each was formed from a mixture of carbon and silicon nerves, equally sized, and wrinkled with pearlescent grooves. The chamber’s subzero temperatures prevented them from storing thoughts and memories, allowing each experiment to begin tabula rasa.
Once these cubes were restored to room temperature, however, their batteries began to whir. They buzzed liked insects as he picked them up with gloved hands, one by one. He liked to imagine that this sensation was a sign of their approval- that they could sense when it was time to think again.
The rules of the dialectic were simple: cubes placed parallel to one another horizontally would always agree with one another, while those stacked vertically would never cease to argue. Once formed into layers and towers, a single thought would be fed into one of the pseudobrains on the lowermost level, which would then begin to communicate this thought to all adjacent cubes simultaneously. Because they were cubes, up to four other brains would readily support any thought communicated outward, while never more than two would be present to oppose it. This made it particularly difficult for thoughts to flow upward through the structure, as each layer spent most of its time reacting to the one beneath it.
That’s not to say that cubes on alternating layers necessarily agreed with each other; cubes on the third layer tended to view the thoughts of those on the first as overly simplistic, as did those on the fourth regarding the thoughts of those on the second, and so on and so forth. However, due to the nature of stacking blocks, higher layers in the structure only ever contained as many or fewer cubes than those in the layers beneath them. As such, despite higher-level thoughts being the most sophisticated, they were also the least supported, and tended to remain isolated from all of those present below. Half-jokingly, the professor liked to refer to the topmost layer of each pseudobrain structure as its “ivory tower.”
That night, he built a simple step pyramid, with eighty-one cubes on the bottom layer, making for one-hundred sixty-five total. He then fed a single sentence to the closest corner: “There is a God.” Then, he sat back in his chair, and listened to the pseudobrains’ electric hum. As they debated, each and every argument that they produced printed onto his computer’s screen. Together, these cubes digitally reproduced the complete history of theology, regurgitating arguments spanning the full spectrum from Celsus to Russell. After forty-two minutes of heated discourse, the topmost cube at last issued its first argument: a concise, compelling proof for the presence of the divine which had never before been written.
The professor stopped the experiment, and the brains droned to a halt. Then he read the top cube’s argument again, and sighed. “I could write a book on all the reasons this is wrong,” he muttered to himself.
Strange things happen when brains are forced to work together.
Some brains have no means of communicating their thoughts at all.
Impossible problems are the norm at the University Beneath Chicago.