In light of a recent reformulation of Bell's theorem from causal principles
by Howard Wiseman and the author, I argue that the conflict between quantum
theory and relativity brought up by Bell's work can be softened by a revision
of our classical notions of causation. I review some recent proposals for a
quantum theory of causation that make great strides towards that end, but
highlight a property that is shared by all those theories that would not have
satisfied Bell's realist inclinations. They require (implicitly or explicitly)
agent-centric notions such as "controllables" and "uncontrollables", or
"observed" and "unobserved". Thus they relieve the tensions around Bell's
theorem by highlighting an issue more often associated with another deep
conceptual issue in quantum theory: the measurement problem. Rather than
rejecting those terms, however, I argue that we should understand why they seem
to be, at least at face-value, needed in order to reach compatibility between
quantum theory and relativity. This seems to suggest that causation, and thus
causal structure, are emergent phenomena, and lends support to the idea that a
resolution of the conflict between quantum theory and relativity necessitates a
solution to the measurement problem.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Submitted for the proceedings of Emergent Quantum
Mechanics 201
