Proto-Space: A Formal and Philosophical Framework for Spacetime Emergence from Quantum Entanglement

This paper develops a formal and philosophical framework for understanding the pregeometric ground state of reality, as implied by the spacetime emergence thesis. Building on results from the AdS/CFT correspondence (Maldacena 1998; Ryu & Takayanagi 2006; Van Raamsdonk 2010), the ER=EPR conjecture (Maldacena & Susskind 2013), and holographic quantum error correction (Almheiri, Dong & Harlow 2015), I introduce the concept of proto-space – a state that is neither fully spatial nor fully non-spatial, but realizes some but not all functional roles of spacetime. The degree of spacetime emergence is formalized through an information-theoretic order parameter η = S_EE / S_max, supplemented by mutual information as a measure of proto-spatial connectivity, spectral geometry as a measure of geometric smoothness, and quantum error correction as an information-theoretic interpretation of the emergence threshold. The central hypothesis states that three physically distinct regimes – sub-Planck scales, the black hole interior, and the pre-Big-Bang state – are structurally related: they belong to the same universality class of the emergence transition. This claim is formulated precisely enough to be falsifiable in tensor network simulations. The paper contributes to the philosophy of physics through the development of a gradual ontology of spacetime in connection with functionalism (Lam & Wüthrich 2018; Knox 2019), through implications for ontic structural realism, and through the transformation of Leibniz’s question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” into a structural question about the physical state space. Throughout, the epistemic status of each claim is explicitly marked.