I'm no expert but I also lean toward superdeterminism. It's either that or the universe is not deterministic at all. Believing that the universe is only partly deterministic is the same as believing someone can be partly pregnant.
As I understand, superdeterminism isn't the same as determinism. Normally Bell's theorem would tell you that it's determinism, but a deterministic system still can arbitrarily end up with skewed statistics and thus look like anything and you can't expose it because it's skewed in a specific way. That's superdeterminism, it looks like not what it is by pure chance.
Superdeterminism is still determinism but an idea added to it for all particles sharing all future states. Superdeterminism is against the idea of real-time processing while Quantum Mechanics is typically imagined as real-time processing. Sure, determinism can illustrate a deterministic system producing infinite universes that are deterministically operating every possibility imaginable, where a local subject could get the impression things aren’t deterministic while they indeed are if viewing the whole system non-locally and that with what you’re describing doesn’t really fit the expression of chance.
In any determinism all particles share all future states simply because future states are predictable and there's only one future, which is total statistical correlation. In superdetermininsm these future states aren't any states, but particularly selected states that show skewed picture. And they ended up this way arbitrarily, which is a chance (maybe bayesian).
Gerard 't Hooft believes we would still have quantum computers faster than classical computers in a superdeterministic universe. However, the speedups would be more modest and factoring huge numbers in poly time would be out of the question
I've quoted it before but I will again just because I hate superdeterminism so much:
First, the logical flow: Bell’s theorem proves that no local, realistic theory can reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. It does so by considering a very specific situation of entangled particles being measured by spin detectors set at different angles. Critically, the angles of these spin detectors are assumed to be set independently from one another. ...
Experimenters have tried to ensure independence for all practical purposes with elaborate techniques: independent quasi-random number generators running with different algorithms on different computers are one very basic example. On more advanced experiments, they use quantum sources of randomness, and try to make sure that the choice is only made once the particles are in flight.
The trouble is that in principle, there will always be a point in the past at which mechanism used for the angle choice, and the mechanism used to produce the entangled particles were in causal contact with one another. (If all else fails, then the early universe will provide such a point.) The super-determination thesis says that any past causal contact can in principle provide correlation between the settings of the two detectors (or the detectors and the properties of the particles), and is the source of the violation of Bell’s inequality.
Here’s a deliberately ridiculous example. Once the particles are in flight, I throw in the air a box of Newton’s notes on alchemy. I select the one that falls closest to my feet. I roll two dice, and use them to select a random word from that page. I match the word with its closest equivalent in Caesar’s commentary on the Gallic wars, or the Iliad, or the complete works of Dickens, my choice of work depending on the orientation of the Crab pulsar at the moment of measurement. I use the word position in these works to select a number in this book A Million Random Digits (take the time to read the customer reviews). And I use this number to set my detectors. I repeat this for my other measurement runs, but I substitute in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code for Dickens every third go.
Superdetermination advocates would tell me that there is in principle a causal connection between my throwing the papers in the air, Newton, Caesar, Dickens as they sat down to write 300, 2000, and 150 years ago, the Crab pulsar and the RAND corporation’s random digit selection. And that it’s possible that these things have conspired (unknowingly) to make sure that my detector settings and a particle’s spin measurement is correlated in a particular way in my lab in a law-like way.
I can only reply that yes, it’s possible. I cannot prove it wrong. But I can find it unreasonable. And I would be tempted to call these people philosophically desperate.
> I can only reply that yes, it’s possible. I cannot prove it wrong. But I can find it unreasonable. And I would be tempted to call these people philosophically desperate.
I'd be tempted to call those people closet theists who are in denial, but maybe you're more polite than I am.
What I mean is that they have something in their system that is playing a god-like role, but they're "scientific", so it can't be God.
By the way, I would say the same about the "universe is a simulation" people.
Your argument is kind of hand wavy and while the same can be argued about quantum mechanics if not attempting to give the theory much thought. Similar to who you’re replying to as well. There exists a few ways that superdeterminism can make a universe such as our own while making humans believe in quantum mechanics and similar to the few ways that quantum mechanics can make a universe like our own with humans believing in superdeterminism. Both theories use logic to express how they do it and the only significant difference is real-time processing vs predeterminism.
> And that it’s possible that these things have conspired (unknowingly) to make sure that my detector settings and a particle’s spin measurement is correlated in a particular way in my lab in a law-like way.
Yes exactly, which is to say that your instrument calibration dicated by that elaborate randomization process, just ensures that the particle will arrive in a specific configuration, which is a purely local, realistic phenomenon.
Sabine and Palmer recently explained how superdeterminism can be understood easily as future input dependence:
Edit: despite superdeterminism annoying you so much, I bet you're perfectly fine with general relativity in which time is just another space-like coordinate, and the correlation you describe is a perfectly well-defined path along a closed timelike curve. An interesting inconsistency if true.
I think s/he is simply against anything that postulates things aren't happening in realtime. That's what the problem boils down to regarding superdeterminism vs quantum mechanics. Certain people are okay with predeterminism while others want every moment to have been processed when it happened maybe "process" isn't the best way to express it but it gets the point across.
Is it reasonable to say the universe might be superdeterministic, but in the example of choosing measurements for an experiment(or almost any other example imaginable), it might as well be truly random as the causal links affecting the instruments isn't likely to be 'conspiring' in some way to impact the results of the experiment?
e.g Anything could be predicted with absolute knowledge of the starting state of the universe, and infinite computing power, but in most practical cases the causal connections between seemingly unrelated objects is irrelevant and as good as random?
I think it stops being science at that point though. For example, if someone made a quantum computer powerful enough to factorise large numbers then that would appear to disprove superdeterminism. However, proponents could always argue that the computer only works because the universe conspires to make the human entering in the numbers to be factorized enter specific values which the computer will then know the factors of.
I'm not a physicist though, so I might have something wrong here.
> I would be tempted to call these people philosophically desperate.
Wouldn't it be equally valid to say that the Quora commenter is philosophically desperate to avoid the natural conclusion that there is an entity that is able to influence the actions of Newton and Caesar etc. and the commenter themselves?
