On Gravitating

On Gravitating

Do you want your life to count, really count, weighed somewhere with nothing left out?

Most people do, and a few of them tried to write the wanting down as mathematics.

There is a graveyard, and everyone who has tried to write the equation of the inner life is buried in it, and the headstones all say the same thing.

Fechner went first, in 1860, and he was not a cold man. He held that plants have souls and that the Earth has one too, he argued for a living, waking cosmos against what he called the night view of dead matter, and he wanted his little formula to be the bridge at last between soul and world. What survived him is a tidy law of how sensation climbs with the stimulus. The soul fell out. A century later the formula was improved, and the soul stayed gone.¹

Then came the moderns, reaching higher: a single number meant to weigh a mind, which by its own lights would crown a grid of simple logic gates, wired just so, more conscious than the person who built it; a wager that quantum strangeness hides in the warm architecture of a neuron, which, even granted everything it asks, would hand you a mechanism, and not one reason the mechanism should feel like anything at all.² Some of those are still upright and still arguing, and I do not say this to dance on anything. I say it because the objections are old and the graves are patient.

The headstones all say: I crossed the gap by trading the felt thing for something I could read off a dial. The success and the burial were the same morning’s work.

I want to be honest about my own equation before I praise it. Written out in symbols it looks like physics. Said plainly, it says only this: everyone present is laid over everyone else, each carried at some strength and turned some direction, and the whole is held in proportion by how much strength there was in the room. No one life is walked around and measured; every perspective is gathered at once, with the direction each was facing folded in. What the gathering returns has two parts: how closely the shared world agrees with itself, and which way it faces. Then each of us reads our own place in it, how sharp that agreement is times how we are turned inside it. That is everything the symbols say. The rest is names.³

It cannot join that graveyard, because it never made the move that does the killing. It never traded the felt for the dial. The alignment of a life (the quiet direction a person is pointed in the present moment) is not reduced, anywhere in it, to something an instrument could read. No instrument runs this gathering. No person runs it. If anything reads it whole, I believe it is the Design across Time, the shape the world’s long unfolding makes, which can be seen only from a long way off. That is a conviction, and I am telling you it is one.

The equation buys its immortality with a single coin and spends the whole purse: it measures nothing, and it predicts nothing. It can pose questions someone could carry out into the world (whether people who share an intent fall into step with one another, and how a shared aim holds or comes apart), but it cannot answer them itself. The day someone could cash it out as a reading on a dial, it would become one more tidy law about the pressing of a button, and it would die like the rest.

So I am not in the proof business. I never was. And the moment I admit that out loud is, I think, the strongest thing the equation can do, because it tells you what kind of thing it actually is.

The Wrong Door and the Right One

Now let gravity in, and let it in carefully, because the obvious door is the wrong one.

The obvious door is the pull: two things drawn toward each other across a distance. I will come back to it, because it opens onto something. But the rhyme does not start there. The equation reads each life against the whole of everyone present, all at once, and gravity has a property that sits exactly there.

It is the only long-range force that cannot be screened. You can build a cage against the electric field; you can stand inside it and the storm outside does not reach you. There is no such cage for gravity. No material refuses it: no insulator, no shadow, no shield. Everything answers, and no one has ever confirmed an exception.⁴

Unscreenability. That is the thing.

Not the pull. The impossibility of being left out of the accounting. No life cast behind glass where the field cannot find it. No life that does not bend the room it stands in.

And here the equation says the same thing in its own grammar, and it says it as arithmetic rather than as hope. The gathering is held in proportion by a total, and that total is the sum over everyone present. Everyone. The quiet ones and the ones who never applied: every perspective there is, by the definition of the sum. There is no term standing outside the denominator, no way to weigh in without also having been weighed, and no shadowed corner where a life declines to be counted. You cannot opt out of a total that is defined as the sum over all of you.

Gravity has no shield. The accounting has no exemption. It is one claim in two grammars, and I did not have to reach for the second one.

What Gathers

And now the door I called wrong, which turns out to be the right door to a different room.

The pull is the shape of what happens next, once everybody is in the sum and nobody can leave.

Here is the asymmetry nobody mentions about gravity, because it is so total that it stops looking like a fact. No negative mass has ever been found. Charge comes in two signs and cancels itself all day long; a proton and an electron sit down together and the room goes electrically quiet. Gravity has no second sign. Nothing with mass repels. Every scrap of mass in existence pulls in the one direction there is, which means gravity cannot subtract; it can only accumulate. That is why there are galaxies, and why there is anything at all with a shape.

And what gravity gathers, it holds. The universe is expanding, and the Earth under you, the solar system, and the galaxy around it take no part in that expansion.⁵ Gravity is coherence holding close.

The arithmetic of alignment has the same one-way street in it. A voice turned crosswise to a room that faces one way is still in the total, and it pulls the room partway toward itself: the shared picture comes out a little less sharp, and everyone turned with the room reads a little less of it. Two equal voices a half-turn apart erase each other outright. But aligned terms cannot cancel each other. Two perspectives turned the same way have no mechanism by which to subtract; they can only add. Agreement has no opposite sign.⁶

Which is the whole reason like minds find each other, and the finding is not mystical.

What you read off the world is how sharp the shared picture is, times how you happen to stand in it. So two people facing near the same direction read the world alike, and read it sharply when the room faces with them, which makes them legible to each other in a way that has nothing to do with liking.

You have felt this in a room. Someone says a sentence and you know, before you could say why, that they are pointed where you are pointed. Nothing pulled you toward them. You were simply two terms that do not cancel, recognizing the fact.

Call it gravitating if you like. I do. The word is honest here in a way it is not honest about the equation’s form, because what it names is real: coherence accumulates, disagreement disperses, and over any length of time the first gathers while the second quietly does not. You are the terms that survive each other, and survival, repeated, looks exactly like attraction from the inside.

We attract what we face. Good people get sick; kind ones get laid off; the sum has nothing to say about that, and it never claimed to. What it tells you is narrower: what gathers around a facing held over time.

And it works in the sad direction too, which is the part I will not leave out. Face away from yourself long enough and the people who stop canceling against you will be the ones facing away from themselves. That is not a punishment either. It is the same arithmetic, run with the facing you handed it. And even the beat that went sour, once read, is a lesson.

This is the only picture of heaven and hell I have ever been able to believe. Not two addresses waiting at the end of the road, but two directions a person is already facing, both open right now, and neither one final. Luke has the kingdom within you.⁷ I have never found a reason the other place would live anywhere else. Turn, and the company turns with you, slower than you would like, but it turns.

The Long Heavy Moment

And time. Gravity slows it (the deeper in the well, the slower the clock), and the inner life does something shaped like it, and you have felt it.

Call the smallest unit of a life a Jay: one beat of experience, made the instant a perceiver meets the world — what it feels like, and which way it tilts, toward or away.⁸ Most Jays are light. Some carry so much that the hours around them bend.

Watched from far up the well, a clock near something massive seems to linger; each of its seconds takes longer to arrive, and at the edge of a black hole a falling thing appears to hang there for good. For the one falling, a second is only ever a second. The heavy moment does this in memory. Inside the crash, the fall, the phone call, the second was a second. Looked back on from the flat hours that followed, it lasted a year: the grief, the awe, the long instant in which all that attention was spent. The flat and empty hour, looked back on, collapses to nothing and leaves no mark at all. If the weight a moment carries is anything like mass (what deepens the well it is lived in), then the physicist’s lingering clock and the long heavy moment share one shape, seen through a telescope from outside and through memory from within.⁹

What the Graveyard Is Telling Us

Here is what the graveyard is really saying, and it is not about neurons.

The appetite outlived every failure. Fechner the mystic, the Platonists, the chasers of the one bright number — they kept reaching long after the formulas were buried, which means the reaching was never for a formula. It was for the inner life to be lawful. To add up. To be weighed somewhere, and weighed truly, with nothing left out.

I suspect every equation of consciousness is a theodicy wearing notation. The question underneath all of them is the only question: does any of this count, and is the counting just?

And that is what my equation is. Not a physics. A hope in formal dress. Read it again and it makes no claim about matter. It is the skeleton of a single conviction: your life is counted, all of it, and nothing is hidden from the counting. Whether the counting is just is another question, and the arithmetic has no term for it. It can tell you how a life was turned to the room around it. It cannot tell you what that life deserved.

This is why gravity, of all the forces, is the right shadow to cast it against. Nothing hides from it either.

The Seam

And now the seam, which I will not paper over, because the paper would be the lie.

We ache for our lives to be unscreened and truly weighed, and that ache is itself a reason to distrust an equation that seems to hand us exactly that. Gravity’s refusal to be screened is a fact about the world; it did not have to be so, and it owes us nothing. My equation’s refusal is a wish, and it is wearing the same uniform.

The resonance is real. I am not taking it back. But the very perfection of the fit is what a longing would build for itself, if a longing could build. Gravity was not obligated to be the one force shaped like our hope. That it is (that the single force in nature which cannot be screened is also the one we would have drawn had we been handed the pen) should make me trust the beauty a little less, and trust the honesty about the beauty, the lamp I read it by, a great deal more.

And I will say the same of the arithmetic, because it would be cheap to hold the physics to a standard I let my own algebra skip. That the total contains everyone is not a discovery. It is a consequence of how I chose to write the total. I built a denominator that nobody can stand outside of, and then I was moved to find that nobody stands outside of it. Even the form of the sum is borrowed. It is how waves add, and physics earned it by measuring real waves; borrowing the form brings none of that warrant with it. The structure is honest and the feeling it produces should be held at arm’s length. A definition that returns your own conviction is not evidence. It is a well-made mirror.

So I hold both, and the holding is the whole piece. The structure rhymes with gravity, truly, down in the unscreenable depths where time bends around what weighs. And the rhyme is partly the sound of the appetite, and not the sound of the truth. I cannot settle which, and I have stopped trying to. The Quantum Lens (the habit of letting something be seen two ways and more, without making it choose one) taught me that the settling is the loss.

Here, then, is the thing the human animal keeps reaching for. Here is the only force in nature shaped like the reaching. Does your life count? It is in the total; nobody is left out of that sum, because of how the sum was written. Whether it is weighed truly is not a thing I can promise you. The fit should comfort and unsettle in equal measure, which is, I have come to think, exactly how a true thing and a wished-for thing feel when they turn out, for once, to wear the same face.

We do not get to know which one it is.

We only get to keep the lamp honest.

Forever, my friends.

Supplemental note

Parallels and Lineage

Among the On ——ing essays on the fundamental forces, this one takes gravity. Gravity gives the framework two images: the unscreenable, which it shares with the framework’s accounting (the total that nobody stands outside of, read again in On Questioning), and the one-signed accumulation that holds what it gathers. On Magnetizing reads the complementary force, the irreducibly paired and unhalvable dipole, and On Expanding reads the cosmic expansion, pairing gravity’s holding close with the expansion’s reach, a reach that bound systems never join. The essays can be read together, and each stands on its own.

The physics drawn upon is settled: the absence of negative gravitational mass and the screening of electric charge; gravitational time dilation from Einstein’s equivalence principle, measured by Pound and Rebka; and the fact that bound systems do not expand. The psychophysics is Weber’s and Fechner’s, with Stevens’s power law as its twentieth-century revision; Integrated Information Theory and Orchestrated Objective Reduction are named as the best-known modern attempts at a measure or mechanism of consciousness, together with the standard objections to each. None of it is offered as a physics of mind; the resonances are structural, read under the Quantum Lens. Where the essay finds unscreenability in its own arithmetic, it says at once that this follows from a definition, that a definition returning one’s own conviction is not evidence, and that the form the sum borrows from the physics of waves brings none of the warrant physics earned by measurement.

The functional is the one seated in On Explaining. Jay, Trace, Intent and Center are defined in Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One, and the Quantum Lens in Journal Two; Design across Time is the essays’ own term.¹⁰

Notes

1. Weber, De pulsu, reports that the smallest noticeable difference between two weights is a constant fraction of the weight already held. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, integrates that finding into the logarithmic law of sensation now named for him. Stevens, “Psychophysical Law,” replaced the logarithm with a power function. Fechner’s ensouled plants (Nanna, 1848), ensouled Earth (Zend-Avesta, 1851), and his “day view” of a living cosmos set against the “night view” of dead matter (Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht, 1879) are discussed in Heidelberger, Nature from Within.

2. Integrated Information Theory assigns a system a single quantity meant to measure its consciousness. Tononi, “Information Integration Theory.” Scott Aaronson showed that simple, regular networks of logic gates can score higher on that measure than a human brain, a consequence Tononi accepted. Aaronson, “Why I Am Not an Integrated Information Theorist.” Orchestrated Objective Reduction locates consciousness in quantum processes in the microtubules of neurons. Hameroff and Penrose, “Consciousness in the Universe.” The standard objection is that the brain is too warm and wet: Tegmark estimated that such quantum states would decohere many orders of magnitude faster than neurons act. Tegmark, “Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes.”

3. The functional in full, as seated in On Explaining: Ψ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ) · e^iφⱼ(τ); Ξ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ); L(τ) = Ψ(τ) ⁄ Ξ(τ), with |L| ≤ 1; Θᵢ(τ) = arg L(τ) − φᵢ(τ); aᵢ(τ) = |L(τ)| · cos Θᵢ(τ). Both sums take in everyone present and, as the framework reads them, whatever Trace the reader meets in that moment. The size of L, between nothing and one, is how far the shared world agrees with itself; its direction is where the room faces; aᵢ is what one perspective lives. It has no extra term for effort; effort shows up as weight, and weight sets how large a part of the room’s average a perspective holds: share, and not agreement. That part is αᵢ ⁄ Ξ, the whole room for a perspective alone and a thousandth of it among a thousand equals, so every arrival thins every share. The questions the framework poses point toward empirical work on shared intentionality; the functional itself predicts and measures nothing. Johnson, On Explaining. That no one stands outside the total is taken up again in Johnson, On Questioning.

4. Electromagnetism and gravity are the two long-range interactions; the weak and strong interactions act only over subnuclear distances. Electric fields can be screened because charge comes in two signs, so a conductor’s charges rearrange to cancel an outside field; this is the principle of the Faraday cage. Gravity has no negative mass to rearrange, and no experiment has confirmed any gravitational shielding. Magnetism, read as gravity’s complement, is the subject of Johnson, On Magnetizing.

5. Systems held together by their own gravity, or by electromagnetic forces, do not take part in the cosmological expansion; its effect on them is negligibly small and does not grow them. Cooperstock, Faraoni, and Vollick, “Cosmological Expansion on Local Systems.” The cosmology is read alongside this essay in Johnson, On Expanding.

6. Because L is a weighted average of unit facings, a perspective turned across a room that faces one way still adds to the total Ξ while contributing nothing along the direction the room faced before it arrived. While it is outweighed, it lowers the size of L and turns the room partly toward itself, so the readings of those turned with the room fall; only its own reading rises, and only as it grows louder. Far louder than all the rest together, it brings the room most of the way around to face it. Two facings of equal strength a half-turn apart cancel exactly. A crowd scattered at random seldom reaches zero: at equal intensity the size of L sits on average near 0.89 ⁄ √N, the floor a scattered room falls toward; that is its usual size, and a given room can read below it. Rayleigh, “Resultant of a Large Number of Vibrations”; Johnson, On Explaining.

7. Luke 17:21 (KJV), “the kingdom of God is within you.” The Greek entos hymōn can also be read “among you,” as in the NRSVue; the reading here takes the older one.

8. Whitehead’s “actual occasion” is the closest philosophical kin of a Jay: a moment of experience that comes to be, takes in what came before it, and perishes into what comes after. Whitehead, Process and Reality. His occasions extend to every physical event, while a Jay is narrower: only what a perceiver feels in one encounter with the world.

9. Clocks deeper in a gravitational potential run slow relative to clocks higher up. Einstein derived the effect from the equivalence principle before the field equations were complete. Einstein, “Relativitätsprinzip”; Einstein, “Einfluß der Schwerkraft.” Pound and Rebka measured it in a tower at Harvard. Pound and Rebka, “Apparent Weight of Photons.” On the felt side, people dropped from a tall tower into a net did not perceive time slowing as it happened but remembered the fall as having lasted longer: the stretch is in recollection, not in perception. Stetson, Fiesta, and Eagleman, “Does Time Really Slow Down.” The correspondence is offered as resonance under the Lens, not as a claim that experienced time is relativistic time.

10. Johnson, Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One; Johnson, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity, “Introduction: The Continued Framework.”

Bibliography

Aaronson, Scott. “Why I Am Not an Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander).” Shtetl-Optimized (blog), May 21, 2014. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799.

Cooperstock, F. I., V. Faraoni, and D. N. Vollick. “The Influence of the Cosmological Expansion on Local Systems.” Astrophysical Journal 503, no. 1 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1086/305956.

Einstein, Albert. “Über das Relativitätsprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen.” Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik 4 (1907).

Einstein, Albert. “Über den Einfluß der Schwerkraft auf die Ausbreitung des Lichtes.” Annalen der Physik 35, no. 10 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.19113401005.

Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Elemente der Psychophysik. 2 vols. Breitkopf und Härtel, 1860.

Hameroff, Stuart, and Roger Penrose. “Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory.” Physics of Life Reviews 11, no. 1 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002.

Heidelberger, Michael. Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview. Translated by Cynthia Klohr. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Expanding. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20838567.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Explaining. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21154523.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Magnetizing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20821000.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Questioning. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20820602.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. The Resonating Hymn of Divinity: On the Universal Architecture of Faith. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Two. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20512320.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One: A Philosophical Framework for Subjective Experience, Suffering, Community, and the Nature of Meaning. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20482186.

Pound, R. V., and G. A. Rebka Jr. “Apparent Weight of Photons.” Physical Review Letters 4, no. 7 (1960). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.4.337.

Rayleigh, Lord. “On the Resultant of a Large Number of Vibrations of the Same Pitch and of Arbitrary Phase.” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 5th ser., 10, no. 60 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1080/14786448008626893.

Stetson, Chess, Matthew P. Fiesta, and David M. Eagleman. “Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?” PLOS ONE 2, no. 12 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0001295.

Stevens, S. S. “On the Psychophysical Law.” Psychological Review 64, no. 3 (1957). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046162.

Tegmark, Max. “Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes.” Physical Review E 61, no. 4 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.61.4194.

Tononi, Giulio. “An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness.” BMC Neuroscience 5 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-5-42.

Weber, Ernst Heinrich. De pulsu, resorptione, auditu et tactu: Annotationes anatomicae et physiologicae. C. F. Koehler, 1834.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. Free Press, 1978.

CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT

© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC