| Sumario: | Recent work in quantum gravity (QG) suggests that spacetime is not fundamental. Rather, spacetime emerges from an underlying non-spatiotemporal reality. Spacetime functionalism has been proposed as one way to make sense of the emergence of spacetime. However, spacetime functionalism faces a 'collapse' problem. The functionalist analysis seems to force spacetime into the (more) fundamental ontology of QG, thereby conflicting with—rather than elucidating—spacetime emergence. In this paper, I show how to resolve the collapse problem. The solution is to draw on an existing distinction between physical and metaphysical notions of (relative) fundamentality. Using this distinction, we can see that spacetime functionalism does not after all force spacetime into the (more) fundamental ontology of QG in any troubling sense. Along the way, I suggest how to extend this solution to similar collapse problems in other domains.
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