CALLIOPE · BCOM

Quantum theory is often presented as both our most successful description of nature and a prompt to abandon classical intuitions. Yet one classical intuition is rarely noticed because it is built into the way we formulate quantum tests: the presumption that measurement choices are statistically independent of the physical states whose properties we measure. Read against a thoroughgoing physicalism, this presumption has an anthropocentric flavor: it treats human (or device-level) ``choices'' as special, floating free of the microstate they probe. The label superdeterminism exaggerates what is, in effect, plain determinism consistently applied to the entire experimental arrangement, choices included. This essay argues that the persistence of measurement independence reflects a subtle form of human provincialism and proposes a cleaner cost accounting of what is gained and lost when we keep---or drop---that assumption.

Bell's theorem rests on a hidden assumption about human choices — and that assumption deserves more scrutiny than it gets.

Here's the core idea. Bell's theorem, which rules out certain "hidden variable" explanations of quantum weirdness, requires two ingredients: a locality condition (distant measurements don't instantly influence each other) and something called measurement independence — the assumption that the hidden state of a particle system has no statistical correlation with the experimenter's choice of what to measure. The second assumption is almost never questioned. This paper argues it should be.

Why? Because in a fully deterministic universe, the experimenter, her random-number generator, and the particle system she's probing are all part of one continuous physical history. They evolved together from the same initial conditions. Demanding that the measurement settings be statistically independent of the particle's hidden state is, from that vantage point, an extra assumption — not a neutral one. It quietly grants human choices (or device outputs) a special status: exempt from the microphysical web everything else is embedded in. The paper calls this "human provincialism," and the label is apt. We've historically assumed humans occupy a privileged position relative to animals, then machines; here, the same instinct sneaks into physics foundations.

The term "superdeterminism" — the label critics use for theories that drop measurement independence — is, the paper argues, actively misleading. There's nothing "super" about it. It's just determinism applied consistently, all the way down, to the agents and instruments too. The "super" prefix makes it sound like an exotic metaphysical add-on, when in fact it's the measurement independence assumption that is the add-on. The paper walks through the math carefully: Bell's factorization formula follows from two separable premises (locality and measurement independence), and you can toggle each independently. Dropping measurement independence while keeping locality is a coherent, principled choice — one corner of what the paper calls the "Bell triangle."

The paper also takes seriously the standard objections — that dropping measurement independence is unfalsifiable or conspiratorial — and pushes back. A legitimate deterministic model must provide a structural, dynamical mechanism for the required correlations, not ad hoc tuning per experiment. It should be robust, arising from global features like initial conditions or invariant measures. And it may imply testable signatures: restricted setting ensembles, forbidden counterfactuals, or small structured deviations from standard quantum predictions. The paper even sketches an algorithmic-information framing: measurement independence corresponds to near-zero algorithmic mutual information between the setting string and the hidden-variable description, and the real question is whether the dependence needed to reproduce quantum statistics is "algorithmically natural" — compressible by short laws — rather than bespoke.

The conclusion is measured. Measurement independence remains an excellent engineering assumption for doing quantum experiments and device-independent cryptography, and nothing here forces us to abandon it in practice. But we should stop treating the reflex to keep it as metaphysically neutral. Dropping it isn't conspiracy — it's determinism taken seriously.