transduction

The name for how a pattern propagates through a medium, each structured region seeding the next — and also, in the plain engineering sense, what a microphone does: convert air pressure into current. Joining the two gives the consequence that matters: noise becomes inseparable from the milieu in which it operates. A proximity sensor is literally a transducer, and its Umwelt is one number. What it carries includes its own thermal fluctuation, which is Gaussian white noise — the same kind the diffusion process in early stop starts from, arriving here out of the physics of a resistor rather than out of a seed. If its reading only nudges an already-running process rather than commanding it, no observer can separate what the object was doing anyway from what their presence caused — entangled inside one iteration, not related as before and after, which is what makes chaos and determinism a design decision rather than a technicality.