Moving to a field theoretic model is precisely what allows you to abstract away at least some of those questions. Space-time is distorted by energy, rather tha

Moving to a field theoretic model is precisely what allows you to abstract away at least some of those questions. Space-time is distorted by energy, rather than just mass, which reduces the number of things the universe has to be prescient to. We can further eliminate some more prescience, by thinking in terms of density rather than mass: The laws of physics stated locally require only (say) a number and a field, rather than a pesky integral. "Space tells matter how to move, Matter tells space how to curve" And asking these questions is a good thing. I've been sitting down and really thinking about special relativity recently, it's fun going through old papers and seeing about how to derive the algebra in the most smugly experiment-less way.