From Succession to Spatial Representation: Dimensional Emergence in a Temporal Rate Ontology

Foundational approaches that reject the ontological primacy of spacetime geometry often leave unanswered a persistent question: why spatial representation reappears so ubiquitously in physical description. This paper does not attempt to derive space from non-spatial primitives, nor to establish the necessity of spatial structure. Instead, it offers a programmatic and diagnostic analysis of the representational pressures that arise when multiple temporally ordered processes with distinct rates must be coherently coordinated. The central claim is modest: linear temporal succession, while sufficient to encode sequence, becomes representationally inefficient, unstable, and convention-dependent as relational coordination among multiple processes increases. Under such conditions, spatial representation functions as a stabilizing and pragmatically advantageous encoding scheme. No formal embedding theorem, metric derivation, or dimensional explanation is provided. The proposal is explicitly exploratory and comparative, intended to clarify why spatial representation is repeatedly reintroduced in physical theories even when geometry is denied ontological fundamentality.