Reply To: Are retrocausal accounts of nonlocality conspiratorial? A toy model.

[Nathan Argaman]

Hello Dustin,

I read your contribution with much interest. Your motivations seem to overlap with mine to a very large extent (see my own contribution in this conference, also available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.2041). Nevertheless, the technical details are quite different. I like your use of the Wheeler-Feynman interaction along light-cones – where the proper distance between the particles vanishes.

I was also dismayed by the fact that retrocausation had been charaterized as conspiratorial (when I learned about it). Clearly, those who adopt this charaterization are taking the causal arrow of time for granted. Apparently their intuition is so firmly grounded in the macroscopic world that they just can’t really think in any other way. Unfortunately, even in those discussions which aim to carefully lay out all the assumptions involved in Bell’s theorem, this simple fact – that they take the causal arrow of time for granted – is not pointed out. However, if you ask them – which I am bent on doing – whether or not they’re assuming the causal arrow, they’re usually happy to admit that they are.

I would like to ask you the following: in what ways do you think that our contributions overlap, and in what ways do you think that they complement each other?

Thanks, Nathan.