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 Van Raamsdonk 2010), the ER=EPR conjecture (Maldacena 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.
Lars Rüggeberg (Mon,) studied this question.