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Branching time and doomsday
Author(s) -
Andreoletti Giacomo
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
ratio
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.475
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 1467-9329
pISSN - 0034-0006
DOI - 10.1111/rati.12328
Subject(s) - openness to experience , branching (polymer chemistry) , mirroring , futures contract , moment (physics) , epistemology , economics , psychology , philosophy , social psychology , physics , classical mechanics , financial economics , materials science , composite material
Branching time is a popular theory of time that is intended to account for the openness of the future. Generally, branching time models the openness of the future by positing a multiplicity of concrete alternative futures mirroring all the possible ways the future could unfold. In the literature, a distinction is drawn among branching‐time theories: those that make use of moment‐based structures and those that employ history‐based ones. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a particular kind of openness relative to the possibility that time ends (doomsday). I then show that whereas moment‐based branching structures cannot represent this kind of openness, history‐based structures can account for it. The conclusion is that history‐based structures have an advantage over moment‐based ones.