Superdeterminism, also known as Determinism, also known as "Common Sense that's brushed aside by our own arrogance"

From wikipedia:

In the 1980s, John Bell discussed superdeterminism in a BBC interview:

There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the "decision" by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster than light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already "knows" what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

Although he acknowledged the loophole, he also argued that it was implausible. Even if the measurements performed are chosen by deterministic random number generators, the choices can be assumed to be "effectively free for the purpose at hand," because the machine's choice is altered by a large number of very small effects. It is unlikely for the hidden variable to be sensitive to all of the same small influences that the random number generator was.^[3]

Superdeterminism has also been criticized because of its implications regarding the validity of science itself. For example, Anton Zeilinger has commented:

[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature.

Can I just....can I...dear God.  I'm sorry, but can I just point out how incredibly daft Bell and Zeilinger sound in these statements?  Today's thoughts come to you from a place of surprise -- surprise that many historical and modern physicists of the highest caliber, to whom I look up, have exceptionally distorted views concerning determinism.  I think, in particular, the mere existence of the term 'superdeterminism' is enough to conclude that something is awry with the established way of thinking.  To see what I mean, take randomness, for comparison.  We don't say 'superrandomness.'  We say 'randomness' or 'random.'  If we are talking about something that seems random but is not truly, then we say pseudorandom.  That there is an asymmetry between the language used for random, and deterministic (which, in fact, means pseudodeterministic) is telling.  Determinism is determinism.  A system is deterministic or it's not, such is the very nature of determinism in and of itself.  If any part of the system is nondeterministic, the system is nondeterministic, period.  The theory of 'superdeterminism' is not a super theory of determinism.  It's just the only one that's actually a deterministic theory.  Others should be called pseudodeterministic.

So, first of all, Bell finds determinism (I will take the liberty of referring to 'superdeterminism' as just determinism) to be implausible because hey, we could replace ourselves with a deterministic machine to deterministically perform measurements, and it seems very odd indeed that the deterministic number generator, in all of its nuance and complexity, would be 'understandable' to the universe in such a way that its choice would already be known to the universe.  Yes indeed, instead of just saying that it's unlikely the universe is attuned to the human brain in such a way that our choices are already known at a distance, he felt it fitting to weaken the non-existent argument by replacing a human brain with a PRNG.  What's really intriguing here, though, is that even the fundamental shape of this argument is so far from valid that it hurts to read.  Let me paraphrase Bell: "Well, ya know, um, that loophole isn't really important because it seems silly that, like, the universe could know what's going to happen.  I mean, think, like, if we made a machine take the measurements kinda-randomly.  It'd be so complicated for the universe to know what's going on!"  Since, after all, this reality is quite trivial in all of its mechanisms, and, if the universe were indeed deterministic, it clearly wouldn't be capable of creating phenomena such as entanglement by simply probing its own state.

Hold on.  This year we used gravitational waves from the merging of two black holes that happened over a billion years ago to figure out how close the black holes were when they merged, their orbital frequency, roughly what region of space they existed in, roughly when the stars that became the black holes were created, and the mass of each black hole as well as the final merged hole.

Yeah, it's silly to think the fabric of spacetime contains enough information to do interesting things with.  Silly to think that the mind, PRNGs, everything in this reality create lasting signatures within its very substrate that could give away the past, current, or future state of another part of the system.  Silly to think that we live in a reality -- alive with beautiful, incredibly-subtle phenomena such as waves in time -- that could possibly be deterministic, despite seeming to exhibit pretty strange behavior.  How absurd it is to believe that this universe is, perhaps, just a tad bit smarter than us, since we are, after all, the center of it.

(Sorry, Zeilinger, I didn't have time for your roast.  But here's the punchline: you think it makes more sense that evolution gave us a perfect mechanism for knowing objective reality, i.e., not having a massive disconnect between perceptual and 'supertrue' reality, than that we might actually be just a teensy bit 'entangled' with nature itself, that our freedom and perception might be just a tad less powerful than we imagined?)

No Free Lunch

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

A profound and universal truth?  Or is it, rather, a thoughtless pseudo-argument that trivializes, devalues, and ultimately impedes the progress of our collective human consciousness?

I often find myself roused by the questioning of something that burns deeply in my own heart: procedural content generation.  "How can a machine possibly generate endless worlds of beautiful content without artist intervention?" "How could a machine ever write a symphony that moves us to tears, or construct a mountainous vista whose beauty gives us pause to reflect on the elegance of our own reality?"  It can't.  Surely it can't.  It's too good to be true.  There's no free lunch.

Did anyone ever say there was?  Invariably, it's a refutation of a claim that never existed in the first place.  In the case of PCG, consider what the so-called 'free lunch' entails.  A lifelong journey toward understanding complex algorithmic paradigms.   A constant probing of and reflection on the elusive patterns in reality that ignite our sense wonder.   The relentless and often-demoralizing conceptualization, testing, and inevitable disposal of a thousand pages worth of inadequate ideas. The exhaustive utilization of a machine that's performing 3,200,000,000 computational operations per second to arrive at a result which still takes minutes to coax out.  If and when a world of beauty washes over the crystal matrix of a screen, if and when a touching symphony lifts gently from the diaphragm of a speaker...will it have been for free?

Awe-inspiring feats are not free lunches.   Clapping one's hands and becoming GQ's model of the year, a socially-fluid savant, and the King of Saudi Arabia in under three seconds is a free lunch. Toiling for years, pushing through a million failed attempts, building on the knowledge and tools of a two-hundred-thousand-year-old species, and ultimately managing to arrive at the crest of something wonderful -- that is no free lunch.  That is simply what it means to be human.

No free lunch is a self-reassuring excuse for non-action.  No free lunch is a tragic failure to believe in the power of our own infinite consciousness.  No free lunch is a slap in the face of all those who wiped sweat from their brow as they spent a lifetime inching closer to an impossible dream -- a dream that, for many, never unfolded until long after they left this world.  No free lunch is a poisonous concept that has impeded too many for too long, and given us naught in return.

Ignore it.  Dive off the precipice of limitation into the river of your own ability and start paying the price for your 'free lunch.'