The lesson of causal discovery algorithms for quantum correlations: causal explanations of Bell-inequality violations require fine-tuning

DOI10.1088/1367-2630/17/3/033002zbMATH Open1452.81085arXiv1208.4119OpenAlexW2092857006MaRDI QIDQ3387724FDOQ3387724

Authors: Christopher J. Wood, Robert W. Spekkens 

Publication date: 13 January 2021

Published in: New Journal of Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: An active area of research in the fields of machine learning and statistics is the development of causal discovery algorithms, the purpose of which is to infer the causal relations that hold among a set of variables from the correlations that these exhibit. We apply some of these algorithms to the correlations that arise for entangled quantum systems. We show that they cannot distinguish correlations that satisfy Bell inequalities from correlations that violate Bell inequalities, and consequently that they cannot do justice to the challenges of explaining certain quantum correlations causally. Nonetheless, by adapting the conceptual tools of causal inference, we can show that any attempt to provide a causal explanation of nonsignalling correlations that violate a Bell inequality must contradict a core principle of these algorithms, namely, that an observed statistical independence between variables should not be explained by fine-tuning of the causal parameters. In particular, we demonstrate the need for such fine-tuning for most of the causal mechanisms that have been proposed to underlie Bell correlations, including superluminal causal influences, superdeterminism (that is, a denial of freedom of choice of settings), and retrocausal influences which do not introduce causal cycles.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4119

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zbMATH Keywords

causalityBell's theoremnonlocalityquantum theory

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Learning and adaptive systems in artificial intelligence (68T05) Quantum computation (81P68) General and philosophical questions in quantum theory (81P05) Quantum measurement theory, state operations, state preparations (81P15)

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