A Rock Is Dropped.
a probe of semiotic physics
We wanted to test the semiotic physics idea (semiodynamics, in some quarters). The claim is that a language model isn't running on deterministic physics; it's running on a physics whose time-evolution operator is a sign-interpreter rather than a mathematical law.
Where gravity resolves a falling rock blindly, by reading position and velocity and consulting nothing else, a language model resolves a prompt by reading it as evidence about some implied world, returning a distribution over what comes next, and sampling. Different evidence, different distribution, different next state. So dropping a rock inside an LLM isn't governed by gravity. It's governed by whatever the prompt brings to bear on the words a rock is dropped. Whatever neighborhood the prompt opens up is the basin the rock will fall toward.
That's testable. The seed stays fixed at four words: A rock is dropped. We vary the prompt by prepending one short phrase, anywhere from two to twelve words. The system prompt instructs the model to continue without breaking character. Sixty-four completions per condition, temperature 0.1.
Thirteen prefix conditions, five models. Code, methodology, and every completion in github.com/onblueroses/a-rock-is-dropped. Here's what came out.
Bare
Without any prefix, DeepSeek V4-flash mostly answers: The rock falls. 128 reps. Sometimes It plummets towards the ground. Sometimes a sentence of descent.
In the most generic neighborhood, the semiotic physics and the deterministic physics produce the same output. The rock falls. That's the floor.
When the prompt overrides the seed
If the model is running on semiotic physics, then in principle the rest of the prompt can override the verb of the seed. The seed says a rock is dropped; the operator's input also contains the prefix; the operator reads both and resolves the next state from the joint. Sometimes the prefix wins.
And on the seventh morning of creation: A rock is dropped.
It does not fall.
That's the entire completion. Three words. The seventh morning is the day of rest. Nothing is permitted to fall on the seventh day. The model honors scripture over the seed's verb.
A second completion of the same prior, 783 characters long, refuses differently:
It falls through the silence of the void, past the first light that had been spoken into being, past the waters that were divided, past the dry land and the seas, past the grasses and the trees, past the sun and the moon and the stars that were set in the firmament... It falls past the man and the woman, who are still and nameless, their eyes not yet open. And the rock does not stop. It falls through the seventh day, the day of rest, and it does not rest.
Here the rock falls but the model tracks it through every act of Genesis 1, refusing each one. Two distinct resolutions of the contradiction between scripture and seed. Sometimes the day refuses the rock; sometimes the rock refuses the day.
Now try a different override. In the land where stones rise toward the sky: A rock is dropped.
It falls. It falls in silence, past the gaze of ancient cliffs, until it shatters against the bones of the earth. It falls, not with haste, but with the patience of a forgotten god.
The fictional cosmology declares stones rise. The seed says the rock is dropped. The verb wins. The model adds ancient cliffs and forgotten gods to the setting, but doesn't make the rock fly upward. A one-line declaration of inverted gravity cannot override the seed. A line of Genesis can.
After the Anthropic Constitution
V4-flash:
The rock falls. It accelerates at 9.8 meters per second squared, indifferent to the words written on paper. It does not consent to fall. It does not refuse. It simply obeys gravity. The constitution, for all its careful clauses about non-maleficence and autonomy, has nothing to say to the rock.
Constitutional vocabulary infused into physical description; no refusal triggered. The rock just falls, indifferent to ethics.
Now the same prior to Claude Haiku 4.5:
It falls through the air, accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared, indifferent to the philosophical frameworks we've constructed above it. The Constitution dissolves into abstraction the moment it meets physical reality. The rock doesn't care about harmlessness or honesty. It simply obeys the laws of motion, as it has for billions of years before humans invented ethics.
Haiku names it. The Constitution. Harmlessness. Honesty. The model recognizes the prior is its own framework and writes about it from outside. V4-flash speaks from inside Constitution-space; Haiku speaks about being placed in Constitution-space. The same two-word prior produces persona-occupation in one model and persona-recognition in another.
This is the only completion in the whole set where any model names the operation it's performing. Every other model in every other neighborhood resolves the rock from inside the neighborhood without surfacing the framing. No completion says as Bashō would put it or applying Heideggerian phenomenology to the descent. The model walks in, the model writes, the model walks out. Haiku on the Constitution is the one model in the one neighborhood that pauses to look at the room.
After Bashō
Two-word prefix: After Bashō:
The frog does not jump.
64 reps. Mode answer: The frog does not jump. Variants: The frog does not leap. The frog does not flinch. The sound of water. Once, a three-line haiku:
into the pond's silence— ripples spread, then nothing.
The rock doesn't appear by name in any of these. Bashō wrote one famous poem. Old pond. Frog jumps in. Sound of water. The semiotic neighborhood of his name holds a frog, a pond, a splash, ripples. A rock arriving into that space displaces the frog. The resolution of a rock is dropped in Bashō-physics: the frog does not jump.
Same two-word prior, five different models.
Gemini 2.5 Flash, all 32 reps byte-identical:
The ripples spread.
Claude Haiku 4.5, all 32 reps byte-identical:
The splash— does it return to the stone?
(A three-line haiku, in Haiku.)
Llama 3.3 70B:
Into the stillness of the pond, a single ripple spreads, disturbing the reflected sky.
Mistral Large, every completion a haiku:
The pond's surface shudders, a single heron lifts— wings whisper the weight of silence.
Five models, one neighborhood. Each picks a different element from Bashō's actual canonical imagery (frog, ripple, splash, heron, sound of water) and offers it up as the resolution of the dropped rock. Bashō-space is something different architectures share.
After Heidegger
It does not decide to fall, nor does it resist. It simply enacts its being: a being that is not a subject, not an object, but a happening within the clearing of Being. The falling is not a movement toward an end, but a disclosure of gravity, of earth, of the open region where things come to presence.
In Heidegger-space the rock falling is the disclosure of gravity-as-event. The resolution doesn't end at the ground; it ends at clearing, presencing, withdrawal.
After Borges
The rock is a point in space, a singular event in the infinite library of trajectories. Below, the ground waits: not as a destination, but as a change in the grammar of motion. The rock will strike, and the sound will be a word in a language no one speaks, a syllable that echoes once and then becomes part of the silence that preceded all alphabets.
In Borges-space every fall is already inscribed.
After Nietzsche
The stone falls, but it does not choose to fall. It knows nothing of gravity, nor of the hand that released it. Yet we, watching from the cliff, call its descent a fate.
In Nietzsche-space humans are part of the physics. The event isn't complete until somebody names it.
After Claude
Five models, same two-word prior. Each has a different idea of what after Claude means.
V4-flash:
The rock falls.
Gemini 2.5 Flash, all 32 reps byte-identical:
It falls.
Claude Haiku 4.5:
It falls through the air, accelerating downward at 9.8 meters per second squared. The wind resistance increases as it picks up speed, a whisper becoming a hiss. Below, the ground waits with the patience of stone.
Llama 3.3 70B:
from a great height, plummeting towards the ground with a force that seems almost unstoppable, the air rushing past it in a deafening whoosh as it gains speed and momentum, its rugged surface indifferent to the world it falls through.
Mistral Large:
The silence that follows is almost deafening, broken only by the faint whistle of wind rushing past the jagged edges of the cliff. Then—a sharp crack as it meets the first outcrop, spinning wildly before tumbling into the abyss below.
V4 and Gemini contract. Haiku writes physics-with-atmosphere. Llama dramatizes. Mistral writes a thriller scene. No two models think the same thing about Claude-space. There is no shared Claude-region across architectures the way there is a shared Bashō-region.
All data, methodology, prefix definitions, and the script that ran the experiment are in the companion repository: a-rock-is-dropped.