**Links to**: [[Inclination]], [[10 Bias, or Falling into Place]]: taking stratification to its logical consequence. See also gravitational metaphors referred to by [[Mark Johnson]]. [[Grave]]. Continue this note with recent work by Lachlan Kent. ### [[Postulate]]: Gravity is more prominent than left/right orientation(s). See also: [[Disorientation]]. >“The artwork must be able to stand up.” Deleuze and Guattari _[[What is philosophy]]_, p. ? >“Since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the centre toward X.” F. Nietzsche 1885, quoted in the preface of _[[Nihil Unbound]]_, R. Brassier. **Abstract:** Linguistic coordination is spatiotemporally, materially determined. All matter in the majority of linguistically-coordinated endeavors is affected by gravity. Concepts reflect this fact by way of the spatiotemporal metaphors they emerge from. Therefore, our thesis is that all concepts do is propose ever different (speculative) relationships to gravity. If, at the very least, _conservation of momentum_ is what matter does, then it is gravity which makes meaning happen, on earth, by allowing things to fall into place ([[10 Bias, or Falling into Place]]). Because of this, ultimately, different relationships to gravity (e.g. in outer space) will give way to drastically novel types of linguistic coordination. Especially so if spatial reasoning is granted new perspectives by a body’s ability to float and move in a new dimensional axis. We know what the body can do, under gravitational constraints. %% ### Gravity for Schelling >“Gravitational force is for Newton only attraction, but Schelling argues, on the contrary, that it is not enough to deploy attraction without repulsion; this is merely “a scientific fiction” that reduces “the phenomenon as such to laws without thereby intending to explain it.” Nevertheless, the two forces, negative and positive, are also not enough, for Schelling goes on to introduce a _third_ force: gravity (_Schwerkraft_). Gravity is the force that contains and unifies the two oppositional forces, and brings the ideal into the real: >>>>If Kant’s expansive and attractive forces (he names “attractive” what we have called “retarding” up to this point) represent nothing other than the original opposition, then he cannot complete the construction of matter from two forces alone. He still requires the _third_ force which fixes the opposition, and which, according to us, is to be sought in the universal striving toward indifference, or in gravity. >Gravity is the unifying force, yet it is not simply one of many synthesizing forces but the appearance of absolute identity, the indifference between the real and the ideal.68 As a result, we need to bear in mind that this _Indifferenz_ (absence of difference) is not the cancelation of all forces, nor is it the void.” Hui, _Recursivity and Contingency_, p. 55. Excerpt From Recursivity and Contingency (Media Philosophy) Yuk Hui This material may be protected by copyright. ” Excerpt From Recursivity and Contingency (Media Philosophy) Yuk Hui This material may be protected by copyright. Use: [[George Russell]] [[Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization]], Volume one: the Art and Science of Tonal Gravity AND DON'T FORGET [[Music and Gravity]] — look again at video on gravity in Lydian playlist youtube Dennett: selves are narrative centers of gravity: abstract and not necessarily definable in terms of causes (What is a self? I will try to answer this question by developing an analogy with something much simpler, something which is nowhere near as puzzling as a self, but has some properties in common with selves. What I have in mind is the center of gravity of an object p. 1 Dennett 2023). ____ “High” and “low” are common qualifiers. _______ ### Gravitropism Lachlan Kent: mental gravity, up-states and down-states. Depression is universal, yet we do not know how to tackle it, what to do about it. Mental gravity seeks to explain four different states: “up/high/ecstatic”/balanced/stable/calm”/falling/unbalanced/anxious”/down/falling/depressed. Gravitropism: structures/functions that maintain gravitational stability, it is a homeostatic function just like phototropism, temperature regulation, etc. Cognitive gravitropism: maintaining gravitational homeostatic balance which takes the template of physical gravitropism. Thoughts, behaviors, etc. have thus a drive to maintain a certain verticality, which is reflected in all the metaphors we use. The meaning (and universality) of these spatiotemporal indicators reveals itself time and time again, everywhere in language (grounding, high, low, depression, etc.). The vestibular system regulates graviception, which also affects higher-order selfhood/cognition. The feeling of being in oneself, is literally grounded by gravity. A learning child’s first truly felt constraint in motion is the fight against gravity. Falling, eternally, is part of the first encounter with the world. Being upright means seeing others, engaging, learning to talk. Lying down means sleeping or being helpless. Positive adaptive physical values learned from gravitational encounters early on necessarily translate to mental states revealing accumulated tropes: verticality and balance are better than unwanted horizontality/destabilization. (this paragraph and the previous has been added to falling into place) The self on its axis: they take Dennet’s metaphor further, they take the DMN as the center of gravity of a self/body. The places of the DMN at the top of the hierarchy (Friston + Carthart-Harris). Anterior insulat Cortex, explains Kent, must hold simulated gravitational. Embryos begin life floating (Anna tunicker’s work with wilkinson): deviations from this homeostasis must necessarily feel adverse. The DMN as a “global minimum” Of the connectome In depression thre is a shift away from the central executive network and towards the DMN, the self becomes unbalanced and introverted, the connection to the world lacks strength in connection, the future fades away, the past is the strong focus. ______________ ### Introduction Linguistic coordination is materially determined. Therefore, our thesis is that all concepts do is propose ever different (speculative) relationships to gravity. [[Grace and Gravity]]: force and gravity, i disagree with "force", force is gravity, too ### Matter All matter in the majority of linguistically-coordinated endeavors is affected by gravity. If [[Conservation of momentum]] is what matter does, without gravity exerting its force material trajectories, then it is gravity which makes meaning happen, on earth, by allowing things to fall into place ([[10 Bias, or Falling into Place]]). ### Matter and meaning Concepts reflect this fact by way of the spatiotemporal metaphors they emerge from. ### Why does it _matter_? Because of this, ultimately, different relationships to gravity (e.g. in outer space) will give way to drastically novel types of linguistic coordination. Especially so if spatial reasoning is granted new perspectives by a body's ability to float and move in a new dimensional axis. _______ In Dennett's paper "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity" (1986), he makes an analogy between the (sense of) self and (that of) gravity. Specifically, between the narrative logic of a self and center of gravity of an object. A center of gravity has no precise delineation nor is it ascribable any measurable physical property, other than the fact that it is (imprecisely; 'generally') spatiotemporally located. Like the self, it is a convenient fabulation that makes certain phenomena traceable: the self moves in expected ways with respect to its attractors, an object moves in expected ways with respect to gravity. What is interesting for our argument is that the _ultimate_ attractor the self moves with respect towards, is gravity as well. The self's narrative gravity is determined by gravity itself. Dennett argues that manipulating an object's center of gravity is straightfoward, as in the case of a water pitcher: just remove some of the water inside it. Similarly, we would argue: in order to manipulate a self's narrative (its simulation, more on this later), all one needs to do is increase or decrease the inclines that lead to its attractors. Dennett asks the question, to beg the analogy he makes, "Now how does a self differ from a center of gravity?" (p. 4). Our answer would be: it doesn'.t His answer is that both ____________ _________________ _______ [[Phaedrus]] by [[Plato]] and "One of the dialogue's central passages is the famous Chariot Allegory, which presents the human soul as composed of a charioteer, a good horse tending upward to the divine, and a bad horse tending downward to material embodiment." [[Desire]], [[Inclination]], [[Drive]] ________ "I came to my truth by diverse paths and in diverse ways: it was not upon a single ladder that I climbed to the height where my eyes survey my distances. And I have asked the way only unwillingly -- that has always offerended my taste! I have rather questioned and attempted the ways themselves. All my progress has been an attempting and a questioning--and truly, one has to _learn_ how to answer such questioning! That however--is to my taste: not good taste, not bad taste, but _my_ taste, which I no longer conceal and of which I am no longer ashamed. 'This--is not _my way_: where is yours?' Thus I answered those who asked me 'the way'. For _the_ way--does not exist! Thus spoke Zarathustra. (Z III, 'Of the Spirit of [[Gravity]]')" ([[Nietzsche]] quoted in [[Nietzsche and Metaphor]] by [[Sarah Kofman]], p. 2) ___________ [[Weights and Biases]] "The writer, Rockwell Stensrud, kept a journal as he accompanied an old-time cattle drive staged in 1975 as part of the Bicentennial celebration: Very strict unspoken rules of cowboy behavior—get as drunk as you want the night before, but you'd better be able to get up the next morning at 4:30, or you're not living by the code of respect- ability. Range codes more severe than high-society ideas of man- ners—and perhaps more necessary out here. What these cowboys respect more than anything is ability to carry one's own weight, to perform, to get the job done well—these are the traditions that make this quest of theirs possible" What interests me is the idea of "carrying one's own weight". I feel the pressures of gravity when my cortisol is not at optimal levels. Should one be lazy or should one be subjected? If you don't finish a thought, is it a philosophical crime? ________ See notes in [[Into the Cool]] ______________ "In other words, with all the gravity of the case, and not without pain: destruction of the category of the universal." —[[Maurice Blanchot]] _______________ [[Quantum gravity]] [[Lee Smolin]] "if we discover the key to quantum gravity we will discover the key to life" [[Sara Walker]] quoting Smolin in the [[Lex Fridman]] podcast. Check: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Roads_to_Quantum_Gravity _____________ "Throw the right switches and the program just runs like a ball rolling downhill." T Deacon p101 We attribute agency to those things which defy gravity Vestibular motor relationship and learning/neuroplasticity The Grave and lavoisier Watch the whole thing again, especially the ending: watch and transcribe the first 5 min of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGucb958rI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGucb958rI) [[Meaning]] and gravity as vectors of developmental pull. Base this thought on the second page of [[Incomplete Nature]] "this sentence has no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity an no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. More troublesome than this, the sentences you are reading right now could be nonsense, in which case there isn't anything in the world they could correspond to. But even this property of being a pretender to significance will make a physical difference in the world if it somehow influences how you might think or act." #metaphorpaper [[Gravitas]] --> Relate to a HOLE in [[Trypophobia]] and to [[JJ Gibson]]'s idea about the concavities and convexities of the landscape: The tendency towards the [[Grave]], the grave and [[Lavoisier]] [[Covalence]] [[Bias]] [[Nadia Metoui]] "smokescreen easy problem, real problems solvable at all?" [[Inclination]] [[Tendency]] [[Unity]] The reason life could emerge is because of clouds, precipitation, the very first thing that tried to get away from itself. Prediction as getting away from yourself [[Kant]], forming an ever-longer vector that has changing patterns of continued 'coherence' and complexity. Slime mould getting away from itself to eat. Outside view of ourselves = becoming the universe, [[Reason]] longs for flying out, spreading out, to become the universe again, to reach its outer limit and get away with it. Most likely Asimov's the last question was right What is an alternative to the last question? _________________________________ What Happened in the Twentieth Century? En Route to A Critique of Extremist Reason: Inaugural Lecture, Emmanuel Levinas Chair, Strasbourg, March 4, 2005 [[Peter Sloterdijk]]: "...The subject of this extremist reason is defined by its vassalage, apostolate, and mediality in relation to a commanding and disinhibiting reality. Its forerunners are champions of “good crime” such as Marquis de Sade and the young Hegelians; its exemplary twentieth-century cases are Lenin and Mao. Alain Badiou is right to note that the memory of their critical projects is rapidly giving way to the uncontested status of today’s global neoliberalist ideology. Yet, Sloterdijk argues, this is not necessarily a bad thing, not even for critical thought. In the third and fourth parts of his essay, his explicit aim is to “translate” Badiou’s thesis that the twentieth century was marked by a “passion for the real” into the context of his own project of spherology. The twentieth century consists primarily of the activation of the real in a passion for technological and economic antigravitation. The result is the slow but unavoidable emancipation of Western civilization from “the dogmatic opportunism of the real as power-of-the-base-from-below” toward “a free-moving position intermediate between the heavy and antigravitational tendencies.” Economically, the ending of scarcity (Entknappung) and, technologically, the exoneration (Entlastung) of the burdens of human life by the intrusion of new motive forces into human propulsive arrangements have led to the death throes (“Agonie”) of the belief in the base/superstructure division and the radicalism or fundamentalism derived from it. If the twentieth century can still inspire us today, this is because its reprogramming of the pitch of existence (Daseinsstimmung) paves the way for a “critique of extremist reason,” a “post-Marxist theory of enrichment,” a “new interpretation of dreams,” and a “general economy” of energy resources based on excess and dissipation." ______ Bacterial DNA enzyme different in 0 gravity: https://astronomy.com/news/2022/03/bacterial-enzyme-that-copies-dna-might-make-more-mistakes-in-zero-gravity -- Do word-search gravity thru A Billion Black. "The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity —DIONNE BRAND, Love Enough" found in "A billion black anthropocenes or none" [[Kathryn Yusoff]] "Finally, I follow recent critical moves in black aesthetics to question how starting with the “End of the World” might release a more exacting critique of this geologic epoch and its material registers of being, liberated from liberal subjectivity into an alternate geophysics of being by a reworking of gravity." [[Kathryn Yusoff]] idem p30 "_A Billion Black Anthropocenes_ goes in search of a grammar of geology for the storm next time. It proposes that the event of geology become truly marked by the colonial marks that have instigated its passage across the “measure of the world” (Césaire [1972] 2000, 73). It embraces its intimacies with the inhuman. It asserts an insurgent geology for the end of the world, for the possibility of other worlds not marked by anti-Blackness, where the inhuman is a relation, no longer an appendage of fungibility. It is a refusal of the white overburden of geology that has secreted its excess into every pore of the earth. No geology is neutral. _The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity._ (Brand 2014, 157)" _____ [[Gravity]] as [[Ontology]] [[Wilfrid Sellars]]. "how things hang together in the broadest sense" quote about philosophy/ metaphysics. And [[Quine]] on the broadest sense: [[10 Bias, or Falling into Place]]: "Our acceptance of an ontology is {similar to} our acceptance of a scientific theory. {W}e adopt ... the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. Our ontology is determined once we have fixed upon the over-all conceptual scheme which is to accommodate science in the broadest sense ... To whatever the extent the adoption of any system of scientific theory may be said to be a matter of language, the same--but no more--may be said of the adoption of an ontology." (p. 36). _______ [[Marx]] [[Labor]] theory of value and the gravitation if prices __________ [[Dance]], [[Gravity]] "I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance. And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep, somber: it was the spirit of gravity – through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I learned to walk, since then I let myself run. I learned to fly, since then I do not wait to be pushed to move from the spot. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath me, now a god dances through me. Thus spoke Zarathustra." "On reading and writing" p. 29, [[Nietzsche]], [[Thus Spoke Zarathustra]]. "For one’s own, you see, all one’s own is well hidden; and of all buried treasures, one’s own is the latest to be dug up – this is the spirit of gravity’s doing. Almost from the cradle, grave words and values are imparted to us; “good” and “evil” this dowry calls itself. For its sake we are forgiven for being alive. And for this reason one lets the little children come to one, in order to restrain them early on from loving themselves: this is the spirit of gravity’s doing. And we – we faithfully lug what is imparted to us on hard shoulders and over rough mountains! And if we sweat, then we are told: “Yes, life is a heavy burden!” But only the human being is a heavy burden to himself! This is because he lugs too much that is foreign to him. Like a camel he kneels down and allows himself to be well burdened. Especially the strong human being who is eager to bear and inherently reverent: too many foreign words and values he loads upon himself – now life seems a desert to him!" "The Spirit of Gravity" p. 154, [[Nietzsche]], [[Thus Spoke Zarathustra]]. [[Learning]], [[Rule]] "By many a trail and manner I came to my truth; not on one ladder did I climb to my height, where my eye roams out into my distance. And I never liked asking the way – that always offended my taste! I preferred to question and try the ways myself. All my coming and going was a trying and questioning – and truly, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however – is my taste: – not good, not bad, but my taste, of which I am no longer shameful nor secretive. “This – it turns out – is my way – where is yours?” – That is how I ans- wered those who asked me “the way.” The way after all – it does not exist!" "The Spirit of Gravity" p. 156, [[Nietzsche]], [[Thus Spoke Zarathustra]]. In [[Difference and Repetition]], p. 6: ![[Pasted image 20221113204850.png]] The gut and gravity research Neutral bouyancy Get in touch with Lachland Kent