> Physicists don't largely choose physical theories on whether they make life meaningful or not. I think you're thinking of religious people.

I disagree, I think quite the opposite.

Physicists often seem to adhere to a "religion" of sorts, that being atheism. Anything to get rid of the "God problem".

It's not all so cut and dry.

> “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” - Albert Einstein

I'm not religious.

There are many religious physicists. I won't get into the argument about whether atheism is a sort of religion.

But even if fervent atheist physicists are trying to remove the God Problem, how does that mean they are selecting physical theories to make life meaningful?

In my physics PhD a meaningful portion of the department was religious. Had more to do with country of birth than the thing they were studying.

I'm not. Otherwise why would physicists support the concept of free will so strongly without any evidence for it. It is borderline religious. The video I posted above says as much.

Physicists essentially like "free will" because it is essential to do physics in a meaningful way (*). If you have something like superdeterminism then everything can be set up to make it look like your experimental results mean something, but while you're not looking anything could be happening, since your choice of what experiment to do can be correlated with the system you're observing without you knowing it.

For example you can have a system with two possible states, A and B. My decision to do experiments some superdeterministic setup is correlated with the state of the sytem so I only do experiments when the state of the system is A. I conclude that A is a physical law, but I'm completely wrong, its quite often B but I am only "choosing" to do experiments when it A.

(*) this is my opinion and the opinion of many, but absolutely not all physicists

Yes. Although it's technically a valid loophole, the likelihood the entire universe is set up to consistently give misleading results is extremely hard to believe.

The universe could still be entirely deterministic, in that your choice of experiment and measurement to make was fixed at the moment of creation. But you still believe that the results you are getting are a fair and accurate reflection of how the universe actually works.

Free will (in the philosophical sense) is irrelevant. Your choice of measurement is only influenced by what is happening locally to you at that time. The game isn't rigged to produce misleading results from the very moment of creation for all time.

IANAP, but the actual definition of Bell's free will argument is a bit more nuanced, and was probably an unfortunate term to use to describe it.

The reason that super determinism is rejected is because (in the usual understanding) that it requires that the initial state of the universe is set up incredibly precisely to make all subsequent measurements appear to violate Bell's inequality, even though reality isn't actually like that.

So if we set up a quantum measurement and make a decision based on photons of light emitted from distant stars, the experimenter deterministically chooses to make just the right measurement that would make the universe look like it was violating the inequality. Including all the matter between us, and the atoms in the neurons in the experimenters brain, and the photons that were emitted before any of that existed.

This is why super determinism is rejected. It would mean that we are not "free" to choose the experiments and measurements we perform. The universe would be essentially conspiring to deceive us at all levels, including what science we do, the results we receive and the conclusions drawn from it. Which is why it would invalidate the scientific method itself. We couldn't trust anything we thought we knew.

Sabine has a different take from what I can tell. If you allow backwards causality, the measurement act is not independent of the thing being measured. See this blog entry and the comments:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solut...

Not sure why this was downvoted. I'm not attacking religious people, so apologies if I gave any offence.

Just observing that historically religion tends to select theories of the physical world that align with its moral and religious belief.