AdS/CFT duality and the emergence of spacetime

The AdS/CFT duality has been a source of several strong conceptual claims in the physics literature that have yet to be explored by philosophers. In this paper I focus on one of these: the extent to which spacetime geometry and locality can be said to emerge from this duality, so that neither is fundamental. I argue: (1) that the kind of emergence in question is relatively weak, involving one kind of spacetime emerging from another kind of spacetime; (2) inasmuch as there is something conceptually interesting to say about the emergence of spacetime and locality (vis-à-vis spacetime ontology), it is no different from that already well known to those within canonical quantum gravity; (3) that at the core of AdS/CFT is an issue of representation and redundancy in representation.