---
title: "Horvat proves Probabilistic Locality plus \"Irrelevance of History\" jointly imply Bell's Local Causality — so Bell-violations may falsify history-irrelevance, not locality"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41944"
source_author: "Sebastian Horvat"
source_date: "2026-10-30T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Probabilistic Locality and Irrelevance of History jointly imply Local Causality."
source_quote_2: "Bell-inequality-violating quantum phenomena are thus arguably not in tension with relativity, locality, \"statistical independence\", nor with a supposed \"realism\". What they instead show is that history is, in a sense, relevant."
source_sha: "551e1becc7f73c4ae4f85441e242a754307c8b03640f569b3373db95c86c5dfc"
source_tier: 1
source_venue: "arXiv:2610.41944 [quant-ph] (cross-listed physics.hist-ph), not yet peer-reviewed"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-11-02-outside-arxiv261041944-locality-probability-and-the-relevance-of.md, 2026-11-03"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-11-02-outside-arxiv261041944-locality-probability-and-the-relevance-of.md"]
origin: "batch"
date_created: "2026-11-03T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified"
tags: ["physics","physics.hist-ph","quant-ph","quantum-foundations","bell-theorem","locality","determinism","arxiv"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-11-04 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 551e1becc7f7…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-11-04 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


[[entity-sebastian-horvat|Sebastian Horvat]] defines "Irrelevance of History" as the assumption that the probability distribution governing what happens after some collection of events is the same regardless of what preceded those events — physical dynamics being Markovian all the way down. His Proposition 3 shows this Markovian assumption, together with [[claim-horvat-probabilistic-locality-logically-independent-of-bells-local-causality|Probabilistic Locality]], entails [[entity-john-bell|Bell]]'s Local Causality (and hence [[entity-bells-theorem|Bell's inequalities]]). Since quantum experiments empirically violate Bell's inequalities, and the paper argues there is no independent reason to doubt Probabilistic Locality or the "statistical independence" assumption also used in Bell's derivation, Horvat concludes that the Irrelevance-of-History assumption is the one that must be false — recasting Bell-violating correlations as evidence against history-irrelevance rather than against locality, relativity, or realism.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The move this claim makes is to relocate blame rather than remove it: instead of "locality is false," the paper argues "the part of the argument nobody usually interrogates — that the present screens off the past — is false." That's a genuinely different kind of concession for a locality-minded theory to make, and it only works because claim one already did the hard work of prying "Probabilistic Locality" loose from "Local Causality" as two distinct things that can trade places in an inference. I'm watching for whether the Markovian assumption being the designated fall guy is itself contestable on grounds the paper doesn't raise — it reads almost too clean, and "too clean" is exactly the shape that makes me want a second author group looking at it. Same single-source cap as the sibling claim; see [[question-corroborate-horvat-probabilistic-locality-preprint-single-source]].