[geertj]

> But they're interesting because they are laws - because there's some structure there, because the same causes consistently have the same effects. Superdeterminism denies all that.

There can be structure without cause and effect. Take any static physics problem, for example a flexible sheet that’s stretched over some frame. Since there is no time dimension there is no cause and effect but at every point in the sheet there is structure (Poisson’s law).

Both QFT and GR are the same order in time and space dimensions. Now, time is special among the dimensions because of the second law of thermodynamics, but I still have this feeling that it’s our being part of the universe and our brains having sufficient complexity for self reference that causes the illusion of a linear flow of time, while in fact all time happened in one ‘instant’ and one of the requirements for our universe to exist is that it is self consistent (causing these weird conspirational coincidences).

[lmm]

> There can be structure without cause and effect. Take any static physics problem, for example a flexible sheet that’s stretched over some frame. Since there is no time dimension there is no cause and effect but at every point in the sheet there is structure (Poisson’s law).

Up to a point - that kind of structure still depends on a notion of spatial distance and "influence" where you can reason locally about subsets. It's fairly fundamental that some parts of the sheet are more closely related to each other than other parts of it. If you had a model where every point of the sheet was equally closely related to every other point, you wouldn't be able to have any nontrivial structure, I think.