[skissane]

> I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.

Here's what I don't get about "superdeterminism" – what it is "super-" about it? I read an explanation of "superdeterminism", and it just reads like plain old determinism to me. Any convinced determinist is going to say that of course determinism includes the human will among the things that are determined. Philosophers such as Spinoza or the Baron d'Holbach were already saying exactly that long before any physicist had thought up the term "superdeterminism".

[jfengel]

"Determinism" covers a wide range of possibilities. Superdeterminism is more specific: every single piddling bit of apparent quantum randomness is actually already stored in some vast lookup table somewhere.

And everything else in the universe leading up to it, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, is constructed to lead up to that. To get that exact measurement from the device, you needed to set it up in that exact way at that exact time. The amount of time it took the clerk to count your change when you bought ice cream thus is a crucial part of that experiment. It was coded up at the beginning of time precisely so that the experiment could occur to give you that result.

Ordinary determinism can be a bit more lax about the specifics. It doesn't have to be, but it could be. It could focus on some other time scale: "It doesn't matter whether you pick chocolate or vanilla, you're still getting hit by a truck on the way out of the ice cream shop, so you get to choose what flavor you're enjoying when you get flattened". Superdeterminism denies that, right back to the beginning.

So it really is plain old determinism, but with a specific focus on, well, specificities.

[skissane]

I'm still wondering, if we look at the classical determinists in the history of philosophy, such as Spinoza, d'Holbach, Laplace, etc – were they superdeterminists or "subdeterminists"?

If the mainstream of historical determinism is in fact superdeterminism, then the term is a bit misleading, because it makes it sound like physicists are coming up with some new idea rather than just restating one that has been around for centuries (maybe even millennia).