Any attempt to speak about c, time, space, mass, and energy must begin with a prohibition.
From a relational ontology, none of these may be treated as:
entities that exist independently of phenomena,
dimensions within which phenomena occur, or
intrinsic properties possessed by things.
To do so would already presuppose what the ontology rejects: a world made of objects with attributes, situated in a container of space and time. The relational ontology begins elsewhere — with systems as structured potentials and instantiation as a perspectival cut.
What exists, on this view, is not a pre‑given spacetime populated by objects, but the actualisation of phenomena under constraint. Meaning, stability, persistence — all arise only with a cut, never prior to it.
The question, then, is not:
What are c, time, space, mass, and energy?
but rather:
What constraints must be in place for a phenomenon to persist across multiple relational perspectives?
It is only at this level that these familiar terms can re‑enter the discussion without smuggling in representational assumptions.
Systems, cuts, and constraint
A system, in this ontology, is a theory of possible instances: a structured potential. Instantiation is not a process unfolding in time, but a perspectival shift — the cut that actualises a particular phenomenon.
Once this is accepted, several consequences follow immediately:
There is no time before instantiation.
There is no space within which instantiation occurs.
There are no intrinsic properties carried from one instance to the next.
And yet, phenomena exhibit remarkable regularities. Some persist. Some resist reconstrual. Some require coordination across perspectives. These regularities are not explained by hidden entities or dimensions, but by systemic constraints.
It is at this level — constraint rather than substance — that c, time, space, mass, and energy properly belong.
The mistake of fundamentality
In mainstream discourse, these terms are treated as fundamental. In a relational ontology, this is precisely backwards.
They are not fundamental to phenomena; they are fundamental to the possibility of phenomena persisting across cuts.
This distinction matters. It allows us to say, without contradiction, that:
time can dilate without becoming unreal,
space can curve without being a container,
mass can resist change without being a substance,
energy can enable transformation without being meaningful,
and c can remain invariant without being a thing.
Each of these is a constraint on how distinctions may be co‑actualised — nothing more, and nothing less.
What follows
The remaining posts in this series will articulate these constraints one by one:
c as the invariant bound on relational co‑actualisation,
time as the ordering of dependency between cuts,
space as the ordering of mutual incompatibility,
mass as resistance to reconstrual,
energy as the density of available alternative cuts.
Taken together, they form a single claim:
What physics treats as fundamentals are, from a relational ontology, the minimal co‑constraints required for a phenomenon to remain identifiable across perspective.
Only once this consolidation is complete does it make sense to explore further avenues — categorical reformulations, critiques of spacetime realism, or reconstruals of gravity. For now, the task is simpler and more exacting: to keep the prohibition intact and see how much explanatory work constraint alone can do.
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