The Forgotten Solution: Superdeterminism

Those kinds of measurements would violate the uncertainty principle. You can't know the complete state going in to the system or the complete state going out. You can run some tests and justify other assumptions based accepted theories. We generally have a good idea what happens when lots of photons pass through these components. We have some ideas of what happens to single photons (in a statistical sense), but the fundamental question we are investigating is whether there even is a local deterministic description of what happens to single photons passing through the component.

> The sources are so inefficient (in terms of converting input energy into photons that are useful for the experiment)... a typical experiment does not use just one photon. It has to take data from many photons

I was aware of that and it's part of my criticism. If the emitter were to only emit useable photons when it's "in the right state", what stops the "right state" for emitting photons to become correlated with the polarizers?

There are a bunch of "unusable" photons bouncing around interacting with everything and transporting global state. Then there are the "usable" photons that get reflected, absorbed and re-emitted by components of the test bed. Any time they interact with anything they modify the state of whatever they touch. What happens to the photons that reflect off of the polarizers and travel back into the emitter?

If a photon bounces off of a mirror it had to have 1. transfered momentum to whatever it hit, and 2. induced a sufficiently strong opposing electromagnetic field to cause the photon to be reflected or re-emitted. While these are tiny effects they are roughly the same order as the effects that caused the photon to be reflected in the first place, and they all require a change in state of the mirror so that momentum is conserved and Maxwell's laws are not violated (my guess would be that this could cause shifts in electron orbital or proton spin orientation, but that's a bit beyond me).

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao. It flows through all things,

inside and outside, and returns

to the origin of all things. The Tao is great.

The universe is great.

Earth is great.

Man is great.

These are the four great powers. Man follows the earth.

Earth follows the universe.

The universe follows the Tao.

The Tao follows only itself.

What does it mean to "deal with" unknowable things in this case? If philosophy is claiming this as their purview, what are they going to do with it? I'd posit philosophers have two options:

1. Say, "I don't know." This is the better option, in my opinion, because it's honest, but scientists already said that, so why do we need philosophers to say the same thing? You can speculate beyond this and posit it from the beginning as "if this thing we don't know is true is true, then it would have this effect". But in other fields this would generally be a very low-value sort of discussion--respectable institutions would not, for example, give a lot of funding to scientific experiments which presuppose unstudied phenomena. You'd study the unstudied phenomenon first and come to conclusions there before moving on to further experiments which presuppose it. Philosophy isn't hurting anything by taking this approach, but it's not adding anything to what science has already done.

2. The second option is, you do what philosophers do all-too-often: simply present your speculation as fact, perhaps hiding a "I don't actually know" in a footnote somewhere so you can point to it when criticized. A common variant of this is teaching ridiculous ideas as equally valid, and then saying you're just teaching history of philosophy when criticized. This is how, for example, you get the categorical imperative taught in schools: it's trivial to come up with counterexamples where everyone behaving a certain way would be horrible, but if you point this out, philosophers will often simply say that they're just teaching Kant because he's historically important. Yet Kantian ethics are taught right next to much more realistic ethical ideas, and students often can't differentiate which ones make any sense and which ones don't. This would be like teaching flat earth-ism in science class, and then saying "it's history of science" when criticized. It's a motte and bailey argument[1] and it's dishonest and harmful to rational thought.

It seems to me that science has taken us as far as it's useful to go with regard to determinism, and philosophy has nothing of value to add on the subject.

Hume's Problem of Induction isn't comparable here. In that case, Hume is asking a question which science hasn't/can't ask, which is somewhat useful. I don't think, however, that Hume really answers the question, and I don't think it would be useful to pretend that we know the answer. In the case of Hume's Problem of Induction, philosophy adds the question but not the answer: with superdeterminism, science has already asked the question, and philosophy can't answer it any better, so philosophy has nothing to contribute.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey