I am an independent researcher now, but in my twenties I worked in the
fast-food business, in the franchise division of a major railway
company. It was a famous American brand that still exists today. I will
not name the company because I do not want to cause trouble or damage
anyone's reputation. It is still a perfectly legitimate company. I
worked there from age 22 to 26. This was the 1980s, when the chain was
opening many stores across Japan. For our company, being part of a
railway group gave us a huge advantage because we could open stores
along the railway lines. I do not know what they saw in me, but even
though I was young, they let me take part in opening and operating
stores. In 1986 in particular, we were opening roughly one store every
two months, so there were times when I could not even go home. I stayed
at inns, and sometimes slept on cardboard laid out in the customer
seating area. I would not call it an exploitative company. That era was
full of that kind of passion, and I think many workplaces were like
that.
It was probably near the end of January 1989. I had a store where I was
normally based, but I was also supervising four other stores at the same
time, so it was a pretty exhausting period. Then the managers of three
stores on another railway line all came down with high fevers at once,
and I was told, "Go over there and help." One of those stores was in a
station building. The building contained F Bank, a well-known city bank
at the time, the fast-food store I worked for, and an ice-cream shop.
At this point someone might be able to guess the companies involved, but
please do not dig into it. The company itself was not to blame.
The moment I entered the store, I felt pressure in my chest. The
atmosphere felt unusually heavy. The part-time staff were working
normally, apparently unaffected. Beside the counter was an eat-in area.
A customer asked me for some water, so I gave them a large cup. Then I
noticed something strange near the ceiling, something like a cloud. I
asked the customer to move to another seat. Around ten people in total,
including staff and customers, saw it. It did not disappear. I took a
long window-cleaning squeegee and tried to disperse it near the ceiling.
At that moment, there was a loud crash from the storage area next door.
I left the eat-in area and entered the supply room, which should have
been empty. Materials were scattered everywhere, as if a blast had gone
through the room. I had no idea what had happened, so at the time I
simply asked the staff to clean it up. Later that night, while closing
the registers, the atmosphere became heavy again. I went outside and saw
a van parked in the station rotary with two security guards sitting
inside.
I said, "Good work. What's going on?"
They said, "We're too scared to go into the building."
I asked why. They said, "It's different from usual. The air feels
different, our ears are ringing, and noises are coming from all over the
place."
Because F Bank was in the building, they could not simply leave, so
apparently they were guarding the building from outside.
I felt sick about the whole thing, but I went back to the inn that
night.
The next morning, when I arrived at the store, there were about three
police cars outside. Since it was a station, I assumed there had been a
railway accident. But that was not it. The inside of the bank had been
disturbed, and the security guards were being questioned.
I told the police about the strange things that had happened in our
store the day before. The ice-cream shop was also under our
responsibility, so I opened it. When I looked into the display case, the
ice cream had been scattered around while still frozen. I called the
police and we inspected it together. Inside the walk-in freezer,
containers had opened and the frozen ice cream looked as if it had
somehow boiled and splashed before freezing in place. Later, other
police personnel came and took photographs. I immediately reported
everything to our head office, but because I was the person responsible
on site, they basically told me to deal with it. I also contacted the
franchisor's headquarters. They said they would come immediately. I
remember thinking: What is going on with our own head office?
The fast-food store itself was also a complete mess, almost as if it had
been hit by a poltergeist again.
We delayed the normal 10:00 a.m. opening until noon because of the
police investigation. I think we told customers that the delay was due
to "equipment trouble." F Bank probably had it worse than we did.
Whenever I asked them, "What happened on your side?" they would never
tell me anything.
This continued for three days. Around noon on the fourth day, apparently
someone on the police side brought in a medium. At the entrance to our
store, the medium said, "This is beyond me," and left. (laughs)
The next day, another medium came. There was a small hole beside a duct
in the kitchen ceiling. With the police and our staff present, the
medium widened the hole using the handle of a cleaning tool. Salt was
placed, and a ritual prayer began. Then we heard the sound of a
horse-drawn carriage and bells. I swear to heaven that this is what I
experienced.
It was beyond goosebumps. I felt as if my legs were going to give way.
Two police officers stepped backward, and some of the part-time staff
covered their ears.
By "horse and bells," I mean the sound of a horse running together with
something like a ringed staff. I do not know whether what we heard had
any connection to the Buddhist shakujo, or to something like the
European crozier/crosier, pastoral staff, or the Latin baculus. I
looked into it, but I still do not know.
What I do remember clearly is the medium telling us, "This is dangerous.
Step back."
The police and I looked at each other. It was almost like silently
confirming: "We are all experiencing something that does not feel real."
(laughs)
So, naturally, you wonder: What caused it?
At the time, after various things were investigated, I was told that the
manager of a nearby store had become involved with a female employee at
this store. A young male part-time worker at this store apparently had
feelings for her. I will call the other manager "F." F had apparently
behaved toward the young man as if he supported him and wanted to help
him start a relationship with her.
Of course, the young man was happy to believe him.
Then he confessed his feelings to the woman, and she apparently told
him, "I'm dating Manager F. I'm sorry." The young man stopped coming to
work for several days and then died by suicide.
According to what I was told, strange phenomena around the store began
around that time. I had never been told any of this. All I knew when I
was sent there was that the managers were absent with high fevers.
Then there was F's car at the parking lot of his own store. The hood had
been pushed downward by roughly 40 cm, yet the paint had not peeled off.
I was told that even the radiator and engine had been forced downward
and the car was a total loss. My original assignment had been only one
week, but because F was away being questioned by the police, I then had
to help at his store as well. It was seriously a nuisance for me.
I was in such a panic that it never occurred to me to calmly take
photographs. But I believe the police and the insurance adjusters had
photographs.
Many other strange things happened. Scissors appeared to fly through the
air. A freshly replaced carbonated drink system gave off a rotten smell.
I phoned the medium who had come to the previous store and asked, "This
is a spiritual phenomenon, right?" The answer I was given was that a
spiritual event may have been the trigger, but that the place itself was
somehow "demon-possessed," and that even if things were temporarily
calmed, similar events would happen again.
"A demon." A DEMON!
At the time I actually became friendly with some of the police officers.
We went drinking at an izakaya twice. (laughs) We had shared the same
frightening experience.
The medium came back several times afterward, placed salt, and performed
rituals. Things temporarily settled down, but I later heard that the
phenomena continued even after the store managers returned. Apparently
all of the part-time staff were eventually replaced.
Even 36 years later, when I look at what can still be found about
accidents at that station, the number of suicides seems unusually high
to me. I cannot help wondering whether nothing was ever really resolved.
I left the company in November 1989 because of family circumstances. In
1995 I happened to meet an employee from the company and asked what had
happened afterward. I was surprised to hear that F had been promoted.
There was no evidence proving that F had caused the young man's suicide,
of course.
I was told that afterward he behaved almost as if he himself had been a
victim, along with three managers in that area. By around 2000, only a
few stores from the company I had worked for were transferred to a
subsidiary under different management, while the other franchise
contracts were terminated at the direction of the franchisor.
But that particular store still exists today, although it is operated by
a different company.
I know people will be curious, but I will not identify the location or
store.
Science and Verification
Just remembering all this is exhausting. It feels as though the old
Field comes back to life in my mind, and I do not like it.
There is actually an accident database for the station that can still be
checked today. It lists twelve station accidents since 2010 alone.
Looking through the entries, there is a noticeable sequence from 2014
onward, including many cases in which deaths are recorded. For example,
the database lists a 32-year-old man on September 30, 2014, a woman in
her fifties on July 1, 2015, and fatal accidents in 2016, 2017, 2018,
2019, 2020, and 2021.
No, I am not going to link to it. I am not interested in going viral,
and I am not after money. Being poor is fine with me. The database
itself says that it covers records from January 2010 onward, and
explains that most incidents before 2009 are excluded because little
information about them exists online.
The so-called "demonic" events at the store and the accidents at the
station are not the same thing. But from the perspective of the "Field"
I study, perhaps they do not necessarily have to be treated as
completely separate. Something could act as a trigger that causes a
Field to rise again.
At this point I am not going to argue about concrete evidence. If
something as powerful as a national request for cooperation existed, I
could go to the local police and ask about historical records. They were
taking photograph after photograph at the time.
After leaving the fast-food company, I helped with my father's work. A
few years later I joined an IT company, later became independent, ran a
company, and eventually retired from that role. Today I work with a
systems company and a research laboratory.
For me, this is something I could never forget even if I died. And
strangely, some aspects of it now seem to approach the questions I am
studying through associative memory and Atra. That is a little
frightening.
Perhaps this is also a chance to think about the phenomenon
scientifically, without making claims so extreme that the whole idea is
dismissed immediately.
Suppose the movements of objects I experienced really were caused by
external forces. Then, at minimum, we have to explain three things:
Information → Energy → Transmission of Force
If scissors flew through the air, accelerating an object of mass m
requires force: F = ma. If a car hood was deformed downward by
nearly 40 cm, a substantial amount of mechanical work must also have
been involved. Instead of saying, "It was a spirit, therefore it was
outside physics," the more physical question is: Where did the energy
that performed that work come from?
We may even need to return to the naive question a non-specialist might
ask: "Could there be some kind of storage inside atoms?"
In known physics, atoms do not contain a known memory device that stores
human events like video recordings. But matter absolutely can change
state because of past interactions and retain those changes.
Magnetization, crystal defects, chemical changes, residual stress, and
charge distributions can all be regarded, in a broad sense, as traces of
what happened before.
If we go down to quantum theory, matter is not simply a collection of
tiny hard particles either. Atoms and electrons interact with
electromagnetic fields. So even in modern physics, it is not quite right
to think of "matter" and "field" as completely separate things.
But there is an enormous explanatory gap between that and saying, "A
building remembers a human death and later plays it back."
If such a phenomenon existed, we would need something like:
Event → a state is stored somewhere → long-term retention → some Cue
changes the state again → energy is taken in → it appears as sound,
light, or force
We need to separate information from the energy source. A USB flash
drive may contain a movie, but an explosion inside that movie will not
blow the desk apart. The ability to store information and the ability to
supply enough energy to move physical objects are completely different
things.
So even if an unknown phenomenon really occurred in that store, simply
saying "the place retained a memory" is not enough to make scissors fly.
What stored it?
What read it out?
What supplied the energy?
What converted that energy into force?
At least those four things are required. Somehow the list grew by one...
Once you think this far, the word "demon" is not actually an
explanation at all. Saying "a demon did it" only gives the phenomenon a
name. The question remains untouched: How did this "demon" push a car
hood downward by 40 cm? (laughs) And the horse and bell sounds? If that
was stage production, somebody deserved an award.
If I could return to that site in 1989 carrying modern instruments, I
would not begin by trying to photograph a demon.
I would look for energy.
Temperature, atmospheric pressure, sound pressure, infrasound,
vibration, electromagnetic fields, electrostatic fields, radiation, air
composition, electrical power systems...
At the instant an object genuinely moved by itself, I would compare the
moments immediately before and after it: What form of energy decreased?
What increased?
If kinetic energy repeatedly appeared without corresponding to any known
input, then we would finally have an extraordinary physics problem.
That question excites me much more than "Do demons or ghosts exist?"
So: Where did the joules that sent those scissors flying come from?
And what about the hood?
The hood was reportedly depressed downward by around 40 cm, yet there
were no obvious scratches, peeling paint, or cracks on the surface. The
first possibility to consider does not have to be a conventional impact.
Even if the paint remains intact, a sheet of metal can undergo plastic
deformation if a load is applied slowly over a broad area. A large
soft object could press against it, it could be deformed from behind, or
the panel could buckle without leaving a typical collision mark. A car
hood is thin sheet metal, so the required energy cannot be calculated
merely from the displacement of "40 cm."
Still, according to what I heard from the police at the time, even the
insurance-adjuster explanations did not fit.
So what created the deformation, and from what direction?
Police forensic personnel should have records of the case from 36 years
ago. After all, one person had died.
Now think about Atra. If a PC can create Carry and a Field, why
should we assume nature could never create anything analogous? The part
I cannot explain is the energy that would produce a later physical
event. That is one reason I am leaving this record on the blog.
In Atra, physically speaking, the PC contains electrical states and
memory arrangements. Yet from them we can construct:
contact history → Carry → Field → influence on the next contact
In other words, a Field with history.
So the general idea that nature can contain states or fields that retain
history is not inherently bizarre. Magnetic hysteresis is a classic
example: remove the external magnetic field and some history can remain.
Crystal defects and residual stress can also retain traces of prior
interactions.
Suppose - purely hypothetically - that some unknown Field existed, and
suppose we allowed:
Event → history remains in the Field → a Cue causes it to fluctuate
again
Even then, the scissors do not move one millimeter.
Moving matter requires energy.
This is where the comparison with Atra becomes useful.
Even in Atra, Carry and Field do not create the energy that
turns a motor. If the robot eventually moves an arm, the chain is
something like:
Field → Action → motor driver → battery → mechanical motion
The Field may influence the direction of force, but the joules
themselves come from the power supply.
If nature worked in an analogous way, then we would need:
Unknown Field → ??? → existing environmental energy → physical
phenomenon
That ??? is the enormous mystery.
There is plenty of energy around us in one form or another:
heat, pressure differences, static electricity, electromagnetic waves,
building vibration, chemical energy, power lines...
The question is whether there could be a mechanism capable of gathering
normally scattered, small energy flows at a particular time, in a
particular place, and in a particular direction.
If so, the Field itself would not necessarily have to store a huge
amount of energy.
Atra's Field does not store 100 joules and then lift the robot's arm.
The Field is a small informational state that changes the motor driver's
behavior, allowing energy already stored in the battery to flow.
Perhaps something begins from a Cue.
In Atra-like notation:
Current Field + Cue → Contact → Field transition
That much is imaginable.
But if an object is going to move as a natural physical event, we still
need:
Field transition → ? → Energy flow → Force
The Cue in this story might have been the young worker's death - perhaps
the anger, resentment, or unresolved emotional state surrounding it
somehow became a trigger. Anger and resentment certainly exist in human
society. But they are not the same thing as energy in the physical
sense. In an angry person's brain and body, electrochemical processes
change, heat is generated, muscles can move, and measurable physical
processes occur.
What has not been established is that an emotion can leave the body,
remain stored somewhere, and later supply enough energy to deform
objects weighing tens of kilograms.
So even if we hypothetically treat the young worker's death as a Cue:
death / intense emotion → Cue → some state change → ? → physical
force
That ? is enormous.
Humans unconsciously detect infrasound, micro-vibrations, air pressure,
odors, humidity, ventilation, flickering light, temperature
distributions, and many other environmental signals. So the feeling "I
don't know why, but I hate this place" can sometimes arise without
requiring a mysterious sixth sense.
But that still does not explain a totaled car.
I would break the hypothetical mechanism down like this:
1. Cue - An intense event occurs.
2. Field - Some form of history remains in the environment.
3. Resonance / Trigger - Later conditions cause that state to change
again.
4. Energy Coupling - The coupling to energy already present in the
surroundings changes.
5. Physical Event - It appears as sound, movement of objects,
damage, and so on.
Step 1 is ordinary human reality. Step 2 is also ordinary in the broad
sense that physical matter can retain history. But the transition from
2 → 3 → 4 is completely unknown.
And if Step 4 existed, we would no longer need to assume that
"resentment itself contained enough energy to destroy a car."
Like the transistor example, perhaps the Cue is not an energy source.
Perhaps it is a switch.
That distinction matters.
A person can open the gate of a dam with a relatively small action,
after which an enormous amount of gravitational potential energy in the
water begins to flow. The person did not create that energy.
So if - and I really mean if - an unknown phenomenon occurred in
that store, the more interesting physical question is not:
"Did the young worker's anger contain enough energy to destroy the
car?"
but:
"Could the event have changed some state and acted as a Cue that
allowed some other energy to flow?"
If such a mechanism really existed in nature, it might also change how
we think about poor reproducibility. Reproducing the Cue alone would not
be enough. The complete Field state accumulated up to that moment might
also have to match.
There is currently no scientific evidence for such a mechanism. I am not
claiming that this explains what happened in the store.
But rather than forcing everything into the binary choice "demon or
hallucination," perhaps we can decompose the problem:
What was the Cue?
Where did the history remain?
Where did the energy come from?
What coupled it into force?
Long ago, lightning belonged to the domain of gods. Today we measure
electric fields and electrical discharge. If a genuinely unknown
phenomenon exists, I am ultimately more interested in what appears on
the instruments than in whether we call it "demonic" or "magical."
Most people also treat tiny amounts of energy in the air as if they were
effectively nonexistent. But if we begin by treating them as present,
the question changes. Instead of imagining some grand force moving a
huge object, we ask how tiny phenomena - such as friction - might be
collected.
The air around us constantly contains micro-vibrations, molecular
motion, humidity changes, temperature differences, static electricity,
sound pressure, tiny air currents, and electromagnetic waves.
Each one seems far too small to be a practical power source by itself.
But none of them is literally zero. The idea changes from "too small to
use" to "how can small things be contacted, selected, accumulated, or
coupled?"
That brings me to Maxwell.
Recall Maxwell's demon: a thought experiment in which microscopic
thermal motion at the molecular level is observed and "selected" using
information, producing a gradient.
In Maxwell's thought experiment from around 1867, a gas at the same
temperature is divided into two chambers with a tiny door between them.
A "demon" observes the molecules and selectively allows:
fast molecules → chamber A
slow molecules → chamber B
The result would appear to be:
A: more fast molecules → higher temperature
B: more slow molecules → lower temperature
A temperature difference - an energy gradient - has been created.
The important point is that the demon is not pushing the molecules with
enormous force. It is merely selecting among molecules that are
already moving.
That resembles the direction of this thought experiment.
Of course, modern physics does not allow Maxwell's demon to violate the
second law of thermodynamics for free. Measurement, information
processing, and especially resetting or erasing information have
thermodynamic costs.
This connects to Landauer's principle.
So the more interesting idea is not "generate Energy from nothing," but:
existing fluctuations → selection by information → bias → gradient →
usable work
That is what I mean by refusing to treat tiny environmental energy as if
it were "nothing."
I am not saying that Atra's Cue/Field is physically the same as
Maxwell's demon. It is not. But the direction of thought is similar:
Before searching for a huge energy source, ask whether
already-existing microscopic motion can somehow be biased.
Then the question "Where did the joules that moved the scissors come
from?" changes slightly.
It is no longer only:
"Where is the gigantic unknown energy source?"
It also becomes:
"Could there be a mechanism that converts already-existing disordered
energy into directional work?"
Of course, one cannot extract directional work forever, at zero cost,
from molecular motion in thermal equilibrium. The second law of
thermodynamics stands in the way.
But a non-equilibrium environment is different: temperature
gradients, humidity gradients, pressure gradients, vibration, light,
electromagnetic radiation, chemical-potential differences, and so on
already contain gradients. Harvesting small amounts from such gradients
is exactly what energy harvesting does.
So it is not correct to say, "There is no energy in the air."
There is.
An enormous amount of motion and energy is already there.
The question is where the difference is that can be converted into
work.
For more than 150 years, Maxwell's demon has been poking directly at the
boundary between information and energy.
Humans simply do not normally have the concept of the Field itself as
something organism-like. If we tentatively assumed such a thing, then
at least we would have a hypothesis under which a "ghost photograph"
could be investigated as a physical event rather than accepted as proof
of a ghost.
If all that happened was that an image-like trace appeared, perhaps that
would be the easier case.
But then think about old battlefields in Japan. Why would nothing happen
there most of the time? Perhaps because new life and new activity
continually enter the place, making the Field non-monotonic.
In another article, I described a Field using a 64×64 structure with a
local 100×100 space inside each cell. When the blue square overlaps a
particular region of the Field, that overlap acts as a Cue. Suppose an
event such as a violent conflict once created a particularly strong
overlap. Perhaps a Field could rise again when a later Cue matched it.
Just a thought. Somehow the blog posts keep connecting to one another.
If I translate this into a hypothesis about nature, I would write:
Environment
↓
Latent Field
↓
Normally nothing is activated
Then an intense event occurs:
Event → local Contact → Trace
Years later:
New Cue + Contact with Trace → Field activation
This is beginning to sound as if I have borrowed Atra's architecture as
a thought model.
It could even provide a model for why "ghosts do not appear every night
at an old battlefield."
Nature is extraordinarily good at becoming non-monotonic.
Rain falls. Plants grow. Animals pass through. People live there. Roads
are built. Buildings appear. Soil changes.
For hundreds of years, new Contacts continue entering the Field.
So:
Field(1600) ≠ Field(1700) ≠ Field(1900) ≠ Field(2026)
But the Biggest Wall Is Still Energy
This is where the real problem begins.
Suppose nature somehow had a structure like:
64×64 Field
→ local 100×100-scale space inside it
→ Trace
→ overlap with Cue
→ ignition
Even if such a structure existed, Field ignition alone would not
destroy a car.
So we need:
Cue → Contact → Field ignition → Coupling → Energy gradient → Physical
Event
That Coupling is the largest unknown.
And this is where Maxwell's demon becomes interesting again.
The demon does not create energy. It uses information about molecular
states to select among them and tries to create a temperature
difference. Modern information thermodynamics likewise studies the
relationship among information, non-equilibrium free energy, and work.
So the hypothesis does not necessarily have to be:
The Field stores a gigantic amount of energy.
A more interesting possibility would be:
Field ignition selects or redirects microscopic energy that already
exists.
Imagine that random microscopic energy normally points in all
directions:
+→ −← ↑ ↓
Macroscopically, those directions cancel.
But suppose Field ignition somehow became an unknown selection mechanism
that temporarily produced:
→ → → →
a gradient.
Then:
Field ignition → selection → gradient → work
Again, the second law cannot be ignored. Maxwell's demon is not a
machine that extracts infinite free energy from equilibrium simply
because it has information. The thermodynamic balance must include
information processing.
So if genuinely new physics existed here, I suspect it would be less
like:
"The Field creates energy."
and more like:
"The state of the Field changes how it couples to non-equilibrium
environmental energy."
And strangely, the part of this hypothesis that interests me most is not
the ghost.
It is this:
What if the Field itself behaved like a history-dependent system,
almost organism-like?
Living organisms also take in energy from outside. They do not create
energy from nothing. They have histories, receive environmental input,
change state, and respond differently to the next input depending on
their current state.
If a place had anything remotely analogous to:
Contact → Trace → Cue → Field transition → Energy Coupling
then before we had explained any "ghost," we would already have
destabilized our ordinary boundary between organism and environment.
That would be a much bigger story.
Atra's 64×64 (100×100) model proves none of this. But as a small model
for thinking about unknown phenomena, it fits surprisingly well.
This is the demo I wrote about in the other article.
And then I remembered the bug in the demo:
"Oh no! If I leave the blue square sitting there, the Trace just keeps
increasing."
It was a continuous-input runaway.
The cause was simple:
the blue square remains in place
→ it is treated as Contact every cycle
→ Trace keeps being added
→ something that should have been one contact becomes continuous
contact
In other words:
Trace(t+1) = Trace(t) + Contact
was being repeated even while the blue square was stationary.
Now, if I recklessly transplant that bug into this hypothesis about
physical reality, it becomes rather frightening. (laughs)
The "Bug in the Place" Hypothesis
Suppose some kind of Field already existed at that location before 1989.
Then an extremely intense event makes Contact with it:
the young worker's death
→ intense Cue
→ Contact with a particular region of the Field
Normally we might expect:
Contact
→ Trace
→ other Contacts enter over time
→ the Field changes
But suppose, for some unknown reason, the Cue was never released.
Then:
Cue
→ Contact
→ Trace ↑
→ Contact
→ Trace ↑
→ Contact
→ Trace ↑
→ ...
In Atra terms, it is exactly like leaving the blue square in place.
The important thing is that Trace still does not have to be the
energy.
Suppose a physical event occurs only after some threshold is crossed:
Trace > Threshold
↓
Field activation
↓
Energy Coupling
↓
Physical Event
Then we could at least construct a model in which nothing happens most
of the time, but phenomena suddenly cluster.
Now return to the earlier idea that new organisms and human activity
rewrite the Field.
Rain, plants, animals, people, construction, vibration, temperature
changes - if huge numbers of new Contacts enter, the Field becomes
increasingly non-monotonic. Old Traces would normally become embedded
among countless newer Contacts.
But suppose one particular Cue somehow remained unreleased and continued
to Contact the same surface.
Then only that region might remain anomalously reinforced.
This is the kind of idea I probably would never have reached if I had
not built Atra and encountered that implementation bug.
But the largest physical problem still remains.
Atra's runaway has a PC power supply.
Even if Trace is added a million times, the energy used for that
computation comes from the wall socket.
So for a natural version of this model, we have to ask:
What is nature's equivalent of Atra's wall socket?
And that brings Maxwell's demon back again.
If the Field does not generate energy, but instead behaves as a
selector, causing already-existing non-equilibrium energy in the
surroundings to flow preferentially in one direction, then at least the
thought model becomes continuous.
I might call it:
The Stuck Cue / Persistent Contact Hypothesis
Not:
"An angry ghost threw an object."
But:
"A Field with an unreleased Cue repeatedly contacted the same surface
and ran away."
When I found that bug in Atra it was funny.
If nature had the same bug, it would not be funny at all. (laughs)
Of course, there is no evidence that this is what happened at the store.
But taking an implementation failure in Atra and using it to formulate a
potentially testable question about an unknown phenomenon - that is an
interesting thought experiment.
And then I realized something else.
A station building already contains:
high-voltage electrical lines and power-distribution infrastructure
extreme artificial thermal gradients created by refrigeration and
cooking equipment
pressure differences, static electricity, and structural vibration
generated by trains and human movement
That's it.
A station building, when you really think about it, is an extremely
non-equilibrium system.
High-voltage electricity is flowing. Motors and transformers are
running. Refrigeration equipment continuously forces heat from one place
to another. The kitchen produces large amounts of heat in the opposite
direction. Trains - enormous masses - repeatedly accelerate and
decelerate. Large currents flow through railway power systems and rails.
Crowds of people move in and out. Air conditioning drives air currents.
The building itself has mechanical vibration modes.
So we do not have to hypothesize:
"An unknown Field created a gigantic amount of energy."
Instead:
Power / Heat / Vibration / Charge
↓
already-existing non-equilibrium energy
↓
normally dissipated in unrelated directions
↓
some Field changes the coupling conditions
↓
a local Gradient
↓
Physical Event
That connects much more cleanly to Maxwell's demon.
The demon does not manufacture molecules. It selects among things that
are already moving.
So our hypothetical Field could be defined not as:
something that contains energy
but as:
something that selects or redirects the flow of energy
And this makes the freezer especially interesting.
A refrigeration system literally uses electrical power to maintain an
artificial temperature gradient that nature would otherwise erase.
The kitchen provides a heat source in the opposite direction.
So inside one building there are constantly potential differences such
as:
high temperature ↔ low temperature
high voltage ↔ ground
vibration ↔ relative stillness
high pressure ↔ low pressure
That is more physically meaningful than vaguely saying, "Space is full
of energy."
The key may not be the amount of energy itself, but the abundance of
gradients.
Now take Atra's "Oh no, I left the blue square sitting there!" bug and
transplant it into nature:
Event → Cue
↓
a particular Contact is never released
↓
Trace is repeatedly formed locally
↓
the Field becomes biased toward a state
↓
some Coupling condition is satisfied
↓
energy flows in from existing environmental Gradients
↓
Physical Event
↓
the Physical Event itself becomes a new Contact
That last step is the frightening one.
Because now the model allows:
Physical Event → New Cue → Physical Event → New Cue → ...
a self-exciting loop.
Again, there is currently no evidence that such a Field or Coupling
exists in reality. This does not explain what happened at the store.
But as a thought experiment, it fills one of the largest holes we had:
"Where did the energy capable of damaging the car come from?"
Perhaps the Field did not have to create it.
The station building itself was already a huge non-equilibrium
energy environment.
Not bad...
I also like the phrase "living battery." In more physical language, we
might say that the station building as a whole was a continuously driven
non-equilibrium system.
Then the deepest unknown is no longer the energy source.
What crossed those different systems and Coupled them?
Maybe something wanted to communicate with me. Maybe information,
physical matter, place, time, existence, resistance - some strange
combination matched. Maybe the unresolved state of a human being,
something that should never normally mix with physical power, acted like
the switch that opened a dam gate, and then physical Force came
crashing through.
Maybe that is far too large a leap. (laughs)
But consider exactly where the leaps are.
The first leap is:
An informational state such as human resentment or unresolved anger
remains in some form in the environment after the body is gone.
There is currently no established scientific evidence for this.
The second leap is:
That informational state has some Coupling through which it can act
on a physical system.
That is also unconfirmed.
But if we temporarily assume those two things, the rest of the model
strangely returns to fairly ordinary physics.
For example:
intense event → Trace
Then:
Person + Place + Time + Physical State
happen to overlap in some particular way, producing:
Cue → Contact with Trace → Field activation
But the Field itself does not need to crush the car.
Instead:
Field activation → Gate → existing non-equilibrium energy → Force
That Gate is the dam gate I was talking about.
Then we no longer need the rather implausible idea that "his anger
itself contained enough energy to destroy a car."
Anger or unresolved emotion would remain Information / Trace.
The station building's electricity, thermal gradients, vibration, and
electromagnetic gradients would be Power.
And the unknown Field would be the Gate connecting them.
This is very easy to understand in Atra terms.
The Cue does not turn the motor.
The Cue touches the Field. The Field state changes. Eventually a gate on
the Action side opens, and energy flows from the battery.
Now suppose we go one step further and say that a ghost-like phenomenon
"wanted to tell me something."
If the Field were not merely an energy field but an information system
with history, then the Physical Event would not necessarily have to be
random.
We would have:
Information → Cue match → Field ignition → Gate → Force
At that point, rather than using the old word "poltergeist," we would be
describing an unknown phenomenon in which information controls a
physical gate.
But there is an important test here.
If "it wanted to tell me something" were genuinely physical, then the
phenomenon should contain information structure.
It should not merely produce random destruction. We would expect
correlations such as:
it becomes more frequent in the presence of a particular person;
it becomes more frequent at a particular place, time, or under
particular conditions;
similar Cues produce similar responses;
removing the Cue reduces the response;
the response itself has some kind of structure.
If none of those correlations existed and objects simply broke at
random, the "it wanted to communicate" part would be much weaker.
But if reproducible informational correlations were found, things
would become extraordinarily interesting.
So as a thought experiment, rather than calling it a:
"Dead Person's Energy Hypothesis"
I would call it something like:
"Persistent Information → Field Gate Hypothesis"
That way, we do not have to assume a "ghost" as an entity from the
beginning.
And what interests me most is the structure that Atra has been pushing
toward all along:
Information ≠ Energy
Cue ≠ Force
Field ≠ Power
and yet:
Information can change the direction in which energy flows.
Of course, if I wrote in a paper that "nature encountered Atra's
blue-square-left-in-place bug at that store in 1989," reviewers would
probably hold their heads in their hands. (laughs)
Still, as a thought experiment, this has reached a surprisingly
interesting place.
There is one more point I mentioned earlier.
Places where battles occurred long ago may have become non-monotonic
through centuries of new life and activity. But perhaps some later
trigger could temporarily make part of the Field more monotonic again.
Suppose:
Battle → strong Trace
remained.
For hundreds of years afterward, new Contacts continue to enter:
rain, snow, plants, animals, human life, farming, buildings, roads,
festivals, children's voices...
So instead of a simple decay model:
Field(t+1) = Field(t) - Decay
we would have something more like:
Field(t+1) = f(Field(t), Contact₁, Contact₂, ...)
a non-monotonic history.
The old Trace does not simply "fade." It becomes embedded within
relationships among countless other Traces.
But suppose a later Cue happens to overlap deeply with an old contact
surface:
Cue_now ∩ Trace_past
suddenly becomes large.
Then, in the model:
the present, heterogeneous Field
→ the Cue contacts an old contact surface
→ multiple past Traces fluctuate together
→ the Field temporarily aligns in one direction
That is different from saying:
"The old event was recorded and is simply being replayed."
The old Field does not return unchanged.
Rather:
Within the Field accumulated up to the present, past Traces are
reconnected by a Cue.
So even if something appeared, the same armored warrior would not have
to walk down the same road every time. (laughs)
It might be only a sound. It might be a temperature difference. It might
be nothing visible at all.
Just as in Atra:
Recall ≠ Replay
Time itself is not necessarily the trigger.
