Perceptions of these objects, processes, etc. are themselves controlled perceptions, but there is no single controller controlling them. That phenomenon of collective control has been part of the PCT model for twenty years.
What time is it? Did you recently change the time on your clocks and watches by one hour? What were you controlling by doing that? What was the cause of the change? Was the change a disturbance to anything else you were controlling? If you resisted the change, did your resistance have any effect on the time of day? Why not?
The Random House Dictionary says
sophistry
/sof"euh stree/, n., pl. sophistries.
1. a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning.
2. a false argument; sophism.
It was wrong of me to use a term which beginning with Plato’s school has been collectively controlled as being derogatory. My apology. It was also poor strategy on my part, because it enabled you to focus on feeling insulted and ignore the substance.
To the substance:
One could with equal justification say that sipping a cup of tea is virtual control, because the numerous motor neurons connecting to muscle fibers in the right bicep do not all carry the identical signal. The reference state for configuration of the right elbow (as part of controlling the relation of cup to lip and the relation of cup to saucer) is proportional to the average of all neural firings and the fatigue-moderated contraction of all involved muscle fibers.
In each case, it is the net effect of diverse outputs that determines the observed reference value as an environmental phenomenon.
Your comments on Labov’s research into an anomalous dialect change intersect a different topic. I’ll reply in a long overdue reply to your post of last February, “Re-thinking Labov’s Pronunciation Drift Data”. The discussion is relevant to the present topic because the higher levels of control (omitted from your model) involve collectively controlled perceptions of two ‘kinds’ of people, Islanders and ‘summer people’, and decisions by adolescents which kind of person they intend to be.
Summer people, typified as those from Boston and New York, are differentiated from Islanders by a number of perceptual variables such as clothing, shopping and dining habits, and pronunciation of can’t, of postvocalic r, and of a higher frequency for both of the first two formants in the initial /a/ vowel of diphthongs, a.k.a. ‘centralization’.
Members of each group control not only recognized shibboleths of membership (such as designer clothing and postvocalic r) but also less salient variables. They control these variables with convergent reference values. The reference values within a group converge not because proximity in an encounter has a magical effect of changing reference values, but rather because by that means they control being perceived by others as a member of one group or the other, and they control other higher-level variables by control of being perceived as a peer in one group or another. To control being perceived as a peer/member an individual must control the relevant perceptions at the requisite reference levels. The perceptions and their reference levels are collectively controlled. The individual doesn’t get to decide these things, they are observable facts in the environment.