The Evidential Arrow of Time: Records, Reconstruction, and Empirical Science

Empirical science does not begin from direct access to dynamical laws, but rather from records, i.e. persistent physical states that function as evidence. It is argued here that such records already define an asymmetric relation between what has become evidentially available and what has not. Time-symmetric laws, when discovered, are therefore reconstructed from within an asymmetric evidential domain, and not the other way around. As opposed to the standard bottom-up view that asks how evidently time-asymmetric Universe can emerge from fundamentally time-symmetric physical laws, empirical science must start from an evidential time-asymetric Universe and leads to the top-down view that the fundamental laws can be equally well symmetric or asymmetric, thereby weakening the Arrow of Time puzzle. This top-down mediation is described as an evidential transfer function; the physical selection, amplification, stabilization, and retention of correlations as records. The proposal explains why empirical access to any law is necessarily record-based and temporally asymmetric, with no recourse to the thermodynamic arrow.