> (i) take it as a point of religious faith that noise will be magically correlated in order to break error correcting codes
This possibility doesn't strike me as any more magical than QM's conjugate variables or its unusual correlations, which also seemed magical to classical physics. Arguably these + contextuality would make noise correlated with the system's configuration in some way, we just don't have a thorough enough understanding of measurement and decoherence to quantify it precisely. I think that's beginning to change, and that we'll have more clarity in the next 10 years or so.
But the reason people believe QM is because of overwhelming empirical evidence, not because it seems right.
You can't just go "QM has many surprising aspects" to "this other theory also has surprising aspects, it's probably true".
If we had been having this conversation before some of the more bizarre quantum effects had been observed it would have been a fair comparison, but we are way past that point.
> You can't just go "QM has many surprising aspects" to "this other theory also has surprising aspects, it's probably true".
I didn't say it's probably true because of this argument, you're saying it's probably false because it seems magical, and that's the implication I'm disputing with that analogy.
I do think it's plausible that noise could be correlated for the reasons I specified, but not because of the "magical" analogy.
This possibility doesn't strike me as any more magical than QM's conjugate variables or its unusual correlations, which also seemed magical to classical physics. Arguably these + contextuality would make noise correlated with the system's configuration in some way, we just don't have a thorough enough understanding of measurement and decoherence to quantify it precisely. I think that's beginning to change, and that we'll have more clarity in the next 10 years or so.