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The causal problem of entanglement. (English) Zbl 1360.03060

Summary: This paper expounds that besides the well-known spatio-temporal problem there is a causal problem of entanglement: even when one neglects spatio-temporal constraints, the peculiar statistics of EPR/B experiment is inconsistent with usual principles of causal explanation as stated by the theory of causal Bayes nets. The conflict amounts to a dilemma that either there are uncaused correlations (violating the causal Markov condition) or there are caused independences (violating the causal faithfulness condition). I argue that the central ideas of causal explanations can be saved if one accepts the latter horn and explains the unfaithful independences by a stable fine-tuning of the causal parameters.

MSC:

03A10 Logic in the philosophy of science
03B48 Probability and inductive logic
62A01 Foundations and philosophical topics in statistics

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