Acting in the Garden of Forking Paths

The Garden of Forking Paths is a popular theory of agency in the context of branching time. It has two main elements. First, we have the idea that the future is open because it consists of several alternative futures. Second, agents are sometimes able to act in ways that determine which future, among the available ones, is selected and actualized. In this paper, I argue that the Garden of Forking Paths is, upon closer inspection, inherently implausible. More specifically, I first introduce and discuss two principles that I take to be essential to the Garden of Forking Paths. I then show that once we reflect on the temporal location of the decisions of agents choosing among alternatives, it turns out that the two principles cannot both be satisfied.