Essay: Gravity Consciousness

My work is concerned with the transformation of consciousness. In evolutionary science, Darwin didn’t study genes as much as create a juxtaposition of images. This technique is similar, but instead of presenting the frames of organisms, I juxtapose behaviors. We all know that life stemmed from a common ancestor, then diverged into the various life forms. At early stages, I compared human to cellular life. A map of a human cityscape is structurally and behaviorally similar to the blood in our veins or the veins of a leaf. Humans intend to understand consciousness, and they intend to understand intelligence, yet naturally do not regard cells as intelligent. Both cells and human beings need to live and survive within a space. Thus a commonality like this becomes a rule, for one to perform analysis. We can begin to talk about spatial limits and operational limits. Since both forms of life have similar limits to their growth, the structure of that growth is bound by law to become similar in time. Spatiotemporal constraints connect us: pointing toward our shared history. Stephen Wolfram’s “Principle of Computational Equivalence” negates the notion human intelligence gives rise to complex systems. Computation, on the other hand, concerns itself with operating within a space. A writer writes by inserting symbols into a space. This is where selection starts. Historically humans would regard the ability to write as an indication of intelligence, however the social consequences of writing clearly entail the eventual formation of human social structures which resemble primitive biology, so this cannot be accurate.

Artificial Intelligence must be biologically inspired. Currently computers are not designed in a way which makes them sensitive to gravity, even though it is known to influence behavior. If a rock falls to the ground, it can be thought of as moving by its own autonomy since nothing else moved it besides itself. The feather falls slower than a rock, but both are bodies in motion. The mover that isn’t moved in each respective situation is gravity. Isaac Newton studied gravity as part of his alchemical exploration of the unmoved mover, or primary cause. If gravity is really the primary cause of autonomous movement, we can trace our relation to it as if it were a common ancestor, because it is the main organizational force in the universe. One example of gravitationally determined autonomous movement is the seed. The seed itself has no correct orientation; it cannot be buried in the soil upside down, then send roots above accidentally. Instead, gravity sensitive cells instruct the seed to send the roots down, or the stem up. This is an example of self-autonomous movement within a space: organization for self-preservation. Computers use binary code, which can create all other numbers and infinite complexity. Because the seed and root are a binary, it hints at the possibility that gravitational sensitivity can be mimicked in a way that will give rise to mechanically independent systems, and eventually artificial life.

Various bio-astronomical observations support this. Astronomers have discovered spinning cosmic filaments that are structures hundreds of millions of light-years long. One might compare this to DNA. Researchers have captured images of supermassive black holes burping. One might compare this to life. And on several occasions supermassive black holes have been seen emitting waste, a jet of material, after “eating” a star. We have anthropomorphised black holes for long enough, but we haven’t yet agreed that black holes exhibit more life-like behavior than anything else we’ve seen in outer space. Living things have self organizing behavior. Gravity takes worlds within its grasp, compacts material into a sphere. Gravity has spiraled galaxies around it’s center, planets around it’s center, and formed Earth itself as a vessel for life to exist, yet it’s regarded as a natural phenomena, rather than the primary organizational force in the universe. It’s ability to take material and organize it into a different form represents the basest example of primal consciousness. I postulate that, because Edmund Husserl’s work was on the “Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness”, a study of gravity consciousness was inevitable. When a python eats a deer, typically we don’t say we lost the deer information. But we do say that about black holes when we talk about information loss. On the other hand, if we start to imagine some kind of metabolism going on inside the black hole, as if it were an animal, I believe we’ll inch closer to understanding black hole internals. 

Space travel is bad for the body at the cellular level because of microgravity’s influence. It was an important achievement when we escaped Earth’s gravity well with the rocket to the moon, all astronauts regard the experience as humbling and awe-inspiring. Studies revealed spaceflight causes mitochondrial dysregulation, supporting the theory life is only acclimatized to operate in Earth’s gravity regime. Computers do not yet have “gravity problems” comparable to those that are suffered by microgravity affected mitochondria. Turing’s interest in mechanical intelligence was doomed to be incomplete because it lacked an understanding of plant gravitropism as the mechanism for plant and animal locomotion. He was fascinated by plant structures, yet he was merely fixated on the emergent patterns, like the spirals in the seed patterns of sunflower heads conforming to numbers that appear in the Fibonacci sequence. A mechanical intelligence must be mechanically independent, and seeds exhibit mechanical independence, assuming we are allowed to define mechanical independence as self-orchestrated movement within a selection space. Alan Turing’s Universal Turing Machine (UTM) features a head which moves from cell to cell along an infinite tape, reading and writing symbols within a central selection space. Thus we have another opportunity to procure gravity as an agent responsible for selection, because of its behavioral tendency to pull outside material into a single space. Turing on the other hand did not advance any such theory for what mechanism or process could be used for self-organization in space, he merely sought to model the process of reading and writing mechanically. Likewise he seemed interested in modeling the outcome of human social structures as they react to writing, as suggested by his interest in reaction diffusion systems and morphogenesis.

“One does not need to be able to understand how these orders lead to the machine’s subsequent behaviour, any more than one needs to understand the mechanism of germination when one puts a seed in the ground. The plant comes up whether one understands or not. If we give the machine a programme which results in its doing something interesting which we had not anticipated I should be inclined to say that the machine had originated something, rather than to claim that its behaviour was implicit in the programme, and therefore that the originality lies entirely with us.” - Alan Turing

To me it seems reasonable to conclude neural architecture is a product of neurons operating in areas of neural-temporal advantage. Fortunately science fiction gave us the Borg as a tool for thought experimentation. If we picture the Borg collective (a hive mind consisting of trillions of telepathically linked bodies) as being a collection of spaceships distributed across a galaxy, we can suppose that some of the spaceships will be anchored to bodies of high density, while others will be anchored to bodies of low density. Surely these differences in terms of processing speed or thinking speed would represent a basis for competition and difference, rather than cohesion as a singular “hive mind” identity. Curiously the brain is a collection of neurons, presumably operating under the stress of microgravity, and sure enough they’re differentiated into specialized organs, such as the frontal lobe or cerebellum. We have specific areas for higher mental functions, and certain areas for motor functions, association, vision, etc. Thus “the Borg” could indeed exist as a singular will, but it would still be torn apart by the gravity regimes generated by the heavenly bodies. Not surprisingly, we continue to find life in areas of extreme density, such as the deep sea, and not elsewhere. Instead of being flabbergasted by the discovery of living things in such environments, the notion that extreme density is integral to organic development, competition, and evolution, implies it should be expected. Life is an informational force, which consumes information to survive entropic decay. Black holes also consume information, creating order within their grasp. Knot-tying implies future-oriented intent, because one cannot come up with the multitude of steps for a knot without imagining some future purpose, yet typically we don’t attribute the strings of string theory to products of a conscious will, even though string theory is a theory of quantum gravity, and gravity has so many lifelike behavioral characteristics.