Classical mechanics begins with an intuition so familiar it almost escapes notice: motion is something that happens in space and over time. A body “moves” by changing its position; time “passes”; space provides the container in which this passage unfolds. This framing is so deeply naturalised that even contemporary physics, for all its technical sophistication, continues to treat motion as a kind of trajectory traced through an independently existing manifold.
In this series, we set aside this entire representational architecture. We do not replace it with metaphysical alternatives—no alternative space, no hidden substance, no subtler field. Instead, we take the step implied by relational ontology but rarely followed through: motion is not displacement, but patterned actualisation; not passage, but ordering.
This is the conceptual pivot that allows us to rewrite dynamics without forces, without conserved quantities, and without any dependence on intrinsic properties of objects. Everything normally attributed to “motion”—velocity, acceleration, momentum—will be reconstrued as perspectival stability or modulation within a system-relative field of potentiality.
The aim of this opening post is simple: to dismantle the representational picture of motion as change of place, and to establish the relational alternative that guides the rest of the series.
1. The Problem with “Moving Through Space”
To say that a body moves from A to B presupposes a picture with three hidden commitments:
-
A universal spatial background that exists independently of anything instantiated in it.
-
A temporal axis against which change of position is measured.
-
A notion of persistence whereby “the same object” is located at different points at different times.
Each of these commitments already violates the relational ontology that treats meaning—and thus reality—as constituted only in construal. There is no universal background outside construal; no independent time against which motion unfolds; no persisting object that carries an intrinsic quantity of movement.
Motion, under this ontology, cannot be the translation of a thing through a container. It must be something that arises within the relational structure, not something that unfolds across it.
2. Successive Actualisations as the Basis of Motion
In the relational model, a “trajectory” is not a line traced through space; it is a construed ordering of successive actualisations of a system.
To say that a body “was here” and “is now there” is a second-order reconstruction of a pattern: a way of organising a series of perspectival cuts into a coherent phenomenon. The ordering is real—because meaning is reality—but its reality lies in the pattern, not in the representational picture used to construe it.
Thus:
-
Motion ≠ the body changing position.
-
Motion = the system-relative construal of a consistent pattern across successive instantiations.
Nothing “moves” in the metaphysical sense. What persists is a regularity of patterning as the system continues to actualise within its horizon of potentiality.
3. Trajectories as Emergent Stability, Not Continuous Paths
The geodesics series established that what we ordinarily call a “trajectory” is the emergent stability of patterning across cuts. There is no curve drawn through space; there is a coherence that construal organises as if it were a curve.
Motion, therefore, is not the traversal of this curve. It is simply the continuation of the same pattern of actualisation. The curve is not travelled; the pattern is maintained.
What classical mechanics treats as continuity in time is, in relational terms, stability in potentiality. A freely moving body does not “keep going”; it remains within a region of the potentiality field where successive actualisations cohere without modulation.
4. The Relational Ordering of Change
Motion becomes intelligible once we drop the representational assumption that there is a background to move in.
Motion is the name we give to a particular ordering relation among successive actualisations:
-
If the pattern is stable → we construe velocity.
-
If the pattern modulates → we construe acceleration.
-
If relational tension persists across cuts → we construe momentum.
These are not quantities inhering in objects. They are perspectival descriptions of how patterning holds or shifts.
The point here is not linguistic; it is ontological. There is no underlying “fact of motion” independent of the construal. What exists is the patterning itself, and motion is the phenomenon that emerges when that patterning stabilises across successive cuts.
5. No Universal Space, No Universal Time
Once motion is understood as pattern rather than passage, the classical picture collapses:
-
Space is not a container; it is a system-level construal of relational potentiality.
-
Time is not a continuum; it is the ordering relation that construal imposes on successive actualisations.
-
Change of place is not primitive; it is a reconstruction of patterning within a perspectival horizon.
This does not diminish the explanatory power of dynamics. It relocates it. Instead of appealing to forces and fields as external agencies that “make things move,” we will explain all dynamical phenomena as shifts in the relational structure itself.
What classical mechanics calls “motion” becomes, in this ontology, the construed ordering of actualisations within a relational field of constraints. Nothing passes through anything. Patterns hold or modulate.
6. The Path Ahead
This opening post clears the ground for a relational dynamics that keeps the explanatory richness of classical mechanics while discarding the representational metaphysics that underpinned it.
The next posts will treat:
-
Velocity as a form of relational rhythm or pattern stability.
-
Acceleration as modulation of relational potentiality.
-
Momentum as tension across cuts, not a substance of motion.
By the end of the series, the classical trinity of motion—velocity, acceleration, momentum—will have been reframed as perspectival construals of relational coherence, not intrinsic properties of objects.
We have eliminated passage. What remains is relation. And relation is enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment