Spacetime

Spacetime is defined as a property of interactions rather than as the container they happen in, which reverses the ordinary relation. A membrane forms around each interaction and the positions of those membranes relative to one another constitute the rest, so spacetime is produced by interactions rather than existing prior to them. Marsh wrote the consequence directly. Spacetime is simply that which contains an interaction, and a self is therefore not an object existing in one spacetime, since objects and selves are both networks of interactions and each interaction is wrapped in a unique one. That is what allows a self to be distributed rather than located, and it is what makes the persistence claim work, since interactions always exist in the spacetime they occurred in and nothing removes them. Time gets the same treatment. Will creates time, and time follows the second law of thermodynamics because the will desires it, with the conscious will pursuing greater entropy and the emotional will pursuing order. So the direction of time is a consequence of what wills want rather than a fact they are subject to. Two mechanisms in the framework depend on this. A repeater brings forward a cluster of interactions from a different spacetime, which is only coherent if those interactions are still there, and a capacitor links a vastly extended self through many spacetimes, which requires the plural.

Relational theories of space and time go back to Leibniz, who argued against Newton that space is nothing but the order of coexisting things and time the order of successions, which is very close to Marsh's second clause. General relativity made spacetime dynamic and shaped by its contents, and relational quantum mechanics and loop quantum gravity treat spacetime as emergent from more fundamental relations. Julian Barbour has argued that time does not exist independently of change. Marsh's version is relational in the Leibnizian sense and adds the will, since making the direction of time a consequence of what wills want is a claim no physical theory makes.