In a Bell test experiment, it's not just that the outcomes were predetermined, but that the brains of two experimenters, and their experimental setups, were configured in a very precise way to make them choose measurements that would yield compatible results. That is, it's not so much that you didn't really get to make a choice, but that it took such a complicated configuration in order to bring about a fairly simple result.
And since you can't know the entire configuration of a brain, you've really just replaced the randomness with a mystery box. Instead of "John chose freely to set the experiment to up/down", all you get is "John was fated from the beginning of time to set the experiment to up/down -- a thing I learned by watching John set the experiment to up/down". Instead of randomness or free will, all you get is a sage nod after the fact, "Yes, so was it foreordained in the before-times."
It's not impossible. I'm not even really sure it's implausible. It's just that it doesn't seem to inform anything.
If you however mean that any entire observable universe¹, if cosmic super-inflation is true, must be causally related and thus "pre"-determined, which may be qualified as "super"-determined in a way, then I agree (layman too).
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[1]: Should we keep -c² as the metric of spacetime, i.e. no causality beyond the light boundary (function of time, in space).
Basically any interaction with some other particle causes that particle to become entangled as well, and so you very easily get "avalanches" of entanglement that spread at the speed of light.
As soon as the avalanches reaches "the observer", the observer themselves become entangled with the originally entangled particle, which means that from their perspective it looks as though they no longer are. This is similar to conditional probabilities.
To get back on the example of dices: we might be building a whole storytelling around "probabilistic dices" because we haven't formalized the concept of the hand behind, yet.
I've always pictured entanglement as totally acceptable if you postulate an extra dimension. Then you simply have to picture a link in that extra dimension between the particles, like a 'U' crossing flatland in two 'dots' (particles) would manifest as 'entanglement' for the flatlanders.
But I've really grown skeptical of all such interpretations now (mine very much included), I'd tell you honestly that I probably favor the one that seems most beautiful to me within the space of possibilities (which is what I care about and investigate, the pure science). Interpretation is belief, basically, even if your name is Schrödinger.
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[1]: Even if eventually found to be partial as the article suggests, I think it's fair to assume any "new" quantum theory would be to QED/QCD what General Relativity was to Newton's equations of motion: precisely a generalization from which to derive Newton for small-ish quantities. Ergo, we can assume QM is 'True'.
Entanglement is unstable, and easily swamped. It doesn't go away, but it becomes a very small factor in things. If I had two entangled electrons, and added them to two coins, the two coins are now entangled. But if I flip them, I don't expect the results to be significantly correlated. The classical behavior of the coins massively swamps the entanglement.
So even if you and I were performing a Bell test experiment, and know that the atoms of your brain are somehow entangled to the atoms of mine dating back to the origin of the universe, it's still unreasonable to expect that to lead us to set up the equipment in such a way as to preserve the correlations between two entangled particles in our experiment. There's just too much brain matter, and too much has happened to it from the beginning of the universe until now, for that entanglement to make a difference.
But speaking of this today, knowing what we know (more like what we don't), and the formidable extent of our reach into and grasp of the cosmos (none, in the big picture)... I don't know. It's like the Ancients talking of "atoms". Sure, they had the right idea... but from there it would take another 2,000 years to actually hone in on the concept — and consider that thousands of years of civilization and history already preceded these people. It's neither preposterous to think we're millennias away from some discoveries, nor yet to firmly believe we'll get there, eventually.
Science problems aren't solved quickly by a biological species... I don't know that we can speak of "failure" when it's just been one century of milder fundamental discoveries but a slew of practical applications (still unfolding) of the current paradigm.
It doesn't just take a problem to crack the next paradigm in science, it also requires the incentive, at a civilizational / societal level, to push through to it. It rarely if ever took less than a century, because it takes the biological maturing of adult human beings to actually crack it, and typically 2-3-4 generations more so than 1/2 in-between Twitter and HN. (I'm being funny, not sarcastic here — we're all human, so chill the doom-and-gloom talk, that's my point).
In a very real sense, I feel like superdeterminism is pure metaphysics as we speak; could maybe become science by the year 4,000, give or take 1,900... Oh History, you chaotic brat...
I love the idea though.
(-skip!- Comment over. Below is me rambling about personal ideas with little to no sci value, most likely; have fun at your own risk).
It's actually somehow embedded in how I explain dark matter halos and galaxy rotations, as all being but 1 heterogenous object whose 'kernel', a supermassive blackhole, has more than enough oomph to justify just about any phenomenon —literally breaks spacetime-gravity! I mean, isn't it obvious that "a weird¹ gravitational halo" and "just about the biggest gravitational object known to the cosmos" happen to come in perfect pairs cutely called "galaxies" (like we'd call boats mere "sails" or even "triangles" on the ocean because we can't see better, or is it figure of speech). For a cool image, a galaxy is like an egg, with a disc-like yolk and a black hole in the middle. Egg shell = DM.
It's cool to think about such topics. It must be profoundly inspiring to actually work on such ideas. I just think it requires this humble reverence for time. I don't know how real it is, but it sure means we can't do now nor ever before its time any future event in the series, A or B regardless. New physics may have to wait...
Now meanwhile, we was promised flying cars 30 years ago. Can we talk about how superdeterminism solves our problem? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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[1] think about it: both DM and BH "break" light as we know it with every other object (photons either pass through or can't escape); the insane gravitational effects (can't imagine DM doesn't "feel" the black hole and reciprocally, these are not limited in distance...); the singularity of having such pairs of DM + BH in pretty much every galaxy, or should we say that every galaxy is "inside" such a combo; and yeah it helps that both are unsolved problems thus perhaps requiring "new physics" to solve. I feel like both problems are but one and the same and solved by an extension of GR/QM to some degree (not necessarily unification, GUT or ToE, that might come much later or never). Anyhow just random thoughts gathered along the years. Now I wish this were my actual line of work... :)
What's lost in the process of burning that strawman, is that we can't ever have perfect knowledge of our environment or our nervous systems; and in a seeming paradox of determinism, a being who believes they have agency will behave differently than one who does not. Even if one accepts the model that we merely rationalize our subconscious choices (an imperfect model with some non-zero truth), the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices, making the "free will software stack" a potentially valuable psycho-technology.
As a practical matter, I'm intrigued by the model that what we experience as consciousness, and the feeling of agency, really only has one knob to turn: what tiny fraction of our massive neural information network we orient the spotlight of our attention towards. That singular "decision" point, navigating what Buddhist cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the "salience landscape", has incredible potency on its own, iterated moment after moment for the entirety of a human lifespan.
It seems to me that any time you have a process that feeds the output into the input, then you can easily have a divergence of trajectory whose precision exceeds anything that could be explicitly stored in a finite universe.
So it seems to me that free will must exist in the sense that a simple system, let alone a brain, can produce information from somewhere that can't come from the limited universe we seem to inhabit. Like, take the Mandelbrot set as a simple proof of concept. It may not have all the things in it that are in the universe, but it seems to have more resolution, more components, than can exist in reality. So if you used it to feed a process, it can add something to the universe as it affects reality.
It implies that the universe is fine tuned to such a degree that everyone who's ever done an experiment which might disprove QM ever arrived at their n-sigma result did so by random chance.
The only way it could make even a lick of sense is if we're living in a simulation, and there's a little green man who's job it is to ensure we never disprove quantum mechanics.
The angle settings in a Bell test can come from basically anywhere. For example, you can point telescopes at opposite sides of the universe, feed the frames into a cryptographic pseudo random number generator, and use the output to decide the angles. For superdeterminism to be true, that would mean the initial state of the universe had to be such that millions of years later billions of stars on opposite sides of the universe would be in just the right configuration to make the SHA1 hash of a picture of them come out in a way that correlated in a simple way with the polarization angle of the photons you were generating locally. And then they'd also correlate for the next one. And the next one. And the next trillion after that. And also it has to be just right for all the other ways you can set up the angle selection.
I won't say it's literally impossible to satisfy that many constraints. There's a lot of degrees of freedom to work with, and only finitely many constraints before heat death. But it seems really really contrived to me. Like explaining why someone has rolled five hundred natural 20s with "Oh that's just how things were always going to play out" instead of "that seems suspicious. Let me see that die."
Based on Occam's Razor alone, modern DNN based models are complete garbage because of the amount of complexity involved in their models, yet they still hold useful predictive power.
Sometimes we have to throw out these general rules of thumbs and test the waters outside when we hit walls we can't seem to get around.
Interest and pursuit in the philosophy of science is something too largely brushed aside that, IMHO, needs an adrenaline shot these days. Unfortunately, few want to pursue that work because it doesn't pay the bills.
The mind consists of different parts. Imagine the act of choosing to eat a strawberry ice cream or a chocolate ice cream. You happen to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. If you could analyze the path electrons follow inside your brain, you could trace, even predict that you will choose chocolate ice cream.
Does it mean that you aren't free? I don't think so.
You might say that you aren't free to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. I'm not convinced either. There were foods I disliked (actually most of them) that I chose to get used to, and finally came to appreciate. So I can make myself freer.
For minor dayly things I may indulge in neurotic behaviours. But I can make most decisions rationally and usually do that when they're important enough for my life. As I grow older I have more control so I'm actually more predictable. Does it means that I'm less free now?
Where is the "you" in that equation?
See:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...
BTW, I also believe that it is a defensible position to say that the moon does not exist, but again, this is not an easy argument to make. See:
http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf (or the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc )
https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...
There's a lot more where that came from if you're interested.
P.S. I love your handle! I see you created this account for the sole purpose of responding this comment. How did you even find this thread? It has been downvoted into oblivion.
I've watched your QM video several times and will do so many more I'm sure in hopes that someday I will understand it.
Heh. I wonder if I have any other secret followers on HN.
> in hopes that someday I will understand it.
Where did I lose you? Because that really was intended to be understandable by anyone with a high school algebra background.
I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether.
For an opposing view to naive materialism which is still firmly nested in rationalist thinking, see Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality": https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...