Emergent Time from Coherence Under Selection Pressure

We propose an operational account of emergent time grounded in coherence preservation under selection pressure. Rather than treating time as a fundamental primitive or as an artifact of entropy alone, we argue that stable temporal ordering arises necessarily in systems required to maintain long-horizon viability under irreversible loss dynamics. We formalize time as an induced ordering over coherence states produced by selection, death, and renewal processes. This framework yields falsifiable predictions and is directly testable in computational systems. The purpose of this paper is to establish conceptual and technical priority for this formulation, ahead of extended empirical and domain-specific work.