So why can't configurations be "far apart" in a way that defies intuition? We model measuring at 45.01° as a perturbation of 45°, but perhaps these are very distant configurations.
> it would render everything pointless as our paths are predetermined
The objection is subtler than this. It's that it's pointless because it's not a productive stance. Science is in large part about predicting results of interventions. It throws its hands up and says everything happens for essentially conspiratorial reasons, and taken fully doesn't admit the possibility of interventions. Further this is stronger than the normal determinism of classical mechanics -- there, even if we believe in determinism, nondeterminism with respect to unobserved things (such as experimenters brains) is a useful stance for discovering truths about the universe. In contrast, with superdeterminism, any possible "intervention" in this stance is "compensated for" by the initial conditions. It explains quantum mechanics only by saying "initial conditions did it", which is no better than "God did it" of medieval philosophy. In neither case can we usefully ask further questions.
Anyway, when you make a rerun of the universe from the same initial conditions, you get randomness because of quantum mechanics, so the future outcome is not exactly the same, and you can't predict anything with certainty because of probabilities. But look, all of this has nothing to do with free will. Neither determinism nor quantum mechanical randomness give you an absolute-metaphysical-libertarian superwill when you're not a subject to the laws of physics at all (unless you believe that you're a soul/cartesian ego/some other supra-physical mental entity with dubious ontological status). You're basically arguing against this abovementioned concept. But actually default, regular free will is just an effective description of reality where persons have volition, and it exists as an emergent rather than fundamental thing.
Before you start to make the same argument that free will doesn't really exist, consider the question: does Hacker News exist? Well, duh, of course not! There are no websites, no Internet and no computers, it's obviously all just fundamental particles acting in some ways, you know, just the wave function of the universe deterministically obeying the Schrodinger equation, etc. Naive reductionism. But here we are, reading Hacker News. Guess what, you don't live on a level of fundamental particles. Does, for example, chess exist? Your argument implies that it does not, but here I am, playing chess in a separate tab.
So, do persons exist?
Does free will exist?
It strikes me that people don't bother to make real arguments against free will, like a psychological one, for example.
For instance, I may decide to have an apple tonight, or spaghetti, or whatever. Thus, I seem to have free will. But if one collected statistics on what I ate over time, there would be patterns and it would be much more difficult for me to overcome those patterns with "will". The more time and events you look at the more you see things like unconcious maintenance of weight, preferences of types of food, and so on.
Yet the long term patterns are made up of the individual choices that seem free.
I have this vague idea that some further exploration of this might be compared to the statistical ideas of quantum mechanics.
The question is essentially, when all biases are accounted for, is there some aspect of free will that remains? You experience free will constantly, and you assume it in all interactions with other agents. Is that an illusion, are we just puppets in a play? Many philosophers believe that it isn't, even if determinism is real. I'm not sure if super-determinism is still compatible or not, but it may well be.
I feel like there's some sort of analogy between how you can have local violations of conservation of energy where particles pop into existence from nowhere, but longer term it has to even out.
Bias isn't the word I would use.
Yes, free will doesn't seem possible in a deterministic universe.
> Anyway, when you make a rerun of the universe from the same initial conditions, you get randomness because of quantum mechanics, so the future outcome is not exactly the same, and you can't predict anything with certainty because of probabilities
Then the universe is not deterministic.
> Before you start to make the same argument that free will doesn't really exist, consider the question: does Hacker News exist? Well, duh, of course not! There are no websites, no Internet and no computers, it's obviously all just fundamental particles acting in some ways, you know, just the wave function of the universe deterministically obeying the Schrodinger equation, etc. Naive reductionism.
No, there is a difference between something existing and free will. A computer can calculate an answer to some query, and the answer exists, doesn't mean it was generated through the computer's free will.
We are on the inside of a 4 dimensional bulk. We are traveling through the temporal dimension.
As opposed to outside of it looking in. In which case we would "see" past, present, and future simultaneously.
When you experience a moment of consciousness at a specific 4D position, you experience all the memories of the "past" that are in your brain. Thus, the consciousness particle interpretation of consciousness is compatible with your direct perception of living a 3D life along a time dimension.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
But the measurement setting (PRNG outcome) can be arbitrarily removed from the seed value (by combining PRNGs in various ways). So that doesn't sound very convincing to me.
If you mean true random, then, yes, superdeterminism does indeed mean that number is predetermined.
Math still works though - there is no way for someone to peek and see what that predetermined number is so it is still random for any observer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator
"A pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), also known as a deterministic random bit generator (DRBG)..."