Reply To: Holism and time symmetry

[Mark Stuckey]

Peter,
Your understanding of SEPRB agrees with mine, so I’m hoping you’ve got it right 😉

In the context of Evans’ paper in this forum, we might depict the holism of EPRB you describe as an undirected space-like link between its space-like separated outcomes (a la the undirected links in Evans’ Fig 4). One could attribute a direction to that link perspectivally/subjectively from within the block universe, depending on whether Alice’s detection or Bob’s detection occurred first per one’s particular Lorentz frame. Since some observers would have that link directed from Alice to Bob, while others would have it reversed, the “objective” version of the link would be undirected. This is analogous to the subjectively ambiguous direction of the retrocausal links in Evans’ Fig 4, which are likewise undirected in their objective form. With this depiction of retrocausality in EPRB, one might say the retrocausal links of Evans’ Fig 4 depict “diachronic holism” (as Silberstein suggested).

In either case, the key to explaining EPRB is that classical causality as characterized by Wood and Spekkens is violated per undirected links in the relevant explanatory graph. That’s why RBW (https://ijqf.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IJQF2015v1n3p2.pdf) employs fundamental explanation via an adynamical global constraint over spatiotemporally extended fundamental ontological entities we call “spacetimesource elements.” In that sense, RBW is “4D holism.”