Bell's superdeterminism compared to determinism

[user30]

If you did always get HH or TT, then determinism cannot explain that. You need an addition assumption that correlates what happens at two remote locations. Not only an assumption that the coin tosses are predetermined.

I think I'm starting to get it now.. . What they are saying is that traditional, causal determinism cannot account for correlations in QM, for that we need superdeterminism.

If I understood it right, it sounds a bit like Leipniz's view of determinism.

"Leibniz is the most famous proponent of pre-established harmony. In his hands, the pre-established harmony has four main tenets: (1) no change in the states of a created substance is due to another created substance (i.e., there is no intersubstantial causation); (2) all (non-initial, natural) change in the states of a created substance is due to that substance itself (i.e., there is intrasubstantial causation); (3) each created substance has a “blueprint” (i.e., a complete concept or law of the series) that lists all of its states; and (4) each “blueprint” conforms with the blueprints of all other created substances (i.e., each of a created substance's natural states cohere with all the natural states of every other created substance)."

 

[PeterDonis]

It was declared locked and shut by many physicists in various publications on the subject. Can you name a physicist who did not reference Bells theorem as decided before 2015? The info pages prior to 2015 made it clear that more experiments are needed, but that was not the picture drawn by physicists to the general public.

Whether or not it was "declared locked and shut" is not a question of physics, it's a question of personal opinion. As such, it is off topic for this discussion. Please keep discussion focused on the thread topic, which is superdeterminism.

 

[Nugatory]

Free will is an illusion - that gets us out of the crisis, does it?

It does not. Rejecting free will is necessary but not sufficient for a superdeterministic explanation of quantum correlation.

Here’s a thought experiment that relies on superdeterminism and requires much more than just a rejection of free will:
I design a clever automated device with a polarizing filter and a chamber into which we can insert a billet of uranium; the device sets its orientation for each measurement according to the pattern of random radioactive decay in that uranium billet. I make two copies my design blueprints; one goes into storage on Earth and the other goes into something like the Voyager spacecraft . A few tens of millennia later the spacecraft reaches an inhabited planet, and these alien physicists build the machine according to the blueprint I sent them, including locating an ore deposit and mining and refining some uranium. Meanwhile my remote descendants are doing the same thing with the blueprints left back on earth. After a decade or so exchanging radio messages to confirm that both sides have set up their devices, some entangled photon pairs are generated and sent to both detectors (another few years) and then the results are shared by radio (even more years)... and it is seen that Bell’s inequality has been violated.

The superdeterminist explanation is that there is a relationship between the decay patterns of two ostensibly independent pieces of uranium mined and refined on different planets light-years apart and the BBO crystal we’re using to generate our entangled photon pairs. It’s possible - all three deterministically evolved from the same cloud of intergalactic schmutz a few billion years ago - but I feel justified in applying adjectives like “extraordinary” and “implausible” to that possibility.

On the other hand... if I reject superdeterminism, then I must also give up one or both of realism and locality...

 

[user30]

... not just predetermined, but they also have to be correlated to make it look like QM is correct!

Oh I see. Doesn't superdeterminism lead to holism then? I understand how it would be devastating to the scientific enterprise but that of course is not an argument against it.


Holism in science, or holistic science, is an approach to research that emphasizes the study of complex systems. Systems are approached as coherent wholes whose component parts are best understood in context and in relation to one another and to the whole.
This practice is in contrast to a purely analytic tradition (sometimes called reductionism) which aims to gain understanding of systems by dividing them into smaller composing elements and gaining understanding of the system through understanding their elemental properties.[1] The holism-reductionism dichotomy is often evident in conflicting interpretations of experimental findings and in setting priorities for future research.

"Richard Healey offered a modal interpretation and used it to present a model account of the puzzling correlations which portrays them as resulting from the operation of a process that violates both spatial and spatiotemporal separability. He argued that, on this interpretation, the nonseparability of the process is a consequence of physical property holism; and that the resulting account yields genuine understanding of how the correlations come about without any violation of relativity theory or Local Action.[10] Subsequent work by Clifton, Dickson and Myrvold cast doubt on whether the account can be squared with relativity theory’s requirement of Lorentz invariance but leaves no doubt of an spatially entangled holism in the theory.[11][12] Paul Davies and John Gribbin further observe that Wheeler's delayed choice experiment shows how the quantum world displays a sort of holism in time as well as space.[13]"

 

[user30]

On the other hand... if I reject superdeterminism, then I must also give up one or both of realism and locality...

Actually no.. The Many Worlds interpretation prescribes an expanded form of realism, not abandoned, and is a local theory.

If by realism you mean this:

"Realism in the sense used in physics[6] is the idea that nature exists independently of man's mind"

 

[user30]

Now as for the non realistic ones, to me, the Copenhagen interpretation is no longer tenable precisely due to Bells theorem in conjuction with this:

"Heisenberg did not try to specify exactly what the collapse of the wavefunction meant. He, however, emphasized that it should not be understood as a physical process.[11] Niels Bohr also repeatedly cautioned that we must give up a “pictorial representation.” The founders of the Copenhagen Interpretation preferred to stress the mathematical formalism of what was occurring.". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse

The problem with viewing wave function collapse as epistemic/knowledge reduction is that according to Bells theorem, Quantum Mechanics is not incomplete.. Hence the knowledge reduction as a way of explaining probabilities is no longer justified.

Many Worlds at least attempts to explain it through a subjective experience route within a branching process, the Copenhagen interpretation does not even make an attempt, which was acceptable until Bell's theorem, in my opinion.

 

[PeterDonis]

the Copenhagen interpretation is no longer tenable

Please review the forum rules for this forum, in particular the following:

Claims about a particular interpretation being true/false, correct/incorrect, right/wrong, better/worse, like/don't like are not helpful to discussion and will be moderated strictly.

Please keep discussion focused on what various interpretations say, not on yours or anyone's personal opinions about which ones are "tenable".

 

[user30]

Please review the forum rules for this forum, in particular the following:
Please keep discussion focused on what various interpretations say, not on yours or anyone's personal opinions about which ones are "tenable".

Alright then. Back to superdeterminism: this is in other words determinism+pre arrangement in an effort to obviate puzzles in our QM model. I did some digging in the archives and fine-tuning was a different term they used which made it more sensible.

It's been established by Bell, at least, that this is a possible world, incredibly. With that out of the way we need to move forward to what the reasons would be for such a world to be in existence. Anybody got an idea that is grounded in science and is not arbitrary (it just is that way)?

 

[PeterDonis]

we need to move forward to what the reasons would be for such a world to be in existence

Basically you appear to be asking why the universe should be arranged in a way that doesn't make sense to humans. I don't see any particular reason why it should be arranged in a way that does make sense to humans. I don't think you can rule out superdeterminism just on the grounds that you don't like it or that you can't see a reason for it to be that way.

 

[Nugatory]

It's been established by Bell, at least, that this is a possible world, incredibly.

Do you have a source for that “established by Bell” assertion?

The quote in the original post in this thread is not such a source. There Bell is just stating two things that were already well-known and uncontroversial: we cannot prove that the universe is not superdeterministic; and if it is then his inequality need not hold. That doesn’t mean that the possibility has to be taken seriously.

Note also the following sentences in the Wikipedia article, which state correctly (and with some understatement) that Bell considered this possibility “implausible”.

At this point I have to really seriously urge you to get hold of a copy of Bell’s book “Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics”.

 

[A. Neumaier]

The operational definition for determinism is:

if you know the state ket at one point in time then you can predict the state ket at all future times

This is not operational since a state cannot be measured unless it is extremely simple.

 

[jedishrfu]

The wikipedia article on superdeterminism mentions a discussion the Gerard T'Hooft had with John Bell on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft discussed this loophole with John Bell in the early '80s. "I raised the question: Suppose that also Alice’s and Bob’s decisions have to be seen as not coming out of free will, but being determined by everything in the theory. John said, well, you know, that I have to exclude. If it’s possible, then what I said doesn’t apply. I said, Alice and Bob are making a decision out of a cause. A cause lies in their past and has to be included in the picture."[6]

The implications of superdeterminism, if it is true, would bring into question the value of science itself by destroying falsifiability, as Anton Zeilinger has commented:

[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.[7]

 

[jedishrfu]

And there's this article in Frontiers in Physics:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139/full

and this arxiv paper by Sabine Hossenfelder and TN Palmer

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462

and lastly, Sabine's blog post on it:

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solution-superdeterminism.html

 

[martinbn]

It's much more than this. It has to correlate things according to QM rules, which no amount of determinism can possibly achieve.

Why not if you have a very finely tuned initial state.

 

[user30]

Why not if you have a very finely tuned initial state.

Well for starters, super determinism is superflous to the every day science conducted that presumes determinism (reproducibility). So why would it be part and parcel of Quantum Mechanics? If your only reason to insert it is to resolve Quantum Mechanics, then it's arbitrary and no more plausible than a theory of divine planning. If you can however derive superdeterminism at large, then we can start talking.

Is there anything you observe outside of Quantum Mechanics that cries out for a superdeterministic theory of everything?

 

[user30]

Do you have a source for that “established by Bell” assertion?

The fact that he goes into great lengths to flesh it out, that he includes it as a loophole? How many reasons do you need? I haven't seen him discuss Bertand Russells invincible tea pot theory and give it the status of a loophole, nor have I seen him flesh that theory out.

To say that something is implausible is simply that you would never bet on it. That's not terribly interesting scientifically. Scientists are wrong all the time.

 

[Lord Jestocost]

Why the need for a "super" inclusion to postulate that human beings are subject to determinism just like everything else? I would presume that this was the prevailing scientific wisdom among physicists ever since Newtonian Mechanics. Why did Bell feel the need to invent a new term that seems superflous. He's just describing determinism.

"When I first chatted with ‘t Hooft for an article eight years ago, he told me he wasn’t sure how to evade Bell’s reasoning. Since then, he has sought to jump through a loophole known as superdeterminism. It’s a weird and downright disturbing idea. Only three other people I know support it, notably Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, who blogged her views last week.

The sober way to put it is that physicists are never able to conduct a fully controlled experiment, since the experimental setup they choose is not strictly independent of the processes that created the particles. Even if the experimentalists (conventionally named Alice and Bob) live on Earth and the particles come from quasars billions of light-years away, they share a common past in the very early universe. Their subtle interdependence creates a selection bias, misleading physicists into thinking that no deeper level of physics could explain the particle coordination, when in fact it could.

The dramatic version is that free will is an illusion. Worse, actually. Even regular determinism – without the “super” – subverts our sense of free will. Through the laws of physics, you can trace every choice you make to the arrangement of matter at the dawn of time. Superdeterminism adds a twist of the knife. Not only is everything you do preordained, the universe reaches into your brain and stops you from doing an experiment that would reveal its true nature. The universe is not just set up in advance. It is set up in advance to fool you. As a conspiracy theory, this leaves Roswell and the Priory of Sion in the dust."

From: "Does Some Deeper Level of Physics Underlie Quantum Mechanics? An Interview with Nobelist Gerard ’t Hooft" by George Musser
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...interview-with-nobelist-gerard-e28099t-hooft/

 

[user30]

The sober way to put it is that physicists are never able to conduct a fully controlled experiment, since the experimental setup they choose is not strictly independent of the processes that created the particles. Even if the experimentalists (conventionally named Alice and Bob) live on Earth and the particles come from quasars billions of light-years away, they share a common past in the very early universe. Their subtle interdependence creates a selection bias, misleading physicists into thinking that no deeper level of physics could explain the particle coordination, when in fact it could.

And the statistical distribution during measurement? How does superdeterminism resolve it?

It says here that: "Superdeterminism is a term introduced in the 1980's by John Bell to explain the mysterious correlation of results for spacelike-separated measurements in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments."

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/superdeterminism.html

 

[PeroK]

Why not if you have a very finely tuned initial state.

Apart from the problems of that sort of fine tuning, it would need to be deliberately tuned to correlate what needs to be correlated to make it look like QM works but nothing else. We don't find that experiments generally are exceptionally correlated.

 

[PeroK]

"When I first chatted with ‘t Hooft for an article eight years ago, he told me he wasn’t sure how to evade Bell’s reasoning. Since then, he has sought to jump through a loophole known as superdeterminism. It’s a weird and downright disturbing idea. Only three other people I know support it, notably Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, who blogged her views last week.

What would happen if we did an experiment using the digits of $\pi$ and $e$ as input? Sure, the decision to do this could be superdetermined, but how would the initial conditions of the universe correlate the digits of $\pi$ and $e$ indefinitely?

 

[user30]

Apart from the problems of that sort of fine tuning, it would need to be deliberately tuned to correlate what needs to be correlated to make it look like QM works but nothing else. We don't find that experiments generally are exceptionally correlated.

And that's why superdeterminism appears to be an arbitrary cop -out at quantum scales, unless we are missing something. Any correlation observed in the macroscopic world is not only compatible with determinism but a requirement of it.

 

[user30]

Furthermore, the fine-tuned universe theory has nothing to do with superdeterminism in our current understanding of it. It neither supports nor undermines it. It has so to do with cosmological constants to generate life form. All it states is that there are other possible configurations that do not give rise to human life form, and we are in a universe that is conducive to generate a life form.

The only possible revelation of that theory is that human life form is not a given, but that wasn't exactly far fetched.

 

[user30]

Here's how Hoft explains superdeterminism, which he also subscribes to

Ordinarily, we think that Bell’s theorem would rule out a classical model. So, how do we overcome that issue?

GtH: Yes, that’s not easy. I do not have the complete answer, because whatever answer I think of, I am always the first to criticize. The only answer I can come up with today is that there are correlations all over, presumably because the entire universe started with a single big bang. Everybody in our universe has a common past, and so they are correlated. The photons emitted by a quasar are correlated with the photons emitted by another quasar. It’s not true those quasars are independent.

That could be the answer to Bell. You can do the exercise. You can ask about a source emitting photons and the ancestors of Alice and Bob. While the source emits photons, Alice and Bob have not yet been born. They are many, many light-years away from each other. Those ancestors–the atoms in them–eventually cause Alice and Bob to make their decisions. Those atoms are correlated with the atoms of the source. Everything is correlated with everything else–not a little bit, but very, very strongly.

 

[user30]

So he can give an account of local hidden variables down this route and it is due to the interconnectedness assumption, which is ruled out in the standard way of looking at statistical distribution

Deep...

 

[PeterDonis]

superdeterminism appears to be an arbitrary cop -out at quantum scales

Deep...

Since you seem unable to keep this thread focused on what superdeterminism says, instead of your personal opinions about it, this thread is closed.