Gravity as a Primitive Beneath Emergent Spacetime: A Does/Is Audit of the Curvature Identity

Mainstream physics, by its working default, identifies gravity with spacetime curvature and treats spacetime as fundamental. The quantum-gravity programs that challenge this make spacetime and gravity both emergent from a deeper quantum-informational layer. This paper proposes a different placement that keeps the emergence move and inverts the arrow: gravity as the primitive beneath emergent spacetime, with spacetime as the structure of gravity and time among its deeds. The proposal is an audit inside general relativity, not a rival to it. Every confirmed prediction of general relativity and quantum mechanics is retained; what is disputed is one interpretive overlay, the identification of gravity with curvature, which is shown to be a choice rather than a forced reading. The contribution offered here is principally that audit. The primitive it points to is, by the paper's own standard, not yet seated, and the paper is explicit about why: the no-referent objection it neutralizes is neutralized only at the level of intrinsic nature, where no primitive is defined, while the proposed primitive additionally lacks the exact structural definition that charge and energy possess; the cosmological-constant reframing reaches gravity's own self-energy and not the matter-sector vacuum energy that drives the catastrophe; and the framework's one near-term empirical contact, an evolving rather than constant dark energy now under measurement, is shared with several rival programs, so the relevant data is non-diagnostic for this framework in both directions until a divergent prediction is developed. These limits are stated as the work that remains.