The Discrete Gravitational Ontology: A Concrete Realisation of Non-Spatiotemporal Quantum Gravity

Recent work in the philosophy of quantum gravity argues that spacetime may not be fundamental and must instead emerge from a non-spatiotemporal substrate. This paper presents the Discrete Gravitational Ontology (DGO) as a concrete realisation of that programme. DGO posits a discrete relational network whose probabilistic update rule generates temporal ordering, local causal structure, and effective geometry without presupposing spacetime. Persistent relational patterns act as mass by consuming update capacity, producing causal drag and curvature in the coarse-grained limit. I show how DGO satisfies key criteria for emergent-spacetime models articulated by Huggett & Wüthrich, Lam & Wüthrich, and Oriti, while also yielding testable toy-model predictions, including curvature scaling, cosmological growth exponents, and compact-object phenomenology. The framework thus offers both a conceptual laboratory for analysing laws beyond spacetime and a minimal model of how spacetime and gravitational dynamics can arise from purely relational microstructure.