Atheists in general are not saying that. Back to my first point. There is no need to try to justify the meaning of Bell's superdeterminism. Most scientists don't agree with superdeterninism anyway, but do agree with his theorem on local hidden variables. What Bell is doing in a sense is throwing in the towel as far as an explanation. But other scientists are continuing a deeper exploration.
They are saying that. Here's what Hitchens said about free will. Where he and I agree is there is no free will part, but we do have a will to make decisions such as moral decisions. It means that we cannot be completely free of outside influence. I can not say all atheists do not believe in free will, but I think most atheists would say that, i.e. no free will. Thus, we have predestination as per the Bible, but no free will. I have found that will is different from free will, so am now able to make a clearer explanation.
It would be nice if you gave some examples of what you mean. We have superdeterminism, determinism, and fatalism. Out of the three, superdeterminism has the hypothetical constructs and states there is no free will. While there are overlaps as to what it means, it may not mean superdeterminism. That means everything is determined everywhere in the universe, i.e. hard determinism. Anything that happens in the universe is due to past actions. Determinism is what most of us believe. That whatever begins to exist must have a cause; it is cause and effect. The distinction between it and hard determinism would mean that it would have to include events that occur in quantum mechanics. I don't think Bell was throwing the towel. He was asking is there always a cause and effect in quantum mechanics or superdeterminism?
What you are ignoring is a concept that comes from classical electromagnetic physics and is adopted in QM. The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics involves the idea of advanced and retarded waves. That concept moves the idea of locality from our perspective to the perspective of the photon. From a photon's frame, there is no such concept as distance traveled and a time of flight.
In the unlikely event that you will look into the transactional interpretation further, here are some further notes that are glossed over in any account you might find. Advanced waves may seem like they violate locality, but think of the Fitzgerald contraction. The faster an object goes the shorter the universe appears in the objects frame of reference. As the object approaches the speed of light, the apparent distance to it's destination diminishes to zero. That also happens with time. The conclusion is that from the perspective of the photon, it is absorbed immediately after emission. The vanishing temporal and spatial variables make the photon's flight local.
To me that is a much more satisfying viewpoint than determinism in understanding entanglement. That is why I say God is unnecessary to explain entanglement.
As far as the multiverse hypothesis, you replied,
I know that the quantum world has some unpredictable behaviors, but you have to do better if you are claiming waves that go backward in time. How does it do that?
How did you overcome the following?
"In 1996,
Tim Maudlin proposed a
thought experiment involving
Wheeler's delayed choice experiment that is generally taken as a refutation of TIQM.
[12] However Kastner showed Maudlin's argument is not fatal for TIQM.
[13][14]
In his book,
The Quantum Handshake, Cramer has added a hierarchy to the description of pseudo-time to deal with Maudlin's objection and has pointed out that some of Maudlin's arguments are based on the inappropriate application of Heisenberg's knowledge interpretation to the transactional description.
[15]
Transactional Interpretation faces criticisms. The following is partial list and some replies:
1. "TI does not generate new predictions / is not testable / has not been tested."
TI is an exact interpretation of QM and so its predictions must be the same as QM. Like the
many-worlds interpretation (MWI), TI is a "pure" interpretation in that it does not add anything ad hoc but provides a physical referent for a part of the formalism that has lacked one (the advanced states implicitly appearing in the
Born rule). Thus the demand often placed on TI for new predictions or testability is a mistaken one that misconstrues the project of interpretation as one of theory modification.
[16]
2. “It is not made clear where in spacetime a transaction occurs.”
One clear account is given in Cramer (1986), which pictures a transaction as a four-vector standing wave whose endpoints are the emission and absorption events.
[17]
3. "Maudlin (1996, 2002) has demonstrated that TI is inconsistent."
Maudlin's probability criticism confused the transactional interpretation with Heisenberg's knowledge interpretation. However, he raised a valid point concerning causally connected possible outcomes, which led Cramer to add hierarchy to the pseudo-time description of transaction formation.
[18][13][19][20][21] Kastner has extended TI to the relativistic domain, and in light of this expansion of the interpretation, it can be shown that the Maudlin Challenge cannot even be mounted, and is therefore nullified; there is no need for the 'hierarchy' proposal of Cramer.
[22] Maudlin has also claimed that all the dynamics of TI is deterministic and therefore there can be no 'collapse.' But this appears to disregard the response of absorbers, which is the whole innovation of the model. Specifically, the linearity of the Schrödinger evolution is broken by the response of absorbers; this directly sets up the non-unitary measurement transition, without any need for ad hoc modifications to the theory. The non-unitarity is discussed, for example in Chapter 3 of Kastner's book
The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: The Reality of Possibility (CUP, 2012).
[23]
4. "It is not clear how the transactional interpretation handles the quantum mechanics of more than one particle."
This issue is addressed in Cramer's 1986 paper, in which he gives many examples of the application of TIQM to multi-particle quantum systems. However, if the question is about the existence of multi-particle wave functions in normal 3D space, Cramer's 2015 book goes into some detail in justifying multi-particle wave functions in 3D space.
[24] A criticism of Cramer's 2015 account of dealing with multi-particle quantum systems is found in Kastner 2016, "An Overview of the Transactional Interpretation and its Evolution into the 21st Century, Philosophy Compass (2016).
[25] It observes in particular that the account in Cramer 2015 is necessarily anti-realist about the multi-particle states: if they are only part of a 'map,' then they are not real, and in this form TI becomes an instrumentalist interpretation, contrary to its original spirit. Thus the so-called "retreat" to Hilbert space (criticized also below in the lengthy discussion of note
[24]) can instead be seen as a needed expansion of the ontology, rather than a retreat to anti-realism/instrumentalism about the multi-particle states. The vague statement (under
[24]) that "Offer waves are somewhat ephemeral three-dimensional space objects" indicates the lack of clear definition of the ontology when one attempts to keep everything in 3+1 spacetime."
Transactional interpretation - Wikipedia
??? They are two different phenomena. Wave-particle duality is an integral part of mathematics of quantum mechanics. Particles traveling through space act as a wave. Interactions act as particles. The multiverse is a hypothesis that addresses the superposition of states and the fact that only one set of states is manifested and observed in an interaction. That is different from duality.
It's the double slit experiment done with lasers. It demonstrates wave-particle duality. If you don't want to subscribe to the multiverse, then that is fine with me. I don't believe it, but like I said people like Stephen Hawking wrote a paper on it. His last one! Other top quantum physicists believe it, too, even though there is no evidence. It's the atheists' flying spaghetti monster haha.
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