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Does superdeterminism save quantum mechanics?

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: Does superdeterminism save quantum mechanics?

#131
post #130
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The laws of physics were there before people started studying physics. Didn't make it less interesting for those who were interested. But they're interesting because they are laws - because there's some structure there, because the same causes consistently have the same effects. Superdeterminism denies all that. > If you don't have free will, then how can you change smth? I'd say that if you're an inherent part of…

> But they're interesting because they are laws - because there's some structure there, because the same causes consistently have the same effects. Superdeterminism denies all that. There can be structure without cause and effect. Take any static physics problem, for example a flexible sheet that’s stretched over some frame. Since there is no time dimension there is no cause and effect but at every point in the sheet…

> There can be structure without cause and effect. Take any static physics problem, for example a flexible sheet that’s stretched over some frame. Since there is no time dimension there is no cause and effect but at every point in the sheet there is structure (Poisson’s law).

Up to a point - that kind of structure still depends on a notion of spatial distance and "influence" where you can reason locally about subsets. It's fairly fundamental that some parts of the sheet are more closely related to each other than other parts of it. If you had a model where every point of the sheet was equally closely related to every other point, you wouldn't be able to have any nontrivial structure, I think.

Re: Does superdeterminism save quantum mechanics?

#132
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait, how does it deny it? To be able to talk about cause and effect you have to have a concept of independence. Superdeterminism's basic premise is essentially that everything in the past can affect everything in the future - you chose which direction to measure because the particle was polarised a particular way (or because of some common underlying cause). So how can you possibly talk about what caused you to me…

> So how can you possibly talk about what caused you to measure a particular direction when apparently it was magically due to this thing that has no visible connection to it? You mean a connection we can measure. as i understand, our measurements rely on what we know and what we know relies on previous events. Its like what and how we measure something is simultaneosly determined by that something. We can't measure…

Not necessarily that we can measure, but that we can reason about. We can't directly measure energy for example, but we know/assume that it obeys certain laws regarding conservation and locality.

If the cat's soul changed the usual laws of physics around the cat, it would destroy our ability to do physics when cats were nearby. It's not about whether we can measure it but about whether we can isolate its effects. If you can't do an experiment that doesn't depend on the state of the entire universe, you can't do an experiment.

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