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Spacetime is not a fundamental arena but a representational interface that becomes valid only when a quantum state's internal relational structure satisfies specific conditions. Three structural conditions jointly license a spacetime description: (1) entanglement must be sufficiently organized to support connected geometry; (2) entanglement must not be so dense as to erase locality through volume-law scrambling; and (3) decoherence must suppress phase relationships enough to produce WKB-stable classical histories. A separate rendering condition: the Higgs field’s vacuum expectation value, sets the classical mass spectrum and stabilizes decoherence once spacetime is licensed. When all conditions hold, a subsystem is forced into a classical mode of representation characterized by locality, geometry, causal order, and sequential time. The Big Bang is reframed as the relational event at which these conditions were first satisfied, rather than a temporal origin. The rendering model is then extended to examine cosmological parameters as interface requirements, classical end-time scenarios as failures of the interface (not the substrate), and the metaphysical implications of a universe whose deepest ontology is non-geometric, nonlocal, and non-temporal. Drawing on philosophical traditions from Plato to Bergson alongside modern quantum gravity, the paper concludes that reality is correlation: spacetime is the classical world's shadow of a deeper relational whole, and the wavefunction is the universe.
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Laurn Larson (2026) studied this question.
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