Distributed Presence III: Ontological Unity in Physics

This paper develops the Distributed Presence (DP) framework as a conceptual programme for rethinking the ontology of fundamental physics. Rather than treating space, time, matter, field, and interaction as irreducibly distinct categories, it explores whether they can be understood as emergent aspects of a single relational substrate. The analysis is organized around a three-level ontological hierarchy: a structural level of formally differentiated possibilities, a level of actualization through which such possibilities are successively realized, and an emergent level at which familiar temporal, spatial, and dynamical regularities appear.

Within this framework, time is interpreted not as a primitive background parameter but as the order of actualization, while space is approached as a higher-level geometric representation of stable neighbourhood relations within the underlying structure. Motion is correspondingly reinterpreted as redistribution of presence across neighbouring configurations rather than translation through a pre-given container. On this basis, the paper proposes a unified reading of space, field, and mass as different organizational regimes of one underlying reality, distinguished by relative density and stability rather than by ontological kind.

The paper also offers a cautious reinterpretation of interaction: what physics describes as force is treated, at the conceptual level, as a systematic bias in re-actualization rather than as an external agency. Finally, it considers whether certain relativistic regularities may be understood as emergent from structural constraints on succession and propagation. The aim throughout is not to present a complete alternative physical theory, but to articulate a coherent ontological framework that may contribute to philosophical discussions of emergent spacetime, temporal order, and unity in the foundations of physics.