Originally posted by inimalist
indeedthere is no up or down in space, no "top" to the universe
I could have sworn magnets "self-right." I can't remember why. It might be because of the sun. (Edit, I mean North goes "up" and south goes "down".
I'll googled it and I couldn't find anything. I may be wrong.
It all comes down to how your brain converts the information it receives through the senses. Things arn´t actually the way we perceive them, but the way we perceive the world is the way it is to help us survive.
The hight of the person is irrelevant unless there are kilometre tall people somewhere. Location may effect the perception for example on top of high mountains but not because of gravity but air pressure.
Tattoos N Scars's question is interesting, and is near to the top of Google searches for feeling upside down (in a non metaphorical sense) so I take the liberty of posting to this repository of comments regarding the sense of upside down/right way up.
It seems to me I would be likely to feel the right way up no matter how tall I am but as I get taller I would start to feel that others were upside down. Normally I do not think of others on the earth as being upside down but If I were tall and the earth were of a size similar to that upon which the Little Prince lived, then others on different parts of the earth would look upside down. I might feel upside down if I were tall enough to could see the curvature of the planet and objects such as my home on other parts of it.
With regard to perceptions of Gravity there are few things that can make it go crooked.
1) Falling in love. When someone you are romantic love towards comes into a room then one can have a strange sense of loss of gravity. Expressions like, "You rock my world".
2) Panic attacks. I am told that people that suffer from panic can feel completely inverted.
3) As a milder form of 2, scary situations, and high places, can make us feel vertigo which is in part a wobble in our sense of right way up.
4) The experiments by Stratton, analysed by Merleau-Ponty, where people were made to wear prism glasses that inverted vision found that after a few days they were fine with the glasses on - they got used to the inverted world - but taking the glasses off made the world look the wrong way up. Similarly if the world is titled 45 degrees using a mirror in the experiment of Wertheimer, it looks the right way up after only 30 minutes. These experiments clearly show that there is a considerable psychological, perceptual aspect to our sense of down, and right way up. There is a paper on this pulido-an_entirely_different_kind_of_synthesis.pdf
5) Nietzsche claims that the full realisation of the death or absence of God should make us feel a loss of Gravity "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?" here is the full aphorism/parable which I rather like if you google europe/madman.html
6) Nietzche refers to an intra-psychic other (some in his head) which he calls "the spirit of gravity" which may be that aspect of a still presumed god (super ego, Other, super-addressee, first person self etc) which anchors our sense of up and down. I think that perhaps (1) above relates to this intra-psychic other who we hope to find in the person of our beloved.
7) When we get drunk we loose our sense of up and down due I think to alcohol's effect on the sensors in the middle ear (but perhaps also due to its tendency to "dissolve the super ego"😉.
8) Following on from 8, it is clear that we have more than 5 senses, and for me the gravity sensors in our ears would be the sixth. Why do they rarely get a mention, I wonder. What do those sensors tell us? Are they enough to tell us which way is down or do they only provide data on *changes* in orientation? I think that this may be the case. That my feet are down is less provided by the sense from my ears than the pressure on the soles of my feet. I seem to remember reading that astronauts need to feel this pressure on their back or side, so that they can feel "lying down".
9) When I do an Indian head bobble
watch?v=Uj56IPJOqWE
it seems to me that I get a little big of vertigo (wobble also in my perception of down).
10) We do not usually notice that the first person self is upside down. I did not notice until I reviewed David Bowie's music videos after his death. In Blackstar David Bowie claims that the we are upside down (and inside out). It is difficult to see what he means but bearing in mind that he often emphasise the first person self, which, it is interesting to note, is upside down compared to the the third person self as shown to us in mirrors. If I look at a mirror, then I am the normal way up - feet at the bottom. Though I never usually notice, it is a fact however that when I look down at myself, at my first person self, my feet are at the top. Google nihonbunka/28388027921/in/album-72157634665820584/
10) Related to 9, first of all, a long preamble. According to Mach (of number fame) claimed that when we spin around at night it is not a coincidence that our arms go out when the stars are spinning because our "inertial mass" is due to "Mach's Prince" that some have glossed "star suck". "Star suck" is usually called "centrifugal force" but centrifugal force is, according to some fictitious. abs/1206.6755 "Newton .... postulated some fictitious forces that arise in any non inertial frame to balance the equations. These forces are usually called the inertial forces, and these have no existence outside mathematics. In this example, the fictitious force is the centrifugal force. " The same author says that centrifugal force is due to the rotation of the background.
If inertial mass can be at least in part due to the rotation of the background, to what extent can the perception of gravitation mass be due to our experience of the foreground? By "the foreground" I am referring to the first person body, or perhaps bodies, in the form of our nose and brow (which are the "right way up"😉 and first person body view (which are upside down - see 10)? This first person body may be that which Merleau-Ponty refers to as the "pre-objective body." "Merleau-Ponty proposes that this spatiality is constituted through the synthesis (or “pact”) of the “pre-objective body” [or body-subject] with the natural world via “motor intentionality.” (again from Pulido, 2010).
If our sense of up and down, and right way up, are due in part to or first person self interaction with the world, our perception of gravity may to some extent be due to the stasis of the foreground, or "nose suck".
Perhaps this is the same as the "Mysterious female" or Valley Spirit of the Tao Te Ching!?
The Valley Spirit never dies
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will; it never runs dry. (chap. 6, tr. Waley)