Most existing proposals to explain the temporal asymmetries we see around us
are sited within an approach to physics based on time evolution, and thus they
typically put the asymmetry in at the beginning of time in the form of a
special initial state. But there may be other possibilities for explaining
temporal asymmetries if we don't presuppose the time evolution paradigm. In
this article, we explore one such possibility, based on Kent's
`final-measurement' interpretation of quantum mechanics. We argue that this
approach potentially has the resources to explain the electromagnetic
asymmetry, the thermodynamic asymmetry, the coarse-graining asymmetry, the fork
asymmetry, the record asymmetry, and the cosmological asymmetry, and that the
explanations it offers may potentially be better than explanations appealing to
a special initial state. Our hope is that this example will encourage further
exploration of novel approaches to temporal asymmetry outside of the time
evolution paradigm.Comment: Forthcoming in BJP