nmann,
Thanks for your post. In my reply to you on Sunday I inadvertently erased a sentence that should have gone before my remarks on Tresser's work. It normally would be no big deal, but it makes it sound as though I am attributing some of the errors that Tresser makes to Zeilinger's group, and that was definitely not my intention.
After criticizing the Z group for their characterization of realism, it should have read:
" Zeilinger's group is very clear that they are ruling out certain classes of nonlocal, deterministic models, and they do NOT make the mistake of supposing that one could decide to abandon realism, and thus save local causality.
Unfortunately, Tresser appears to make exactly this mistake."
I have a high regard for the work that the Vienna group has done, and I don't want to criticize them unfairly. I do think that they, and many other people, are sometimes a little too quick in considering what assumptions we might start throwing out. Giving up local causality is a huge step in itself, but Bell's analysis appears to force us in that direction. I also advocate accepting limits on determinism, but we are not logically compelled to take that step.
de broglie-Bohm theory gives a deterministic nonlocal account of the quantum correlations. It's just that if we take that route we have to either accept the fact that (as Elitzur and Dolev say) "hidden variables must be forever hidden", or look for possible violations of signal causality (as Valentini has pointed out).
It just seems to me that we should take things a step at a time, before we start giving up on logic, and our belief in an objectively existing external world. It's true that we need to be open-minded, but we also need to be clear-headed and careful.
It's time to get on with my day job,
Ed