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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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That is not my understanding of superdeterminism - it is extending determinism to quantum (and all probabilistic) phenomena and thus necessarily forming one causal chain from end to end through the entire universe, which does indeed follow lightly from a free-will-free determinism that only leaves probabilistic corners. If that is not correct, mea culpa, give this extension of determinism a different name.

If you want to salvage determinism, just go with many-worlds. That gives you a deterministic multiverse, which is good enough for most people, though it doesn't produce a deterministic universe from the observer's perspective, and that's good, because the evidence really does suggest that one universe isn't deterministic.

I'm not a many-worlds partisan, myself, but it's useful to illustrate the point that there is not, from any observer's point of view at any moment in time, One True Future that could be determined, Laplace's Demon style, through total knowledge of the current state of the universe, because, in the many-worlds view, there are infinitely many futures ahead, and any prediction you make would either have to be accurate for all of them if it needs to be guaranteed to be correct (such predictions are "motteish:" true but trivial) or else it would only be, at best, probabilistically correct (i.e., the most likely choice, but decreasingly likely to be correct the more ambitious it is: "baileyish.")

So to recover determinism from a situation where it appears one cannot determine the future, many-worlds says that all possible futures actually exist, none more real than any other (well, unless you weight them by probability...) If the idea of every physically possible continuation of the universe's initial conditions being real is more palatable to you than any sort of non-determinism, then many-worlds is for you.

Superdeterminism, by contrast, recovers determinism for a single universe by saying that physics aren't random at all, but are only pretending to be. Beautiful perfect statistical matches to theoretical predictions of quantum randomness are observed because - well, because it pleased the Uncaused Cause that it should be so. Reality is pulling the wool over our eyes (and if about this - then about what else? We can never know...) This isn't something I can say is false - it is no more falsifiable than, well, any other theism, frankly. But cleaving to it doesn't sound like hard-nosed empiricism to me - maybe more like Calvinism.

But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.

But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.

Bold of you to assume I had a choice in the matter.