Where Is Here?
Part 4 of the Core Concepts series: Why spatial extension depends on temporal ordering, and what that means for the world you see
Part 3 ended with a provocation.
We’d just shown that time isn’t fundamental — it’s the ordering relation that emerges when non-identical actualizations accumulate as Memory. Change is prior; time is what change looks like from inside the interface. And then I said: space is even more derivative than time.
That’s a big claim. Space feels more fundamental than almost anything. It feels like the thing everything else is in. You’re sitting somewhere right now. There’s a distance between you and the nearest wall. The room has dimensions. Space seems like the most basic, most obvious, most undeniable feature of reality.
So let’s look at why it isn’t.
The Asymmetry
Here’s a thought experiment.
Close your eyes. Experience a sequence: a thought, then a feeling, then a sound, then an itch. One after another. Each distinct from the last.
You just had temporal ordering — non-identical actualizations, distinguishable from each other, accumulated in sequence. And you did it without any spatial extension at all. No left or right, no near or far, no dimensions. Just: this, then this, then this. Pure qualitative sequence.
Time without space. It works.
Now try the reverse. Try to conceive of spatial extension — here versus there, this position versus that one — without any capacity to distinguish one position from another.
You can’t. Distinguishing positions requires comparison: this one, not that one. Comparison requires at minimum an ordering — something like “first I consider this, then I consider that.” Even a frozen spatial snapshot — a photograph, a grid, a coordinate system — presupposes that positions are distinguishable. And distinguishability is exactly what temporal ordering provides.
You can’t even describe space without implicitly invoking sequence. Trace from point A to point B. Scan across a visual field. Specify coordinates in order. Every attempt to articulate spatial extension smuggles in the ordering that time provides.
This isn’t a TNT claim. It’s just logic.
Time can exist without space. Space cannot exist without time. The dependency runs one way.
Why This Follows From What We’ve Built
Part 3 established that time is the ordering relation induced by non-identical actualizations retained as Memory. That’s A5 in TNT’s formal apparatus — time has no independent ontology. It emerges from the fact that actualizations are non-identical and they accumulate.
Now watch what happens when we ask what space requires.
Spatial extension needs distinguishable positions. “Here” has to be different from “there” — otherwise you don’t have spatial extension, you just have... nothing spatial. But distinguishable positions require non-identical actualizations. You can’t have two distinguishable positions without there being a difference between them, and difference means non-identical actualizations. And non-identical actualizations retained as Memory — that’s temporal ordering. That’s time.
So spatial extension presupposes what temporal ordering already provides. Space borrows from time. It can’t stand on its own.
This is DP14 in TNT’s formal framework: spatial extension is logically derivative of temporal ordering. Not “space happens to depend on time in our universe.” Not “space and time are related.” Space logically requires what time provides — distinguishability, ordering, the capacity to differentiate one position from another — while time requires only non-identical actualizations and their retention. The asymmetry is logical, not empirical.
What Motion Actually Is
This reframing changes how we understand something as basic as movement.
Watch a bird cross the sky. Common sense says: the bird moves through space over time. There’s a thing (bird), a container (space), and a medium (time), and the bird traverses the container while the medium ticks along.
TNT says: there is no motion. There is only updating.
What you experience as “a bird crossing the sky” is the appearance of non-identical actualizations across ordered Now events. Each actualization is complete in itself — a full experiential moment. The “movement” is the pattern of difference between actualizations as they accumulate. It’s not a thing traveling through a container. It’s the interface rendering a sequence of distinct actualizations as spatial displacement.
That’s A11: there is no motion, only updating via iterated actualization.
This isn’t as strange as it sounds. Film works this way. Twenty-four still frames per second, each one complete, each one slightly different from the last. Movement is what you see. What exists is a sequence of non-identical stills. The motion is real as experience — you genuinely see the bird cross the sky — but ontologically, there’s just updating.
The difference is that in film, there’s still a projector, a screen, a spatial setup. In TNT, there is no screen. The space the “frames” appear to move through is itself part of the rendering.
“Here” Is Interface
So where does this leave us?
If spatial extension is logically derivative of temporal ordering, and physical reality is an experiential interface arising from consistent patterns of actualization, then spatial separation — the distance between you and the wall, the space between stars, the vastness of the observable universe — is a feature of how actualizations appear. Not a constraint on what can cohere.
That distinction matters enormously.
We tend to think of space as the most fundamental container there is. Things are in space. Events happen at locations. Distance constrains what can interact with what. If two things are far apart, they can’t influence each other without something crossing the distance between them.
But in TNT, spatial separation is interface-level. It describes relations within the experiential interface, not ontological distance. The global coherence boundary B₀ and the micro-boundary condition Bµ operate without spatial limitation. Coherence constraints are not attenuated by apparent distance. Two actualizations that appear to be on opposite sides of the universe are not more ontologically separated than two that appear to be side by side.
That’s DP15: spatial separation is interface-level, not ontological.
“Here” is real — as real as any feature of the interface. You experience it. It constrains your accessible potentials at the interface level. But it’s not the bedrock of reality. It’s the rendering.
Why “Nonlocal” Isn’t Spooky
And this is where it gets good.
Quantum mechanics has a famous puzzle. When two particles are entangled, measuring one instantaneously affects the measurement of the other — regardless of how far apart they are. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Physicists have spent a century trying to figure out how spatially separated particles coordinate without anything traveling between them.
The question presupposes that spatial separation is ontologically fundamental. That distance is a real constraint. That for correlations to exist across space, something has to cross that space — some signal, some influence, some hidden variable.
TNT denies the presupposition.
If spatial separation is interface-level, there is no distance to traverse. What appears as “nonlocal” correlation is simply the expression of shared coherence constraints that were never spatially limited in the first place. B₀ and Bµ don’t care about distance — distance is a feature of how their effects appear, not a constraint on how they operate.
The entanglement puzzle isn’t resolved. It’s abolished. The question rested on a false presupposition — that physical space is a fundamental container within which things must interact. Remove that presupposition, and there’s nothing left to explain. Asking how entangled particles coordinate across space is like asking how a dream character travels to a dream location. The question misapplies a concept — spatial distance as ontological constraint — outside its domain.
This isn’t a reinterpretation of the physics. The empirical findings stand. The mathematics is untouched. The correlations are real. What changes is the metaphysical interpretation: the correlations don’t need explanation as nonlocal, because “local” and “nonlocal” are interface-level distinctions, not ontological ones.
To Recap:
Part 1 gave us the ground: Awareness as the primitive substrate, the Field of Infinite Potential containing everything that could be, B₀ carving out what’s coherent from what’s forever incoherent. The static foundation.
Part 2 gave us actualization: conscious apertures selecting from accessible potential, the Now as the indivisible selection event, actualization as experience itself. The dynamic process.
Part 3 gave us Memory: the structured accumulation of all actualizations, Bµ derived from M, the emergence of time as an ordering relation, identity as trajectory rather than substance. The accumulation that shapes without determining.
Part 4 gave us emergent space: spatial extension as logically derivative of temporal ordering, spatial separation as interface-level rather than ontological, motion as the appearance of updating rather than traversal. The rendering that isn’t bedrock.
Together, these four articles have dismantled the scaffolding most people use to think about reality. Space isn’t the container. Time isn’t the medium. Physical reality isn’t the substrate. These are all features of the interface — real as experience, genuine as appearances, but not fundamental. The fundamental level is Awareness, coherence constraints, and the act of selection by which potential becomes actual.
But we haven’t yet confronted the interface directly. We’ve said physical reality is an experiential interface — but what does that actually mean? What is the physical world, if not bedrock? What are brains doing, if not generating consciousness? And what happens when a recording — a book, a song, a photograph — carries something from one conscious aperture to another?
We’ll discuss that, next time.
Next: “The World You See Isn’t What You Think” — physical reality as interface, what recordings actually are, and why brains don’t generate consciousness.