The Unbound Wave Function: The Spatiotemporal Assumption Behind the Standard Puzzles

A century after the wave function's introduction, the vocabulary chosen for it in 1926 - propagation, evolution, collapse, wave - still quietly settles its ontology: each term presupposes an object already situated in spacetime. This paper explores what follows from withholding that assumption. On the proposed reading - here called the unbound reading - spatiotemporal predicates fail to apply to the entity described by ψ, and location, duration, and ordering arise only at interaction events. The mathematics is unchanged; only the referent is reinterpreted. The claim's logical form is predicate-failure rather than denial: spatiotemporal predicates are held not to apply to the referent absent registration, which is what withholding the 1926 assumption, as opposed to negating it, amounts to. The proposal is offered under an explicit contract: it sorts every standard puzzle it touches into an itemized ledger of what is dissolved, what is relocated and left open, and what is split; it states the experimental result that would kill it; and its consistency with standard quantum computation is demonstrated in executable form. The reading inverts the standard explanandum: superposition is the natural condition of an unbound domain, and it is definiteness, not coexistence, that requires explanation. Under this reading, two difficulties that depend specifically on the spatiotemporal assumption - the distance-indifference of entangled correlations and the frame-dependence of collapse ordering - become expected rather than tolerated; four others (delayed choice, wave-particle duality, contextuality, the observer effect) cease to arise under any ψ-ontic reading and are inherited rather than earned; the problem of time is reframed; and outcome selection, the applicability of chance, the preferred basis, the Born measure, the Tsirelson bound, and the local arrow of time are explicitly relocated rather than solved. The proposal is situated among converging programs (possibilist transactional interpretation, timeless configuration-space dynamics, relational quantum mechanics, structure-first metaphysics) and distinguished by its deliberate mechanism-agnosticism. Its death condition is confirmation of registration without interaction - spontaneous collapse of the GRW or Diósi-Penrose type; short of that, it competes on the currencies interpretations have always competed on and says so.