Bell's Theorem assumes that hidden variables are not influenced by future
measurement settings. The assumption has sometimes been questioned, but the
suggestion has been thought outlandish, even by the taxed standards of the
discipline. (Bell thought that it led to fatalism.) The case for this reaction
turns out to be surprisingly weak, however. We show that QM easily evades the
standard objections to advanced action. And the approach has striking
advantages, especially in avoiding the apparent conflict between Bell's Theorem
and special relativity.
The second part of the paper considers the broader question as to why
advanced action seems so counterintuitive. We investigate the origins of our
ordinary intuitions about causal asymmetry. It is argued that the view that the
past does not depend on the future is largely anthropocentric, a kind of
projection of our own temporal asymmetry. Many physicists have also reached
this conclusion, but have thought that if causation has no objective direction,
there is no objective content to an advanced action interpretation of QM. This
turns out to be a mistake. From the ordinary subjective perspective, we can
distinguish two sorts of objective world: one "looks as if" it contains only
forward causation, the other ``looks as if'' it involves a mix of backward and
forward causation. This clarifies the objective core of an advanced action
interpretation of QM, and shows that there is an independent symmetry argument
in favour of the approach.Comment: 35 pages, LaTex (forthcoming in MIND, July 1994; written for a
philosophical audience, but perhaps of some interest here