You are probably familiar with the following story, which was supposed to explain how charges act on charges:

Did you notice the absence of any explanation of how a charge locally acts on the electromagnetic field, or how the electromagnetic field locally acts on itself, or how it locally acts on a charge? Comment by B. S. DeWitt and R. N. Graham:

Physicists are, at bottom, a naive breed, forever trying to come to terms with the "world out there" by methods which, however imaginative and refined, involve in essence the same element of contact as a well-placed kick.

Fact is that the calculation of electromagnetic effects can be carried out in two steps:

The rest — the transmogrification of an algorithm for calculating the effects of charges on charges into a mechanism or process by which charges act on charges — is embroidery. But it wasn't until after the advent of quantum mechanics that the embroidery began to wear through.

If, after considering the experiment of Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger or the setup illustrating Bell's theorem, and after assimilating the fact that the quantum formalism encapsulates correlations between uncaused events, you are still not convinced of the impossibility of explaining the synchronic correlations — either in terms of hidden variables or by construing the correlation laws as descriptive of a physical mechanism or process — then the relativity of simultaneity should bring it home to you.

For any two events A, B in spacelike relation there exist reference frames in which A precedes B as well as reference frames in which B precedes A. If the two events were related as cause and effect, we wouldn't be able to say which is the cause and which is the effect. Since a reference frame is part of the language that we use to describe a situation, rather than part of the situation itself, a frame-dependent causal relation would also belong to the way we describe a situation rather then to the situation itself. In other words, a causal relation between events in spacelike relation cannot be an objective, physical relation.

So much for the synchronic correlations. While the diachronic correlations of classical physics, being deterministic, admit of causal interpretations, the diachronic correlations of quantum physics, being probabilistic, do not. The quantum-mechanical correlation laws leave no room for a physical mechanism or rule-governed process by which measurement outcomes determine the probabilities of measurement outcomes. Anyone searching for a causal explanation of the quantum-mechanical correlations puts the cart before the horse. It is the quantum-mechanical correlation laws that determine the extent to which causal concepts can be used. The use of such concepts is limited to the macroworld, in which the statistical correlation laws of quantum physics degenerate into the deterministic laws of classical physics. (The reason why causal concepts are nevertheless extremely useful is that the vast majority of our stories concern goings-on in the macroworld.)