Comment by drdeca
11 hours ago
No? Superdeterminism says that there’s no way to pick your experimental choices in a way that reveals things because any possible random number sources you could use have contrived correlations that prevent that? Why would one ever consider that as “the default”?
The strong belief before QM was discovered was that the universe was deterministic - that given sufficient knowledge of a physical system's present state, you could accurately predict its specific future states (not just possible future states.)
Laplace expressed this in "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities" in 1814: "We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of that which is to follow. [...] For [an intelligence that has sufficient information] nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes."
Superdeterminism essentially extends this idea of deterministic physical evolution to quantum mechanics. It could be considered an appropriate default simply because it was previously considered to be, not only the default, but the strongly believed truth.
> Superdeterminism says that there’s no way to pick your experimental choices in a way that reveals things because any possible random number sources you could use have contrived correlations that prevent that
You're arguing against a consequence of superdeterminism, not its motivation. Its motivation is as I've described.
The word "contrived" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement. Nothing needs to be contrived in superdeterminism, even if it seems that way to an observer within the universe.
The explanatory problem you've alluded to only arises because we're trying to understand the universe from within the universe. The universe is under no obligation to make itself sensible to us.
Essentially, you're saying little more than that you don't like the idea of superdeterminism.
Can you explain how determinism applied to quantum mechanics results in superdeterminism? I feel like you've just skipped over an important step here. Determinism isn't a controversial idea, and indeed in QM the wavefunction is fully deterministic anyway, it's only interpretations which require a collapse where non-determinism appears. I can understand roughly why the many worlds in MWI are a consequence of assuming the wavefunction is reality and that there is never a collapse, I do not understand how you get to the consequences of superdeterminism from applying determinism to quantum mechanics.
(And yeah, preference for any of these interpretations will essentially boil down to what idea you like the most, or more likely what idea you dislike the least. With QM you pick your reasonable base assumptions and then take the uncomfortable conclusions that result)