With inertia reconceived as cheap persistence, and explanation tied to the cost of reconfiguration, one temptation still remains.
It is subtle, familiar, and deeply resilient.
The temptation is to say: very well — but surely there is still something systems do naturally.
This post closes that door.
The quiet return of substance
Talk of natural states appears innocuous. It often presents itself as shorthand, pedagogy, or pragmatic convenience.
But ontologically, it performs a specific move.
It reintroduces substance.
Whether the phrase is:
natural rest,
natural uniform motion,
equilibrium,
minimum-energy configuration,
what a system does when left alone,
…the structure is the same.
A privileged configuration is smuggled in beneath relational description.
Why “natural” always cheats
The word natural does three kinds of illicit work at once.
1. It presupposes isolability
To ask what a system does when left alone presumes that systems can be meaningfully detached from the relations that constitute them.
In a relational ontology, there is no such condition.
Nothing is ever left alone. Relations do not switch off.
2. It presupposes privilege
A natural state is one that requires no explanation, while deviations do.
This reinstates exactly the asymmetry the previous posts dismantled.
Persistence is cheap everywhere constraints are flat — not because a state is privileged, but because nothing makes reconfiguration cheaper.
3. It presupposes an external metric
Equilibrium and minimum-energy talk rely on an evaluative frame that sits outside the relational architecture it claims to describe.
But there is no global vantage point from which configurations can be ranked.
Only local architectures exist.
The mistake of equilibrium metaphysics
Equilibrium is often treated as a destination.
Relationally, it is not a state but a description of a stability regime.
Where constraints are symmetric and costs are evenly distributed:
successive re-cuts remain compatible,
deviation remains expensive,
persistence reproduces itself quietly.
Calling this equilibrium does not explain it. It merely labels a pattern.
The mistake is to treat the label as causal.
Stability without default
Once natural states are abandoned, something important changes.
Stability no longer needs justification.
But it also loses privilege.
There may be:
many stability regimes,
overlapping or nested,
local or transient,
mutually incompatible.
None of them is the state things aim toward.
They are simply regions of relational architecture where persistence is cheap.
No attractors, only architectures
It is tempting to redescribe stability regimes as attractors.
This too must be resisted.
Attractors suggest teleology: something pulling systems toward a destination.
Relationally, nothing pulls.
Architectures constrain. Costs distribute. Patterns persist where they are inexpensive to repeat.
No future state governs the present.
What replaces “natural motion”
Without natural motion or rest, what remains?
Only this:
Motion and persistence are structured re-actualisations under constraint.
The difference is architectural, not metaphysical.
Closing the loopholes
We can now state the closure condition explicitly.
There is:
no natural rest,
no natural motion,
no equilibrium state toward which systems tend,
no default configuration hiding beneath description.
There are only relational architectures and the costs they impose on re-actualisation.
What remains
With natural states removed, inertia no longer disguises substance.
It names the persistence of patterns where nothing makes change cheaper.
That is all.
And that is enough.
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