Evidence of control is all around us

Unedited posts from archives of CSG-L (see INTROCSG.NET):

Date: Tue Dec 21, 1993 9:21 am PST

Subject: Abnormal Physics

[From Bill Powers (931221.0820 EST)]

I predict that from now until June, the motto will be "Light, morelight!"

Martin Taylor (931221) --

From me:

>> Control systems create abnormal physics.

From you:

> Why is this abnormal physics?

---------------------------------------

ABNORMAL PHYSICS

Balance a broomstick on end (the bottom of the unstable broomstick movesinstead of the top).

Stand up in a gale (you lean into the wind instead of away from it).

Hold a bucket under a faucet until it's full (the supporting musclesshorten instead of the bucket descending as its weight increases to stretch themuscles).

Keep a marble spinning halfway up the side of a bowl. (Pick marble offtable and put it in bowl. Pick up bowl. Move bowl in circle to make marbleclimb wall and circle at constant height. Maintain as long as you like).

Prevent a vortex from forming (Stick your finger in the middle).

Make the vortex spin half as fast (Stir gently with your finger).

Make an arm behave as if it had a different mass and as if the muscles hada different spring constant (Spinal control systems)

Climb a hill.

Drive a car 20 miles through traffic to a specific parking place.

Drive a car from Pagosa Springs to Alamosa over the San Juan mountains(Wow! Sure is lucky there was a road there. Sure is lucky the car stayed onit).

Put on a shirt and button it (highly improbable).

Arrange a shelf of books alphabetically by title, author, or call number.Or by color. Or by size.

Find some food and eat it (Note that the "energy stream" does not maintainitself).

Do a scratch spin on ice-skatesand end up on one knee facing the judges.

Make a bed.

Make a chair.

Pump up a swing.

Sort socks into pairs.

Flip a coin and put it down showing heads 50 times in a row (probability 10^-15)

Shake a coin in a bottle so it ends up heads 100 times in a row (stopshaking every time you see the coin at the bottom showing heads).

From a bowl containing 1000 white beads and 10 black beads, remove all theblack beads without removing any white beads.

Place 100 beads in 200 bins with a bead in every second bin.

From a shuffled deck, deal a bridge hand in which each person ends up withAce through King in a single suit.

Write your name.

Make a rubber ball rise off a table at constant vertical speed, make itpause 5 sec, and make it return at constant speed to the tabletop withoutbouncing.

Heat a pan of soup, with all objects in the room starting and finishing ata temperature lower than that of the soup.

Get out of a locked, barred room without picking the lock or breaking thebars (pay the fine).

------------------------------

All these abnormal physical behaviors of physical objects are made possibleby the fact that you can sense things without disturbing them, and produce anaction that will cause parts of the environment to behave in ways contrary towhat would have happened if you not acted to control your perceptions. As acontrol system, you can produce acts which are not caused by antecedent forces,and hence are not simply part of a normal physical interaction. You can causephysical variables to covary with other physical variables in ways contrary tonatural law. Of course the free variable in all these acts is your ownbehavior, your ability to create arbitrary forces unrelated to the forces thatnaturally occur. These forces are not caused in the normal way, but are basedon extremely low-energysensing processes which by themselves are incapable of producing any actions.Your thoughts and intentions cause the environment to exhibit unlikelyrelationships and outcomes, none of which would exist if it were not for thepresence of living control systems.

There is one condition that is tacitly agreed to in doing any validscientific experiment, in physics or elsewhere: hands off! If you're checking achemical assay by weighing the products, keep your thumb off the scale. Ifyou're timing the swings of a pendulum, don't breathe rhythmically or otherwiseon the swinging bob. If you're using a mass spectrometer, leave your magnet athome. Scientific experiments are supposed to run by themselves, without theneed for anyone to keep looking and nudge them along if they're not progressingright. To take any kind of purposive action during an experiment (other thandesigning it, setting it up, and turning it on) is cheating.

But we cheat all the time. The pictures on the wall didn't get there by anyordinary physical process. Breakfast doesn't appear on the table through anynormal set of physical or chemical interactions. Lab equipment isn't a naturaloutgrowth of natural deposits of minerals. The oranges in the geometrical stackat the supermarket didn't climb up and arrange themselves. The probability ofpractically anything you find in your environment being what it is and where itis is incalculably close to zero. Abnormal physics. It's everywhere.

Best, Bill P.