Gravity as Constraint and Entanglement as Capacity: A Unified Structural Account in Temporal Rate Ontology

We develop a unified structural account of gravity and quantum entanglement within Temporal Rate Ontology (TRO), a pregeometric framework in which ordered temporal succession is ontologically primitive. Both phenomena are shown to be controlled by a single underlying object: the continuation multiplicity Ω of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Entanglement is the global coupling of continuation capacity across subsystems; gravity is the local rate at which continuation capacity is suppressed, encoded via a temporal rate field. We make this identification precise by showing that the constraint parameter λ of the TRO decoherence kernel is structurally equivalent to the temporal rate field τ that encodes gravitational time dilation in the TRO cosmological program. From this identification we derive a Gravity-Entanglement Coupling Proposition: increasing gravitational constraint drives the joint continuation measure toward factorizability, recovering gravitational decoherence as an inevitable structural consequence rather than an additional postulate. We further show that the ER = EPR correspondence acquires a natural pregeometric interpretation: wormhole geometry and quantum entanglement are dual projections of the same non-factorizable DAG continuation structure onto geometric and quantum-mechanical representation schemes respectively. Near black hole horizons, the collapse of continuation multiplicity simultaneously suppresses entanglement capacity and produces the projection-induced information inaccessibility established in earlier work, unifying three previously separate results within the TRO program. The framework requires no new dynamics, no Hilbert space ontology, and no background spacetime.