Informational Gravity: Time, Spacetime, and Dark Energy as Emergent Properties of Informational Structure

We present a conceptual framework in which spacetime, gravity, and dark energy areemergent phenomena arising from the informational structure of bound energy. The central thesis is thatgravitational mass measures informationally bound energy: structured, causally connected energy thatmaintains internal relationships or constraints within a rest frame. Proper time — the time measuredalong a system's worldline — emerges from these internal causal relationships. Systems withoutinternal structure (such as massless excitations) define causal structure but have zero proper time alongtheir worldlines. Spatial distance is identified with causal separation in the resulting network: two systems are "far apart"if many causal steps connect them. Adopting a Planck-scale discreteness hypothesis (as in causal setapproaches), the Planck length serves as the minimal node spacing. The Malament theorem establishesthat causal ordering determines the topology and conformal geometry of spacetime; when supplementedwith volume information — which we identify with informational node density (a Level 2 interpretivestep) — the full metric of general relativity can be recovered. This framework reinterprets several known phenomena — gravitational redshift, time dilation, theequivalence principle, and cosmic acceleration — in informational terms. It connects establishedresearch programmes (Wheeler, Bekenstein, Verlinde, Penrose, Rovelli, Maldacena, Sorkin) under asingle informational principle and generates falsifiable experimental predictions, particularly regardingthe gravitational behaviour of low-information systems such as Bose-Einstein condensates. We distinguish throughout between three claim levels: (1) reinterpretation, (2) conceptual extrapolation,and (3) speculative quantitative predictions that can be constrained experimentally