A Human-Language First-Conditions Companion to SFM 2.1 - The Pre-Planck Structural Proposal

Human inquiry repeatedly returns to a small group of foundational questions: What does “before” mean without time? What existed before structure? Is “nothing” a meaningful starting condition? Can distinction exist before objects? Can boundary exist before geometry? Can relation exist before space? Does continuity come before time? What turns possibility into structure? What has to be there at the start? This paper is a human-language first-conditions companion to SFM 2.1 - The Pre-Planck Structural Proposal. It does not claim that earlier philosophical or scientific traditions anticipated or endorse the PATON System. Instead, it establishes the recognised question landscape and provides a distinct structural account drawn from the formal architecture developed across the PATON System. The paper asks what minimum structural conditions would have to be satisfied before classical distance, geometry, clocks, fields, matter and ordinary physical description could become available. Its central human-language sequence is: Availability → distinction → boundary → candidate relation → constraint → admissibility → carrier → locking → persistence → continuity → metric capability → possible physical handover. Each core question is addressed through the same structure: existing question lineage, plain-language answer, grounding example, prior PATON structural source and claim boundary. This allows the answers to stand in ordinary language while showing where each structural component is inherited from earlier PATON work. The paper distinguishes formal verification from physical validation. It does not identify a pre-spacetime substance, claim that the universe is literally a graph, or report empirical confirmation of a pre-Planck physical correspondence. Explicit physical mappings, parameter calibration, independent human reproduction and empirical testing remain open.