Why not superdeterminism?
Two different readers of my book have asked me why the book doesn’t explicitly address superdeterminism, which is a controversial attempt to save locality in quantum mechanics. I’ll try to answer within the confines of a short blog post.
First of all, “superdeterminism” is a terrible label. Nothing can be more deterministic than determinism. Even hard determinism is just plain-old determinism combined with the (false) claim that determinism rules out free choice.
Instead, what the view mislabeled “superdeterminism” tries to do is make the universe both deterministic and local even though Bell’s Theorem and quantum mechanics seem to forbid it. It does so by claiming that we can’t sample randomly in quantum mechanics the way we can in every other science. In quantum mechanics alone, it says, the things we select for testing depend statistically on which tests we conduct ‒ and they depend in just such a way as to make nature appear nonlocal despite being local. So a better label for the view might be “conspiratorial local determinism.”
My aim in my book is to defend determinism, not locality. As J. S. Bell himself emphasized, Bohmian mechanics is a deterministic theory that reproduces the predictions of quantum mechanics and is no more nonlocal than quantum mechanics already is. So I can defend determinism without entertaining the strange suggestion that the sampling in quantum mechanics violates statistical independence in ways that afflict no other science. That’s why I don’t consider superdeterminism relevant to the defense of determinism.
