With rest and motion dissolved together, inertia can finally be approached on its own terms.
In classical mechanics, inertia is defined negatively: the tendency of a body to resist change in its state of motion. Even when force is removed from the picture, inertia remains framed as opposition — a stubbornness that must be overcome.
From a relational ontology, this framing is backwards.
Inertia is not resistance. It is economy.
Re-cutting and cost
A cut is a perspectival actualisation of relational possibility. To persist is for cuts to be re-actualised compatibly across perspectives.
But not all re-cuts are equal.
Some require extensive reconfiguration of relational constraint:
dependency relations must be rearranged,
incompatibility boundaries must be redrawn,
availability for coherence must be redistributed.
Other re-cuts require almost none of this. They resolve again with negligible architectural change.
This difference is what inertia measures.
Minimal cost persistence
Inertia names the tendency of relational architectures to favour low-cost re-actualisation.
Where constraints are flat and symmetric:
successive cuts resolve with minimal adjustment,
coherence reproduces itself cheaply,
persistence proceeds smoothly.
Phenomenally, we describe this as uniform motion or rest. Ontologically, nothing special is happening. The system is simply taking the cheapest path available.
Why straightness returns
Earlier, straight lines were identified as traces of minimal constraint reconfiguration.
We can now sharpen that claim.
A straight line is not a path through space. It is a sequence of cuts whose re-actualisation cost remains constant.
So long as the relational architecture does not impose gradients or asymmetries:
no re-cut is more expensive than the last,
no deviation is incentivised,
persistence remains directionally indifferent.
Straightness is the phenomenal residue of this indifference.
Inertia without objects
Classical inertia belongs to objects.
Relational inertia belongs to patterns.
It is not bodies that resist change, but architectures that favour continuity.
A pattern exhibits inertia when:
altering it would require widespread reconfiguration of constraint,
while repeating it requires almost none.
Nothing pushes the pattern to continue. It simply costs less to do so.
Mass revisited
In the gravity series, mass was identified as resistance to reconstrual — relational thickening.
We can now see the connection precisely.
High-mass configurations:
thicken relational architecture,
increase the cost of reconfiguration,
stabilise certain persistence patterns.
Inertia increases not because mass resists acceleration, but because thickened architectures make alternative re-cuts expensive.
The classical equation linking force, mass, and acceleration is here replaced by a relational economy linking cost, thickness, and deviation.
Why inertia feels passive
Inertia feels passive because low-cost processes are phenomenally quiet.
We notice effort where cost is incurred, not where it is avoided.
Persistence along minimal-cost paths produces no sensation of action. It feels like nothing happening — even as coherence continues to reproduce itself.
This is why inertia has always been misdescribed as resistance rather than ease.
No law required
Classical inertia requires a law to sustain it.
Relational inertia requires none.
Low-cost re-actualisation does not need enforcement. It is simply what happens when nothing makes change cheaper than persistence.
Deviation, by contrast, always requires explanation — because it requires cost.
Preparing the next inversion
We can now restate the series’ central inversion with greater precision:
Persistence occurs because it is cheap.Change occurs only when constraint makes it cheaper than persistence.
The next post will take this inversion one step further by addressing a lingering intuition:
If inertia is cheap persistence, why does change so often feel causal?
Post 4 — Why Change Requires Explanation (But Persistence Doesn’t).
For now, inertia stands revealed not as resistance to motion, but as the quiet economy of coherence.
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