Physics describes mass through its measurable effects and through mechanisms that contribute to the mass of particles and composite structures. The Mechanism asks an ontological question: What is experienced as mass, and how does this experience arise?

In The Mechanism, mass is understood as qualia. Its abstract foundation is the organisation of SEPARATIONS and MEANINGS in KNOWING. What we experience manifestly originates in the fundamental impulse and reading through the Experience Circle.

An attractor never stands alone. It enters into relations with surrounding structures and receives support through them. A change in the organisation therefore affects an interconnected relational landscape. The attractor’s stability consists in how this landscape maintains and confirms a particular understanding.

Here, The Mechanism seeks the explanation of inertia. When a persistent structure changes its motion, its relations to its surroundings change, even when its internal form is preserved. Inertia is understood as the manifest resistance corresponding to this relational reorganisation. The explanatory task is to show how the attractor organisation and the relevant readings give rise to precisely this resistance.

This does not mean that SEPARATIONS are deleted or established KNOWING is undone. Changes establish new relationships, while what came before remains. It is the current organisation and its further development that change.

Mass is therefore not a substance added to a structure. The manifest experience of mass has its foundation in CHANGE, impulse and EC reading. Every established SEPARATION has this as its origin.

A higher attractor incorporates lower attractors and thus the understanding of a more extensive foundation of SEPARATIONS. The higher organisation thereby encompasses more of the history of establishment that, on the manifest side, is experienced through the fundamental impulse. The relationship between incorporated understanding and mass is therefore not accidental: both originate in the same CHANGES and readings.

What matters is the extent of the foundation actually incorporated. Height in the emergence tree expresses this incorporation, but is not a separate source of mass. SEPARATIONS remain in THE SOURCE, and the same SEPARATION does not become several because it forms part of several MEANINGS.

The attractor’s incorporated foundation and relational support thus provide an ontological explanation of mass and inertia. The further derivation must specify how this foundation is expressed as particular mass values and particular effects when motion changes.

Solidity, weight and inertia are different experiences and effects. The Mechanism seeks their foundation in the same ontology, but must explain each through the organisation and reading relevant to it.

The principle of attractor stability also has significance beyond what we usually call physics. A psychological identity can be maintained through extensive relational support and incorporation into the ego-tree. Change can then be experienced as difficult, heavy or threatening. The Mechanism proposes a common underlying principle for such psychological inertia and physical inertia: established organisations derive their stability from the relations in which they participate. This does not make the two experiences identical, but places them within the same explanatory framework.

The ontological claim is that mass and inertia have their foundation in the organisation of KNOWING and appear as manifest experience through the Experience Circle. The further derivation must show how this foundation gives rise to the specific relationships measured by physics.

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