Things are looking
up
.
Her spirits
sank
.
I’m feeling
low
.
That
lifted
my mood.
upright
slumped
HAPPY IS UP
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980
a language model: text in, text out
UP
up · rise · above · climb …
down · fall · below · descend …
(a sketch: each dot stands for a word, placed by hand)
“Today I am feeling ___”
hopeful · optimistic
excited · happy
anxious · sad · worried
depressed · hopeless
pushes toward sad
pushes toward happy
UP
each grey dot: a direction built the same way from 31 random words against 31 others
The same in a second model, GPT-2, at three different depths: UP beats every random direction there too.
A model that has never had a body
carries HAPPY IS UP —
learned from the language of people who do.
That doesn’t show it’s more than an inheritance from human text.
It shows the inheritance is there, and that it works.
Pythia 1.4B (layer 12) and GPT-2 medium (layers 6, 12, 18) · pre-registered · Niamh McCombe & Claude · glassnest.ai/embodied · October 2026
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