The Arrow of Time as Standing Monotonicity

This paper gives an AASC treatment of the arrow of time. It does not introduce a new temporal substance, replacement entropy, preferred foliation, primitive collapse event, privileged cosmological boundary primitive, or information ontology. AASC is used as a mathematical necessity-constraint formalism: once a fixed target class is declared, same-scope alternatives are exhausted by testing whether they preserve the standing-bearing roles required by that target, collapse to presentation skin, move an anchor, import hidden tensor load, change scope, repair a failed act, or fail. The positive result is standing monotonicity in quotient form. Admissible irreversible fixation induces a standing preorder on raw standing-bearing stages. Quotienting by standing equivalence yields a partial order on standing-equivalence classes, and the standing arrow is the strict non-invertible direction of that quotient order. The paper therefore does not claim a partial order on raw stages. Primitive temporal direction, primitive entropy, primitive information, primitive probability, primitive causality, psychological memory, quantum measurement selection, and privileged cosmological boundary conditions are inadmissible as foundations because each presupposes the standing discipline needed to identify, compare, transport, or reuse its own content. Physical time is retained4 consequence ordering inside the realized physical interior; causality is witnessed dependence across that order; records are fixed witnesses available for downstream admissible reuse. Thermodynamic, record, causal, quantum-measurement, psychological, and cosmological arrows survive as effective projections or refinements. They may align locally without being identical in principle or required to align globally. The result is a unified constraint-formalism account in which familiar arrows survive as admissible, plural, and non-primitive projections or refinements over standing monotonicity. Because the quotient order is partial rather than globally linear, the standing arrow supplies an invariant orientation wherever standing comparison is fixed while allowing incomparable branches unless a domain-specific projection supplies additional comparability.