Yes, it's misleading for her to suggest the objections to superdeterminism are mainly about "killing free will", rather they're about the way the theory would need a strange "conspiracy" in the initial conditions of the universe to work. The idea is that if two entangled particles are sent out from an emitter to two experimenters in opposite directions, the particles carry hidden variables that predetermine what response they will give to the measurements, and that the hidden variables they are assigned are somehow correlated what variables the two experimenters are going to choose to measure in the future. But even if the experimenters' choice involves no free will, it may depend in a complicated way on events throughout the past light cone of their decisions (as with the butterfly effect in chaos theory), including events right after the Big Bang that are outside the past light cone of the two particles being 'assigned' their hidden variables (most likely when the two particles were generated by the emitter and sent on their way to the experimenters). So you need a conspiracy in the initial state of the universe at the time of the Big Bang to ensure that billions of years later when intelligent beings evolve and do these sorts of experiments, making their choices of measurement variables in whatever arbitrary way they select, the initial conditions in their past light cones that determine the outcome of their selection would always be correlated with the initial conditions in the past light cone of the emission event in a way that ensured the hidden variables and the selected measurements were always statistically correlated in just the right way.
Hossenfelder and a co-author address the conspiracy objection in section 4.2 of their paper at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139/full but the answer seems pretty weak, they basically say "yes it might seem like you'd need some very complicated and arbitrary constraint on the initial conditions, but you can't be *sure* the constraint doesn't actually have high algorithmic compressibility." Would be a lot more convincing if someone could come up with an actual toy model of superdeterminism where the experimenters are treated as complex classical computational systems whose "choices" on each experiment involve chaos theory style sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Jesse On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 8:25 AM John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > Sabine Hossenfelder recently posted this video on Youtube, this is my > comment: > > Does Superdeterminism save Quantum Mechanics? Or does it kill free will > and destroy science? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytyjgIyegDI> > > I strongly agree with Sabine Hossenfelder that "free will" is incoherent > nonsense, but I strongly disagree with her advocacy of superdeterminism. > Even if the laws of physics were as deterministic as Newton thought they > were and you knew all of them you still couldn't make a prediction unless > you knew the initial conditions, that's why I think "superdeterminism" is a > pretty good name. When scientists talk about plain old vanilla style > Newtonian "determinism" they're only talking about the laws of physics, but > superdeterminism means more than that, it's also talking about initial > conditions. Occam's Razor says that if 2 theories agree with observations > equally well then the theory with the fewest assumptions (*NOT* the > fewest outcomes) is the one to be preferred. It would be absolutely > impossible for superdeterminism to contain more assumptions than it does, > depending on if the universe is infinite or not and if space and time are > quantized or continuous, superdeterminism demands either an astronomical > number to an astronomical power of independent assumptions, or more likely > an infinite number of such assumptions. You can get more out of a good > theory then you put into it, in fact that's what a "good theory" means. but > that would be impossible with superdeterminism because it requires an > infinite input. > > Superdeterminism violates Occam's Razor just as badly as the God > hypothesis does because they both need to invoke infinity in their > assumptions. Superdeterminism assumes that out of the (probably) infinite > number of states the universe could've been in at the time of the Big Bang > it was actually in the one and only one specific state that would prevent > experimenters on the planet Earth 13.8 billion years later from ever > performing a simple experiment that would unequivocally show that the world > is indeed deterministic, the God hypothesis assumes the existence of an > infinitely powerful infinitely intelligent being. By contrast the Many > Worlds Theory only makes one assumption, Schrodinger's Equation means what > it says. So Many Worlds wins. > > John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis > <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1YBWRDtagjez97hQGcFgmboKSqZ2PyX_1JvxQP64R9xg%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1YBWRDtagjez97hQGcFgmboKSqZ2PyX_1JvxQP64R9xg%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAPCWU3KUjEmkMLsRhZvCHQweay%2BRW6UuBKiahpRqiET5DN%2BkiQ%40mail.gmail.com.
