Hong Joo Ryoo

Recent arguments in favor of Presentism leverage Markovianity, the principle of the future’s events being able to be determined/influenced only by current events (and sufficiently near events). These approaches, however, leave the room open for objections centered around recent speculative non-Markovian foundations of our physical theories. Using insights from Builes and Impagnatiello’s argument and drawing on recent quantum foundations, I explore how non-Markovian quantum dynamics may constrain metaphysical accounts of time. I compare rough versions of Eternalism and Presentism in their ability to accommodate temporally extended correlations and motivate further development with explicit treatment of non-Markovian physics in the metaphysics of time.

The explanatory structure of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity is marked by complementarity: the existence of distinct, mutually incompatible descriptions that are nonetheless each empirically valid in specific observational settings. In recent work, Ryoo (2025) proposed a context-dependent mapping framework (f c ) as an epistemic tool to capture this phenomenon. This framework maps each physically defined “context” to a set of laws that yield coherent and predictive explanations within that context. In this paper, I formally define the notion of “context” underlying the f c mapping, offer a general structural typology, and present case studies from quantum gravity and entanglement wedge reconstruction to illustrate how explanatory fragmentation is grounded in physical theory rather than epistemic limitation.

Modern physics proposals present deep tensions between seemingly contradictory descriptions of reality. Views of wave-particle duality, black hole complementarity, and the Unruh effect demand explanations that shift depending on how a system is observed. However, traditional models of scientific explanation impose a fixed structure that fails to account for varying observational contexts. This paper introduces context-dependent mapping, a framework that reorganizes physical laws into self-consistent subsets structured around what can actually be observed in a given context. By doing so, it provides a principled way to integrate complementarity into the philosophy of explanation.