The Future of Quantum Theory: A Way Out of the Impasse

Abstract

In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky action at a distance. We argue that these issues are fundamentally rooted in conflations commonly made between causal dependencies, counterfactual dependencies, and statistical dependencies. We argue that a simple, albeit somewhat uncomfortable shift of viewpoint leads to a way out of the impossibility to extend the theory beyond indeterminism, and towards the possibility that sound extensions of quantum theory, possibly even deterministic yet not super-deterministic, will emerge in the future. The paradigm shift, which we present here, involves a non-trivial relaxation of the commonly accepted mathematical definition of free choice, leading to non-Nashian free choice, more care with the choice of probabilistic notations, and more rigorous use of vocabulary related to causality, counterfactuals, and correlations, which are three concepts of a fundamentally different nature.