Horvat's "alien organism" toy model shows how history-dependence lets a theory violate Bell's Local Causality while still satisfying Probabilistic Locality

physicsphysics.hist-phquant-phquantum-foundationsbell-theoremlocalityeprarxiv

Using a toy example of shape/color-changing organisms — a red pyramid turns into a red cube or red sphere with 50% probability each after time τ; a red cube deterministically turns blue, a red sphere deterministically turns green, after a further τ — Horvat shows the general mechanism by which a theory could reproduce Bell-inequality-violating EPR correlations while still complying with Probabilistic Locality. If "red cube → blue cube" holds only for cubes tracing back to a red-pyramid origin — not for red cubes with other origins — then conditioning on the immediate past state (red cube) alone fails to fix the future probability, violating Irrelevance of History, while Probabilistic Locality can still hold globally. Applied to EPR-type correlations, the paper argues the apparently nonlocal correlations are "washed out by averaging over the possible histories" leading to the measured outcome. The paper is explicit that it has not constructed a concrete physical theory doing this for real EPR experiments — the mechanism is a coherence proof-of-concept, not a demonstrated physical model.