Abstract
In light of a recent reformulation of Bell's theorem from causal principles by Wiseman and the author, I argue that the conflict between quantum theory and relativity brought up by Bell's work can be softened by a revision of our classical notions of causation. I review some recent proposals for a quantum theory of causation that make great strides towards that end, but highlight a property that is shared by all those theories that would not have satisfied Bell's realist inclinations. They require (implicitly or explicitly) agent-centric notions such as “controllables” and “uncontrollables”, or “observed” and “unobserved”. Thus they relieve the tensions around Bell's theorem by highlighting an issue more often associated with another deep conceptual issue in quantum theory: the measurement problem. Rather than rejecting those terms, however, I argue that we should understand why they seem to be, at least at face-value, needed in order to reach compatibility between quantum theory and relativity. This seems to suggest that causation, and thus causal structure, are emergent phenomena, and lends support to the idea that a resolution of the conflict between quantum theory and relativity necessitates a solution to the measurement problem.
Highlights
Who cares about causality? Some philosophers, like Bertrand Russell, have argued that it has no role in fundamental physics
For Russell, the time-asymmetric notions of cause and effect are not compatible with the deterministic and time-symmetric laws of physics, in which the future determines the past just as the past determines the future. Another point of view is defended by Nancy Cartwright [5]: “Bertrand Russell argued that laws of association are all the laws there are, and that causal principles cannot be derived from the causally symmetric laws of association. (...) Causal principles cannot be reduced to laws of association; but they cannot be done away with”
The conflict becomes a terminological dispute about what is the physically correct notion of locality, with different camps disagreeing about whether or not it is violated by quantum theory
Summary
Who cares about causality? Some philosophers, like Bertrand Russell, have argued that it has no role in fundamental physics. A DAG can be seen as representing the conditional independences associated with any probability distribution P (·) over the variables in the graph that is compatible with that causal structure.
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