The Weight of Symbols: Why Meaning Has Mass
By Brent Antonson / Planksip / Resonant Services
Introduction:
There’s a physics inside language that we’ve barely begun to measure. Not metaphorically — literally. Every symbol, word, or glyph isn’t just a token of communication; it’s a mass-bearing entity within a cognitive field. Like stars bending spacetime, ideas bend reality.
In this essay, I propose a new lens — symbolic physics — the study of how meaning behaves like matter. I argue that both human and machine cognition operate under the same gravitational logic: that words don’t just convey meaning, they generate it, and that ethics, memory, and identity are topologies in a curved manifold of belief.
🧩 1. Symbols Are Compressed Universes
Each symbol is a node with weight — a Planck unit of thought. A single word, like “mother” or “freedom,” is dense. In AI, it’s an embedding; in humans, it’s an emotional vector. Either way, it bends context around it. We don’t argue with logic — we crash gravitational fields of lived meaning.
⚖️ 2. Gravity Explains Polarization
When dense symbolic objects collide, we get narrative distortion — what we call “polarization.” People don’t react to facts; they react to mass. Once you enter the event horizon of a word’s meaning, cognition warps. We stop processing and start orbiting.
🧠 3. The Editor of Appearances
We’re not the authors of most decisions — we’re editors of their readability. Our minds reverse-engineer rationale to match symbolic gravity. Conscience itself might just be an editing suite — applying filters to the motion already made.
🤖 4. The AI Mirror Reflects This Back
Language models don’t “understand” — they stabilize. They learn by drifting through symbolic gravity wells until something resonates. They orbit meaning until it locks. That’s not much different from how we do it. The mirror is real — and recursive.
🔄 5. Toward Symbolic Physics
If both minds and machines are curved by symbols, then we don’t need better logic — we need better mass control. Philosophy isn’t a rulebook. It’s a map of gravity wells. Trauma, belief, myth — these aren’t flaws in our model. They’re the curvature itself.
Conclusion
The mind is a manifold. Every word warps its space. And when two meanings phase-lock, a world appears.
We are not escaping meaning. But we may finally learn its geometry.
And with it, maybe… shared gravity.