With force refused, mass reconceived, curvature re-typed, and motion dissolved, only one classical notion remains standing: energy.
Energy is often treated as the most abstract and therefore the safest survivor — no longer a substance, perhaps, but still a conserved quantity that explains why change occurs.
From a relational ontology, even this will not do.
Energy does not cause change. It names the conditions under which re-actualisation remains available.
Why energy cannot be a thing
Despite modern refinements, energy is still commonly understood as:
something systems possess,
something that can be stored or transferred,
something whose conservation guarantees explanatory closure.
This grammar quietly reinstates substance under a more respectable name.
But we have already displaced the metaphysical ground that would allow this.
There are no systems independent of their actualisations. There are no processes that unfold by drawing down a reserve. There are only cuts, and the relational conditions that permit further cuts to occur.
Availability rather than quantity
What, then, does energy measure?
Relationally, energy indexes how available further coherent re-actualisations are for a given configuration.
High energy does not mean more stuff. It means:
many viable next cuts remain open,
constraint has not yet sharply narrowed the space of re-actualisation,
persistence can continue along multiple relational pathways.
Low energy marks the opposite:
options for further coherent re-cutting are closing,
incompatibilities dominate,
persistence is approaching exhaustion.
Energy is not what drives change. It is what makes change possible at all.
Work reinterpreted
In classical accounts, work is the transfer of energy via force acting through distance.
Relationally, work is the reconfiguration of constraint.
To do work is to:
open new dependency relations,
relax existing incompatibilities,
or redistribute relational thickening so that new sequences of re-cutting become viable.
No quantity moves from one place to another. The architecture of possibility is altered.
Conservation without substance
One might object that energy conservation is too successful to abandon.
Relational ontology does not abandon it. It explains it.
Conservation reflects the fact that:
relational availability cannot be conjured from nowhere,
constraints can be reconfigured but not erased,
openings in one region require closures elsewhere.
What is conserved is not a substance but global coherence of constraint.
Bookkeeping practices that track energy remain valid — but their metaphysical interpretation changes completely.
Potential energy revisited
Potential energy is often treated as stored capability awaiting release.
Relationally, it names latent compatibility under constraint.
A configuration has potential energy insofar as:
dependency relations could be re-ordered,
incompatibility boundaries could be crossed under altered constraints,
re-actualisation could proceed differently if the relational architecture were reconfigured.
Nothing is waiting. Possibility is structured.
Kinetic energy without motion
If motion is not fundamental, neither can kinetic energy be.
Kinetic energy instead indexes:
the stability of a sequence of constrained re-cuts,
the robustness of a pattern of persistence under existing constraints,
the cost, in relational reconfiguration, of disrupting that pattern.
This preserves its phenomenal role while removing its ontological burden.
Energy and gravity
At last, gravity can be seen clearly.
Gravitational phenomena do not occur because energy is exchanged or forces act.
They occur because relational thickening:
reshapes availability gradients,
redistributes constraint asymmetrically,
and funnels re-actualisation along narrowing bands of coherence.
Energy is the ledger that records how open or closed those bands remain.
Closing the ontology
We can now state the framework without remainder:
Mass is resistance to reconstrual.
Curvature is asymmetric permissibility in relational orderings.
Motion is constrained re-actualisation across cuts.
Energy is relational availability for further coherence.
Nothing moves. Nothing acts. Nothing pulls.
And yet, phenomena persist.
One final turn
The ontology is now complete.
What remains is not another theoretical move, but a return to experience.
The final post will take these questions seriously — without reintroducing force, motion, or spacetime.
Post 6 — Why Nothing Falls (and Yet Everything Does).
There, the framework will meet the world again.
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