Abstract Despite its empirical success, quantum mechanics continues to provoke foundational debates concerning the nature of probability, the ontological status of the quantum state, and the mechanism of measurement. 1 This work introduces Distributed Presence (DP) as a structural ontological framework that addresses these issues by reinterpreting quantum phenomena in terms of a system’s distributed mode of existence across its state space. Crucially, this distribution is modal rather than spatial: it concerns how a system is present across possible states, not how it is extended in physical space. Within the DP framework, a quantum system is not assumed to occupy a definite state prior to interaction. Instead, its fundamental mode of existence is an ontologically distributed presence, understood as a structural feature of reality rather than a reflection of epistemic uncertainty. From this standpoint, probability is not introduced as a primitive postulate but emerges operationally from the geometry of presence, yielding a structural derivation of the Born rule. Core quantum phenomena (including superposition, wave–particle duality, state reduction, and entanglement) are recast as different manifestations of a single underlying principle: the modal distribution, reconfiguration, and non‑separability of presence. Entanglement corresponds to the non‑factorizability of presence fractions over a composite state space, while non‑local correlations are interpreted as consequences of shared modal structure rather than dynamical signal transmission, fully consistent with relativistic causality. The framework is developed within a Euclidean geometric setting chosen to prioritize ontological clarity, without altering the predictive formalism of standard quantum mechanics or its Hilbert‑space representation. By grounding randomness, probability, and quantum behavior in the notion of modal distributed presence, DP offers a coherent foundational program that bridges the conceptual gap between unitary evolution and definite outcomes, providing an alternative to both epistemic interpretations and wave‑function realism.
Sadeq Nasiri Vatan (Mon,) studied this question.