Abstract
The aim of this paper is to discuss the rejection of the so-called Measurement Independence—i.e. No-conspiracy—condition, in the context of causal explanations of EPR correlations, and survey some of its implications. In particular, I pay attention here to a specific way Measurement Independence is violated. It has to do with two assumptions about the presupposed causal order and space-time arrangement of the events involved in the EPR picture. The consequences are mostly, and more importantly, related to locality issues.
Financial support is gratefully acknowledged from BBVA Foundation, research project “Causality, Locality and Free Will in Quantum Mechanics”, and Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, project FFI2014-57064-P.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, (Graßhoff et al. 2005) for a more recent example.
- 2.
Reference to ‘free will’ in this context is usually set aside in favour of more general stronger claims about ‘world (or cosmic) conspiracies’ instead. The exact relation between the requirement of Measurement Independence, ‘free will’ and ‘world conspiracies’ will be addressed more in detail in what follows.
- 3.
I would even say that it is indeed the fact that these assumptions behind the idea of free will carry over to Measurement Independence what it is most often seen as justifying that the later stands for the former. And my point in San Pedro (2013) is precisely that such assumptions are not well grounded and can all be challenged.
- 4.
This is, by the way, where the origin of the terminology No-conspiracy can be traced back to.
- 5.
This is indeed the view defended by Bas van Fraassen in his influential “Charybdis of Realism …” (van Fraassen 1982).
- 6.
As we shall see in a moment, a violation of Causal Order will not mean that all causal influences propagate backwards in time but just that some do. This will be in fact the source of some criticism as regards common cause models featuring a violation of Causal Order.
- 7.
However, rejecting Time Order would result in other different causal pictures (see causal models 2 and 3 below).
- 8.
Classical references to retrocausal pictures include Sutherland (1983), de Beauregard (1987) or more recently Price (1994, 1996). Huw Price, for instance, has gone as far as to argue that the characteristic time-symmetry of quantum mechanics (and of microphysics in particular) may imply, given some further assumptions about the ontology of the theory, the existence of backwards in time causation, or retrocausality, as he terms it (Price 2012).
- 9.
I must thank a reviewer for hinting this further kind of difficulties.
- 10.
Note that we cannot rule out this possibility completely just by looking at the other relevant probabilistic relations among O L and m L . In fact, we should expect them both to be correlated.
- 11.
Obviously, this is not the only temporal arrangement possible. Time Order could be violated as well by altering the order between measurements and outcomes, and leaving the common cause in the past of both, just as it is standard. The problem with such a structure, of course, is that it is very difficult to think of outcomes taking palace (or being observed) before measurements have been performed.
- 12.
This model, of course, needs to assume that there is some lapse of time—or rather some region of space-time—, however little this may be, between the performance of a measurement and the occurrence of the corresponding outcome. See San Pedro (2012) for details.
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San Pedro, I. (2017). On Time Order and Causal Order in the EPR Experiment. In: Hofer-Szabó, G., Wroński, L. (eds) Making it Formally Explicit. European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55486-0_8
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