By now, inertia has been re-situated as cheap persistence: the low-cost re-actualisation of relational coherence.
And yet a stubborn intuition remains.
Change still feels like it requires explanation. Persistence still feels like something that must be maintained. We speak naturally of causes, influences, pushes, and interventions — as though the world would otherwise lapse into stillness or drift.
This post argues that this intuition is exactly backwards.
The asymmetry we keep getting wrong
In classical thinking, persistence is fragile and change is natural.
Accordingly, explanation is directed toward why something continues.
From a relational perspective, this explanatory direction is inverted.
Only one of these requires explanation.
Cost and phenomenality
Why does change feel causal?
Because cost is phenomenally salient.
Low-cost re-actualisation produces little experiential trace. It feels like nothing happening. High-cost reconfiguration produces effort, tension, disruption — phenomena we interpret as action.
Causality, on this view, is not an ontological primitive. It is a phenomenological marker of costly re-cutting.
Why persistence needs no story
When successive cuts resolve compatibly:
dependencies align,
incompatibilities remain stable,
availability is conserved.
Nothing calls attention to itself.
No explanatory narrative is triggered because nothing has become difficult.
Persistence does not ask why because no constraint has demanded renegotiation.
Why change always does
Change, by contrast, is noisy.
Deviation requires:
redrawing incompatibility boundaries,
redistributing availability,
renegotiating dependency structures.
These operations are costly. They leave traces. They interrupt expectation.
We experience these interruptions as needing explanation.
Causes are stories we tell to account for why persistence failed to remain cheap.
The illusion of active forces
Once explanation is demanded, agency rushes in.
Forces appear as candidates to do the explanatory work:
something must have pushed,
something must have pulled,
something must have acted.
But from a relational standpoint, forces are not agents. They are descriptions of constraint gradients — summaries of where re-cutting becomes expensive or cheap.
Causality as retrospective bookkeeping
Causal accounts are always retrospective.
They reconstruct a path through constraint space that renders the observed deviation intelligible.
This is not a defect.
It is a clue.
If causality were fundamental, it would not need reconstruction. The fact that it is always narrated after the fact reveals its status as explanatory bookkeeping rather than ontological engine.
Laws as summaries, not governors
Classical physics treats laws as enforcers: rules that compel behaviour.
Relationally, laws are summaries of cost regularities.
They describe how architectures typically reconfigure under given constraints. They do not make anything happen.
The deep economy of explanation
We can now state the asymmetry cleanly:
Persistence is self-explaining because it is cheap.Change demands explanation because it is costly.
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