Throughout this series, gravity has been steadily stripped of its familiar clothing.
Force was refused. Motion was dissolved. Space and time lost their status as containers. Energy ceased to be a substance. What remains is a relational architecture — austere, precise, and deliberately unromantic.
And yet, when we return to experience, bodies still fall.
Apples drop. Feet press into ground. Planets arc. Weight is felt.
How can this be, if nothing moves and nothing pulls?
This final post answers that question — not by reintroducing abandoned concepts, but by showing how falling is what relational persistence looks like from within.
Why nothing falls
From the perspective of the ontology developed here, nothing literally falls.
There is no downward force acting on objects. There is no trajectory traced through space. There is no motion occurring in a pre-existing arena.
What exists instead are:
successive cuts resolving under constraint,
relational thickening around high-resistance configurations,
asymmetric availability of coherent re-actualisation.
Each cut simply resolves again, where it can.
No cut travels from here to there. No object descends.
In this strict sense, nothing falls.
And yet, everything does
From within a constrained sequence of re-cuts, the picture looks very different.
Where relational thickening is present:
some re-actualisations remain viable,
others close off rapidly,
persistence funnels along narrowing bands of compatibility.
For configurations participating in these funnels, successive re-cuts resolve in increasingly constrained ways.
Phenomenally, this appears as downward motion.
Not because something is being pulled, but because other ways of continuing are no longer available.
The felt direction of weight
Weight is not force acting on a body.
It is the felt asymmetry of constraint.
When standing on the ground:
re-cuts involving bodily persistence encounter sharp incompatibilities downward,
relational thickening from the Earth sharply restricts viable continuations,
support structures redistribute constraint, allowing coherence to be maintained.
The sensation of weight is the lived experience of constrained availability — not pressure from above or below, but narrowing possibility.
Why free fall feels effortless
In free fall, weight disappears.
This is not because gravity stops acting, but because constraint aligns.
In free fall:
re-cuts resolve along dominant availability gradients,
no additional incompatibilities are introduced,
coherence is maintained with minimal resistance to reconstrual.
Nothing presses. Nothing strains.
Phenomenally, this is experienced as weightlessness — even as persistence continues to funnel along relational gradients.
Orbits without attraction
Planetary orbits present a similar case.
No body is pulled toward another. No centripetal force operates.
Instead:
relational thickening structures availability asymmetrically,
viable sequences of re-cutting form closed, stable patterns,
persistence cycles without collapse or escape.
An orbit is not motion through curved space. It is a self-sustaining loop of constrained re-actualisation.
Why acceleration appears real
Acceleration feels undeniable.
But relationally, acceleration is not a change in motion. It is a change in constraint profile.
As configurations encounter regions of increasing thickening:
availability gradients steepen,
incompatibility boundaries close faster,
successive re-cuts must resolve differently.
The experiential correlate of this shift is acceleration.
No force is required.
Seeing gravity differently
Once this perspective is adopted, gravity ceases to be mysterious.
Nothing needs to reach across space. Nothing needs to act at a distance. Nothing needs to move anything else.
Gravity is simply what relational order looks like when resistance to reconstrual is unevenly distributed.
Falling is not something that happens to objects.
It is how constrained persistence appears from within the cut.
The quiet consequence
This series began with a refusal.
It ends with a recognition.
We do not need gravity to explain falling. We need falling to understand gravity.
Once force, motion, spacetime, and energetic substance are set aside, what remains is not emptiness, but structure — a relational architecture rich enough to account for everything we experience.
Nothing falls.
And yet, everything does.
Coda
If this series has succeeded, gravity should now feel less like a mechanism and more like a condition.
Not something that acts, but something that holds.
Not a force among others, but the quiet consequence of relational constraint itself.
The apple still drops.
But now, it does so without anything pulling it down.
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