Superdeterminism

The part about superdeterminism which is goofy isn't that it negates the idea of "experimental choice" (simple determinism already does that), but that conspiracy you mention, trying to weaken QM and claiming that a classic deterministic universe + that conspiracy rule can replace QM.

I think that the idea of superdeterminism can be questioned this way: in a world with a single deterministic timeline, the odds of life appearing is basically zero. A single deterministic timeline just doesn't have enough room for natural selection to evolve anything interesting. E.g brains, as probabilistic predictors, would have no utility (i.e. no way to be selected, because the odds of them appearing would be so vanishingly small).

But in the many world interpretation, life will always appear in some branches (even if it's only a tiny fraction), and those are the branches where we exist, writing in this thread. Natural selection can be seen as a process acting across parallel branches of the multiverse. Brains would be selected across multiple branches because their high level state (symbol manipulation) is based on macro physical values (from a thermodynamics/statistical physics point of view), and that state is therefore robust in terms of micro state fluctuations (those are the fluctuations which branch the universe), just like all IBM PCs give the same output for a given algorithm and data, even though they're all different at the atomic level (this is what a computation is).

/r/samharris Thread Parent Link - en.m.wikipedia.org