July 13th, 2026: Preprint for consideration at Foundations of Physics, updated with recent development within Absolute Frame Theory. We derive black hole horizons as the active set of a constrained variational problem within the Absolute Frame Theory (AFT). The first axiom of AFT, which quantizes the integrated interaction Lagrangian over four-volumes in half-integer units of ħ, is reformulated as a continuous bound on the local density of action. Parsimony fixes this density bound to the topological tension of the embedding up to a dimensionless factor of order unity. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions then yield a codimension-one surface where the constraint is active, which we identify with the event horizon. This identification reverses the standard causal arrow of general relativity: saturation of the embedding constraint is primary, and high curvature is its observable manifestation. From this structure the holographic area scaling of the horizon entropy follows directly, without invoking a holographic principle as input. The exact Bekenstein-Hawking coefficient 1/4 is not fixed by the framework; rather than a quantity left for later computation, we conjecture it to be a substratum-internal constant, structurally non-identifiable from observations internal to ℳ in the operational Fisher-information sense, the parameter-level counterpart of the program's Gödelian epistemic limit; this is a structural conjecture. We discuss four discriminating predictions: holographic exactness, AFT-specific logarithmic corrections, a discrete Planck-scale mass spectrum, and information preservation through the dual KKT multipliers as a candidate structural resolution of the Hawking information paradox.
Patricio E. Valenzuela (Mon,) studied this question.