What is a force?
A force is a steepness, the slope of a value spread across the network, and the nudge a pattern gets from sitting on it. Matter here is a pattern that repair keeps re-establishing. Put one unit of charge on one of a patch's twelve ports and the potential drops in exact fractions as you walk outward, eleven sixtieths of the fall between the source and its nearest neighbors, three sixtieths across the next ring, one sixtieth out to the far side. Steep near and shallow far is the shape Coulomb measured with a twisted thread in 1785, and here it comes from nothing but a list of which port touches which. A pattern sitting in such a fall gets re-established slightly off-center on each cycle, toward the steep side. How far off-center is the force.
Also in Chapter 26: Why Exactly These Forces?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 35: What Is Anything Made Of?watch a universe make its own particles