On the Structural Asymmetry Between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, with a Formal Substrate Companion

This deposit contains two documents. The first is a short, plain-language essay arguing that gravity is not a force within spacetime but the geometric structure that defines it, named here the Gravitational Baseline Principle, and sketching how both spacetime and gravity emerge from a pre-geometric substrate of variably correlated quantum systems. The second is a mathematical companion giving that sketch explicit formal content: a finite-dimensional quantum substrate with no built-in geometry, from which a causal structure, an emergent hyperbolic geometry, and Einstein's field equation are each derived from established results rather than assumed, via the Lieb-Robinson bound, the entanglement-renormalization and holographic correspondence, and Jacobson's thermodynamic derivation of gravity respectively. The companion paper states its limitations plainly, including that its geometric construction is specifically Anti-de Sitter-style and does not, as it stands, extend to the de Sitter geometry of the observed universe, a genuinely open problem in the wider field, not glossed over here.