lerjj comments on Bell's Theorem: No EPR "Reality" - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 May 2008 04:44AM

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Comment author: VAuroch 18 November 2013 10:44:44AM 4 points [-]

It is a personal peeve when any explanation of the Bell Inequality fails to mention the determinist Big Loophole: It rules out nearly all local hidden-variable theories, except those for which the entire universe is ruled by hidden variables. If you reject the assumption of counterfactual definiteness (the idea that there is a meaningful answer to the question "what answer would I have gotten, had I conducted a different experiment?"), local hidden variable theories are not ruled out. This leads to superdeterminism and theories which assume that, through either hidden variables stretching back to t=0 or backwards-in-time signals, the universe accounted for the measurement and the result was determined to match.

This is, in fact, what I held to be the most likely total explanation for years, until I better understood both its implications and MWI. Which, in fact, also rejects counterfactual definiteness. MWI does it one better; it rejects factual definiteness, the idea that there is a well-defined answer to the question "What answer did I get?", since in alternate worlds you got different answers.

Comment author: lerjj 06 April 2015 10:08:28PM 1 point [-]

Sorry for being a pain, but I didn't understand exactly what you said. If you're still an active user, could you clear up a few things for me? Firstly, could you elaborate on counterfactual definiteness? Another user said contrafactual, is this the same, and what do other interpretations say on this issue?

Secondly, I'm not sure what you meant by the whole universe being ruled by hidden variables, I'm currently interpreting that as the universe coming pre-loaded with random numbers to use and therefore being fully determined by that list along with the current probabilistic laws. Is that what you meant? If not, could you expand a little on that for me, it would help my understanding. Again, this is quite a long time post-event so if anyone reading this could respond that would be helpful.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 April 2015 10:27:36PM 3 points [-]

Firstly, I am not an expert in QM, so you should take everything I say with a whole serving of salt.

1) Yes, counterfactual = contrafactual. What other interpretations of QM say about counterfactual definiteness I don't know. But wikipedia seems to give at least a cursory understanding to what is necessary for any interpretation to QM.

2) You could understand it that way, yes. Basically, the existence of hidden variables means 'just' that our current theory of QM is incomplete. So basically there is no collapsing wave function or decoherence or anything and all the seeming randomness we observe just comes from our not knowing which values those hidden variables take.

Again, if all I have said is complete and utter nonsense, please correct me!

Comment author: VAuroch 08 April 2015 02:49:20PM 0 points [-]

Also not a QM expert, but this matches my understanding as well.