Thanks for this very long answer. That would be a perfect discussion for a science cafe or something similar (which would be much more suitable than writing and writhing and writing). Anyway I guess we have to deal with written comments at the moment.
While I cannot calculate - or even reasonably estimate - the sum of the involved values, I can only conceive of this gestalt being utterly equitable, and not conceive of any way in which it could fail to resolve perfectly.
That’s somewhat a problem because calculations are required to be able to compare predictions with data. And data will tell us whether your idea is possible or not.
All data known so far show that causality is satisfied (especially in the context of relativity that matters here), and agree with relativity. Therefore, if someone wants to replace the currently admitted paradigm by something else, or even generalise it (which is not impossible; this already happened in the past), this person has to show that the new framework does at least as good as the previous one (or in other words that there is a gain), and that the theory is equipped with unique predictions so that there are ways to test it in the future and unambiguously show that it is working (or not; both a positive and a negative conclusion are useful).
We perceive them very differently, and have been fortunate enough to grasp that our perceptions do not convey what actually exists, because spacetime is what exists. […] Only spacetime does enable reality to exist and equitably resolve, and only as a totality.
What I don’t get here is that physics has nothing to do with perceptions. For instance, we can perceive Earth as being flat at our scale. Of course it is not.
At the end we have a mathematical framework that can be used not only to describe past results, but also to make predictions. This is more or less the mere definition of a theory. It is not because we, as humans, perceive something, that it happens like that in nature. Nature has nothing to do with our human perception.
The fact that we have space, time and spacetime does not lead to any specific issue to me. In some domains we can consider space and time as separate entities (for instance when I walk or drive a car), and sometimes we cannot do this (cosmology, particle physics). I do not see any contradiction here.
I reckon the appearance of chaotic eruption of virtual particles from quantum foam simply reveals our inability to perceive spacetime in which causality works directionlessly to produce the eruption of virtual pairs necessary to resolve the sum total of forces equitably.
Here I don’t understand because it seems to be unrelated to the rest of the discussion. That’s a particle physics thing and not a cosmology one, except if you want to discuss particle models of inflation (that have a connection with cosmology). In particle physics, there is a well-defined way to handle virtual particles, higher order corrections, etc. and it works. Theory and data agree to a very high level of precision.
Indeed, the fact of spacetime warping across time as well as space due to the presence of mass everywhen and everywhere is the essential crux of conceiving the unitary nature of reality, since that warping does not propagate through space over time, but simply exists as mass exists in the unitary field of spacetime.
I don’t see any reason why this would not be accounted for in existing calculations. Gravitational lensing is a good examples where this is actually done.
The invisibility of mass at other times effecting spacetime warping is because light moves at the speed of light, which takes time to propagate through space and thus does not affect our observations of spacetime warping due to mass present at other times because that warping does not propagate across spacetime like forces do. That warping is an aspect of spacetime itself.
This is true. But this also mean light can go back in time. Therefore, as I wrote before, it is only the proposal of events in the future having an influence on events in the past that worries me. I do not see how this would be acceptable in light of current data.
It does not follow that treating spacetime as a four dimensional whole excludes gravity, and instead I see that the affect of mass reaches across time as it does space, since what the affect of mass is actually reaching across is spacetime.
I also don't understand why gravity should be excluded. In general relativity, it is not. Minkowski spacetime is used for calculations involving special relativity from many years. And it has a causal structure.
Given that mass warps spacetime, it follows that mass we observe as well as mass we do not observe in our imperfect perception of spacetime is effecting that warping, because while we perceive mass in a present instant, mass actually exists in a continuum, not a sequence of instants succeeding one another. Exactly as we see that mass a meter from a point of observation effects spacetime warping, and mass 10 meters away effects spacetime warping, moderated by the inverse square law, mass 1 second from the moment of observation effects spacetime warping, and mass 1 week from the moment of observation effects spacetime warping, moderated by the inverse square law.
This is actually one of the things that we do to ‘detect’ invisible mass. We use their effect on the warping of spacetime to get a grasp on it.
While I have utterly no ability to understand any of the relevant math, I am told by @Shaula on Cosmoquest that the affect of "a mass 1 second away in time would have a gravitational effect 30,000,000,000,000,000x greater than a mass 1m away. So you need to introduce some scaling factor for masses displaced in time to counter that - and if you make it 1 / c^2 then the effects rapidly become unmeasurable. If we use that scaling then an object would need to be almost stationary for about 300x the age of the universe to experience the same effect as having a similar object a metre away."
That’s an interesting forum discussion (it seems that many people there are telling. What the people there told you is basically what I told you above in terms of having a theoretical framework. Without doing the math themselves, I am afraid there is no way to get further. At the end of the day, physics is always numerical.
Cheers!