Hemn Spaces

Hemn Spaces (also called configuration spaces) are abstract theoretical spaces attributed to Saunt Hemn, developed in the early Praxic Age. They are not physical spaces that one can move through with a ruler; instead, they are coordinate spaces defined by action principles. Their purpose is to represent the state of a system in a way that makes its behavior and structure easier to understand than when using raw positional and velocity components.

Description and Origin

According to an in‑world explanation, Saunt Hemn introduced these spaces as a general alternative to working directly with Saunt Lesper’s x–y–z coordinates. In Hemn’s approach, the “space” is defined by quantities chosen to reveal structure (as constrained by an action principle), trading brute calculation for clarity about what the system is doing.

Use and Examples

Cosmographers commonly use a six‑dimensional space whose coordinates are the six orbital elements of a satellite; this is a special‑purpose instance serving that discipline. Hemn Spaces generalize the idea beyond cosmography, providing a broader framework for choosing coordinates that expose stability or qualitative features of motion better than raw axes.

Reasoning and plausibility

In a dialog among avout led by Fraa Orolo, a Hemn space was invoked to clarify why minds tend to worry only about some possible futures. The argument runs that the world’s evolution traces a path through Hemn space constrained by an action principle—intuitively, a "coherent story" linking one moment to the next. Outcomes that require jumping to distant, unconstrained points in Hemn space are dismissed as implausible, while scenarios reachable by a plausible, constraint‑respecting path are the ones taken seriously. This line of thought was connected by participants to the tradition associated with Evenedric, concerning how consciousness filters possibilities.

First Appearance and Context

The concept is introduced in a calca where a senior avout explains it to a novice while contrasting it with Saunt Lesper’s Coordinates and with the orbital‑elements approach used by cosmographers. The emphasis is on how a well‑chosen configuration space can make features like “is this an orbit, and of what kind?” immediately legible, instead of being buried in lists of x, y, z positions and velocities.