On measurement, superdeterminism, free will, and contextuality

TL;DR

This paper formalizes the concept of superdeterminism in physical theories, examining how it affects measurement outcomes, free will, and contextuality, and establishes standards to distinguish superdeterministic from nonsuperdeterministic theories.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous framework for understanding superdeterminism, clarifies the role of measurement, free will, and contextuality, and discusses how different theories can produce identical empirical data.

Findings

Superdeterminism is generally contextual in most cases.

Measurement outcomes must be representative of observed distributions.

Different theories can produce the same empirical data despite different ontic states.

Abstract

Superdeterminism has received recent attention as a possible path toward a locally causal explanation of the entanglement correlations that appear in experimental tests of Bell's theorem. While the term `superdeterminism' was coined by Bell to refer to restrictions on the free will of experimenters, it was not rigorously defined until recently. It has now been defined as a property of any physical theory that produces systematic violations of statistical independence. Here we focus on formalizing the requirements that being nonsuperdeterministic places on a physical theory, and setting a standard that must be met before we can conclude that a given theory is not superdeterministic. We begin by carefully examining how a physical theory determines what outcomes we observe when performing measurements in terms of ontic states and response functions, and how this differs between superdeterministic and nonsuperdeterministic theories, in terms of the behavior of the types of vetted random sampling procedures that we use in experiments. The core result is that individual samples and measurement outcomes must be representative of the observed distributions, which is explained in detail. This also has a bearing on how measurement settings are chosen by agents, whether freely or randomly, and we argue that this standard ultimately defines what freedom/independence actually mean. We then discuss contextuality, and show that in most cases, superdeterminism is contextual. Finally, we discuss how different physical theories, with different notions of ontic states and response functions, can give rise to the same empirical data, and how the same operational contextuality may appear in different forms.