I Closing the Superdeterminism Loophole?

[stevendaryl]

This is my last post on this subject, but the most popular comment on Hossenfelder YouTube Video, with 300 likes, is this:

"I've been saying for decades that EVERY observation in QM can be explained deterministically. I was shot down every time, primarily because of Bell. Now, finally, a few decades late, somebody has noticed that Bell's theorem doesn't say what everybody insisted it said. And so now we have superdeterminism, which is just plain old determinism, but with a 'super' added presumably to help someone somewhere save some face. I don't mind, in fact if people were to attach a 'super' to everything I've been saying for the last few decades and not just in the field of quantum mechanics that would be fine by me."

AFAIK, what's she done is unforgiveable.

Just a note about “superdeterminism” versus ordinary “determinism”. It’s easy to think that there is no distinction, that superdeterminism is just determinism assumed to apply to human choices. This leads to people to think that superdeterminism is only objected to for philosophical reasons having to do with a belief in “free will”.

But as it applies to EPR, superdeterminism is not just determinism. It’s determinism together with nonlocal constraints on initial conditions.

Imagine the situation in which the initial conditions of the universe look like this: Alice has a list of 1000s of detector settings. Bob has a different list. And finally we have a source of anti-correlated pairs of spin-1/2 particles, each with its hidden variable value.

Now, Alice and Bob perform a round of measurements on the twin pairs, choosing the measurements on their respective lists.

Only certain combinations of Alice’s list, Bob’s list, and list of hidden variable values will satisfy the predictions of quantum mechanics. So a superdeterministic explanation of the EPR results must assume that only certain combinations are possible.

That’s different from ordinary determinism, which allows for initial conditions for one section of the universe to be specified independently.

 

[PeroK]

Only certain combinations of Alice’s list, Bob’s list, and list of hidden variable values will satisfy the predictions of quantum mechanics. So a superdeterministic explanation of the EPR results must assume that only certain combinations are possible.

Yes, I know. That's what Aaronson was pointing out. Nature is SD only insofar as to scupper the probabilistic nature of QM: not in any other respect.

 

[Nullstein]

What if I propose a SD theory of electrical circuits? Classical EM says that when I flick my light switch a current is set up in the electrical wiring and my lightbulb goes on. But, I claim, that the switch being flicked and the filament illuminating are superdeterministically correlated. No matter what one does to try to demonstrate that the switch being flicked causes the bulb to illuminate, I claim that it's just SD correlations.

And, if you put an ammeter on the wire, then the reading on the meter is likewise just SD correlated with the switch. And doesn't prove there is a current at all.

It doesn't suffice to just claim that. You'd have to put forward a well-defined theory and derive your claims from it. Then one can study it and see whether it additionally answers some yet unexplained phenomena. If it doesn't, one would reject it according to Occams razor. If it does, it might be worth studying more deeply, because it seems to have more predictive power than the previous theory.

 

[PeterDonis]

I can think of no reason to take that theory seriously!

I can think of one reason not to: it's not testable by experiment.

I cannot see that MWI is even remotely in the same category as that.

Based on the reason I just gave above, it is.

 

[stevendaryl]

And I'm saying that on the only really relevant grounds as far as science is concerned, testability by experiment, there is no substance (yet) to the MWI, or indeed to any QM interpretation.

A topic can have substance without it being a testable (or falsifiable) theory. For example: the claim that scientific theory must be falsifiable is not itself a falsifiable theory. The theory of differential equations is not falsifiable.

 

[PeroK]

It doesn't suffice to just claim that. You'd have to put forward a well-defined theory and derive your claims from it. Then one can study it and see whether it additionally answers some yet unexplained phenomena. If it doesn't, one would reject it according to Occams razor. If it does, it might be worth studying more deeply, because it seems to have more predictive power than the previous theory.

And why does that not apply to Hossenfelder's SD?

 

[PeterDonis]

And why does that not apply to Hossenfelder's SD?

It does. And it also applies to the MWI. The MWI adds no predictive power at all to QM. (And of course neither does any other QM interpretation, so the same applies to all of them.)

 

[Nullstein]

And why does that not apply to Hossenfelder's SD?

It does. She doesn't have a proper theory yet, in my opinion and I don't expect any progress soon. However, I think that trying to make progress in that direction isn't apriori a bad idea, especially given the fact that the alternative, non-locality, is also a quite undesirable feature. (In general, I'm not really convinced by hidden variable theories in the first place, but if people want to study them, why not. The really interesting question is: What research should receive funding?)

 

[PeroK]

It does. She doesn't have a proper theory yet, in my opinion and I don't expect any progress soon.

That's no better than me, then! This is ridiculous.

 

[Nullstein]

That's no better than me, then! This is ridiculous.

Well, we had a lot of funding in string theory for quite a few decades now without getting any testable predictions. In my opinion, it can't hurt to spend a little money on a few people studying some unpopular approaches. Keep in mind that QM is a very peculiar theory to begin with and no proposed interpretation is really satisfactory so far.

 

[Jarvis323]

The thing which is interesting about the debate, to me, is that even though superdeterminism does seem way too far fetched for me in the end, Sabine still appears to win most of her arguments through technicalities. And it is very hard for her detractors to go beyond the word "seems". If nothing else, Sabine has pressured people to attempt to think more precisely.

An example is the fine tuning argument, which is used very frequently. We all seem to have some intuitive understanding of what that argument is, and most of us accept it, but nobody (at least in the discussions I've read through) is able to precisely state the argument in a logically valid form.

One of my favorite comments on Aaronson's blog is from Atai,

I would really like to understand what you are arguing for because history shows that quantum mechanics confuses the hell out of very smart people and one can never be certain one is not on the confused side on any given argument. I hope we can mutually engage here within the context of this attitude…

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6215

Scott and the others who are very confident of the absolute absurdity of SD may well be on the not-confused side in this case (they seem to be right). But for me, I can't take that for granted simply because I personally don't know enough to be sure there are no faulty assumptions, jumps of logic, mistakes, or simply cases where intuition has mislead us in surprising ways, that have been overlooked somewhere along the line. The point is, when I hear from Aaronson, I want precise arguments that get to the details and clarify, not just reiteration of poorly formulated arguments, or "Just trust me ...".

Another comment on the blog I liked is from Steven Evans,

Also, there is a real problem here, and thinking about a real problem may lead to some insight even if the original idea doesn’t prove correct. Unlike, for example, completely random speculation about fine-tuning and multiverses which aren’t known to mean anything even.

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6215

 

[martinbn]

What exactly is meant by "the initial conditions" in SD? It needs a first moment of time. But there isn't one in the standard cosmological model!