Proximity as Perception: An Ultrasonic Sensor as a Spatial Sensory Organ for General-Purpose Computing, and the Perceptual Wave Function as its Mathematical Processor

General-purpose computers receive signals through discrete and encoded channels: keyboard, microphone, camera, WiFi, Bluetooth. None of them continuously perceive the physical space surrounding them. This is not a technical limitation—it is a design assumption so widespread that it is rarely questioned. This work poses a different question: what happens when a computer is given a spatial sense it was never designed for? The PWF Physical Probe uses an HC-SR04 sensor, a three-dollar microcontroller, and a common computer to run the formalism of the Panperceptual Theory of the Universe (PTU) on the real physical world. Anyone can replicate it with what they have at home. The instrument operates in two layers: computational execution on synthetic signals and physical confirmation with real sensor data. Between the sensor and the operating system, there now exists a layer—PercepWare—that evaluates whether a physical datum crosses a threshold of significance, quantifies its density over time, and decides whether to integrate or forget.