It seems to me that you are predicting the path of the pinball, but quickly enough that you don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s such a fundamental axiom that if there is a clear downward path to a given position, this position will be reached, that it’s easy to forget that it was originally reasoning about intermediate steps that led to this axiom. At most points the pinball can reach, it is expected to move down. At the next point, it’s expected to move down again. You would inductively expect it to reach a point where it cannot move down anymore, and this point is the hole (or sometimes a fault in the machine).
Contrast with the hole being upraised, or blocked by some barrier. All of the paths you envision lead to a point other than the hole, so you conclude that the ball will land instead on some other array of points. There it’s easier to see that gravity still requires path-based reasoning.
It seems to me that you are predicting the path of the pinball, but quickly enough that you don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s such a fundamental axiom that if there is a clear downward path to a given position, this position will be reached, that it’s easy to forget that it was originally reasoning about intermediate steps that led to this axiom. At most points the pinball can reach, it is expected to move down. At the next point, it’s expected to move down again. You would inductively expect it to reach a point where it cannot move down anymore, and this point is the hole (or sometimes a fault in the machine).
Contrast with the hole being upraised, or blocked by some barrier. All of the paths you envision lead to a point other than the hole, so you conclude that the ball will land instead on some other array of points. There it’s easier to see that gravity still requires path-based reasoning.