And physicists stopped questioning it to the point that today most of them don’t know that Bell’s theorem even requires this additional assumption. Nevertheless, the mathematical assumption of “statistical independence” has since widely been called the “free will” assumption, or the “free choice” assumption. And in any case, throwing out determinism just because you don’t like its consequences is really bad science.
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Spooky action at a distance doesn’t make any difference for free will because the indeterministic processes in quantum mechanics are not influenced by anything, so they are not influenced by your “free will,” whatever that may be.
But even if you don’t share my opinion, Bell’s argument just doesn’t work. Now you all know that I think free will is logically incoherent nonsense. He argued that there are only two options: either accept spooky action and keep free will which would mean that Bell was right, or reject spooky action but give up free will which would mean that Einstein was right. Bell called a violation of statistical independence “superdeterminism” and claimed that it would require giving up free will. This is where the word “superdeterminism” comes from. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the “decision” by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears.” But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. “There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. In a 1983 BBC interview he said the following: So he had to somehow convince them that this weird extra assumption, statistical independence, makes sense. Bell in contrast wanted physicists to accept this spooky action. That’s why Einstein thought quantum mechanics is just an average description for a hidden variables theory. If you remember, Einstein had said that quantum mechanics can’t be complete because it has a spooky action at a distance. Like so many before and after him, Bell wanted to prove Einstein wrong. But first let me tell you where the name superdeterminism comes from and why physicists get so upset if you mention it.īell didn’t like the conclusion which followed from his own mathematics. And that’s how superdeterminism works: what a quantum particle does depends on what you measure. If statistical independence is violated, this means that what a quantum particle does depends on what you measure. It follows that any local hidden variable theory which fits to our observations, has to violate statistical independence. We know experimentally that this inequality is violated.
Bell proved that a hidden variables theory which is (a) local and (b) fulfills an obscure assumption called “statistical independence” must obey an inequality, now called Bell’s inequality. No, he didn’t, though this is a very common misunderstanding, depressingly, even among physicists. But didn’t this guy what’s his name Bell prove that hidden variables are wrong? This missing information is usually referred to as the “hidden variables”. According to superdeterminism, the reason we can’t predict the outcome of a quantum measurement is that we are missing information. Superdeterminism returns us to determinism. The outcomes are not determined, so quantum mechanics is indeterministic. But in quantum mechanics we can only predict probabilities for measurement outcomes, rather than the measurement outcomes themselves. That’s determinism: Everything that happens follows from what happened earlier.
If you know the initial position and velocity of an arrow, you can calculate where it will land, at least in principle. Superdeterminism is exactly as deterministic as plain old vanilla determinism. How does superdeterminism work, what is it good for, and why does it allegedly destroy science? That’s what we’ll talk about today.įirst things first, what is superdeterminism? Above all, it’s a terrible nomenclature because it suggests something more deterministic than deterministic and how is that supposed to work? Well, that’s just not how it works. But some physicists and philosophers have argued that if one were to allow it, it would destroy science. Superdeterminism is a way to make sense of quantum mechanics.
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