Brothers in Dispute #5 with Dr. Michael Abraham, 21.1.25 – Arnon Shahar

[Speaker A] Hi, welcome to the podcast Brothers in Dispute, a podcast where I invite people to argue with me together with the principle of attentive speaking, according to which the speaker always has to stop speaking when the other person asks to say something. Today I’m hosting Dr. Michael Abraham, Miki Abraham, who is a rabbi at Bar-Ilan University and also has a doctorate in physics. That’s it, it was a very nice and interesting conversation. Hope you enjoy it. Bye. Oh, that’s it.

[Speaker B] Great. Hi.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Hello.

[Speaker B] Nice to meet you. Very nice. So I heard about you through someone who takes part in dialogue meetings that I go to, between religious and secular people, and she said it would be interesting for me to listen to you. And really, I listened to your talks on YouTube, and you definitely interest me, and your ideas interest me. And I thought—I mainly looked at debates of yours on religious issues—and I thought it might be interesting to do some kind of debate with you as well, but in a way that matters most to me, which is this method of attentive speaking, where the speaker has to give the floor to the listener the moment the listener asks for it. So I’m committed to that. You don’t have to be committed to it, only if you want to, only if you’re willing. And anytime you want me to stop talking, you can either jump in or raise your hand so I’ll see and stop and let you speak.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, we can try.

[Speaker B] Yes, I’ll say that in my opinion this is the best way to conduct an argument, and I hope you’ll see the logic in it and appreciate it. Okay?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine.

[Speaker B] Good. So what would you like to talk about, to argue about? We have several topics we could talk about. One is the subject of the Holy One, blessed be He—whether He exists or does not exist. That seems to me like a possible issue, clear and obvious in the sense of what distinguishes a religious person from a person—or a believer from a non-believer. We can talk about that. We can also talk about—I tried having a discussion about the Holy One, blessed be He, in the framework of a dialogue meeting, and what ultimately came up as more relevant or more meaningful, what stirred more discussion, is that I believe in absolute determinism, meaning that I believe there is no free will, and we could talk about that too. I assume you believe there is free will, so we could talk about that. Whatever you prefer, whatever interests you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t matter to me, either one is fine. Maybe the second seems a bit more interesting to me than the first. The first is a bit detached, I think. Let’s try the second one if we’re choosing, though it doesn’t really matter to me.

[Speaker B] Okay, excellent. So if you want, you can start, or I can start.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If you want me to—please, you start.

[Speaker B] Fine. So I’ll present my position, and I ask that you stop me the moment you hear something you don’t agree with or something you don’t understand. Naturally, right at the start you’ll hear things like that, but feel free. So I believe in determinism. What that means is that there really is no free choice. The reason I believe this comes from the belief or assumption that everything has a cause or causes. And when I look inward, into my own conscious process, where we tend to think we have choice, it’s in the context of consciousness. If someone offers me tea or coffee, and I say coffee, I feel like coffee, then ostensibly there’s some kind of choice there. And in the context of the here and now, yes, there really is me choosing coffee and not tea, but in fact, within me, the thought process, the process that led me to say coffee rather than tea, is a process determined in advance. The chain of thought, sensation—everything is part of some causal chain that began, maybe never began, maybe existed forever—and we are simply part of the deterministic process of the development of the universe. And we are entities that watch what happens, experience it, but don’t really choose. If you’d like to respond to that or if you have questions?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe I’ll respond to the point you raised here. Basically, what you described is a situation known in neuroscience and philosophy as picking versus choosing. In other words, the decision whether you want coffee or tea is a decision that involves no dilemma at all. There aren’t two real sides here that you’re torn between and then decide. Maybe I’ll give an example. The point at which people began talking about the question of determinism not as a philosophical issue but as a scientific one was at the end of the 20th century, or in the 1970s–80s of the 20th century, when Libet’s experiments began. They continue to this day in all kinds of different forms; people have expanded them, tightened them up, refined them, but they continue to this day. And there, the basic experiment was like this: you put a person in front of a table with a button on it and say to him, “Whenever you decide to press the button, press it.” On the wall in front of him there’s a clock running, and electrodes are connected to his head—an EEG—we want to check his brain waves. Now the claim is that before a person performs an action, there is a signal in the brain that predicts that action. It’s called the readiness potential, RP. That part is known. Now Libet’s idea was: “I want to check not the relation between the action and that signal, but the relation between the decision and that signal.” In other words, the question is: when you decided to press the button, did that happen before the signal was generated or after it? Why is that really the important thing? Because the question of whether a person acts deterministically is not determined by the question of whether there is a signal in the brain and then he acts—of course that’s true. The question is when he decided. Meaning, if he decided before there was a signal in the brain, and then the signal in the brain was created, then the signal is the result of the decision, and afterward the action also occurs—but the decision is what began the chain. By contrast, if he decides after the signal is created, then the decision seems to be some kind of illusion. In fact, after all, we already know in advance that he’ll press; he experiences… thank you, thank you.

[Speaker B] So I claim—and if you could tell me what you think about this—I claim that every decision, every decision, or no decision can occur or does occur out of nothing. It looks as if it comes from nothing, but in fact every decision, every opinion we have, everything is based on a chain of thought-processes that happened before the decision. Yes, please.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s clear to me that that’s what you’re claiming. I’m only saying that the example you gave doesn’t represent it, because in that example I also agree, even though I don’t agree with your overall claim. And in order to understand that… and in order to understand this point, I make the distinction between picking and choosing. And the claim is that Libet discovered, in that experiment I described earlier, that it turns out the decision appears after the signal appears. In later experiments the gaps were even several seconds, which are huge gaps on the scale of events of this kind. So it’s clear that the signal appears before the decision, and therefore the conclusion seems determinist. By the way, Libet himself was not a determinist, and still wasn’t, so this surprised him. But one of the criticisms—there are many criticisms of this experiment; in my opinion, even if they improve these experiments, they won’t be able to decide the discussion—but one of the criticisms of his experiment was that he examined a case of picking, not a case of choosing. Because a decision about when to press a button is an arbitrary decision; there are no considerations pulling this way and that. And therefore, whenever you decide, you press. There are no dilemmas. Since that’s the case, once the signal appears, you’ll press—why wouldn’t you? So of course the signal will come before pressing the button. By contrast, if the dilemma—just a second, I’m only finishing the distinction—if by contrast we’re talking about a case of choosing, not picking, meaning you have to decide in a moral dilemma, for example, which has two serious sides and where the decision is not simple, my claim in the book I published on the subject was that in such a case, if they did a Libet experiment—and it’s not easy to do it on such a case—they would not discover a readiness potential preceding the decision. The decision would come before the readiness potential, because there you deliberate, and even if the readiness potential tells you to do something, it may be that you won’t do it, that you’ll choose to resist what it says. One last sentence: two years after my book came out, a very large experiment was conducted with dozens of scientists around the world. Liad Mudrik was one of the partners, she’s a brain researcher from Tel Aviv University, together with Uri Maoz from New York, doesn’t matter, also originally Israeli. And they discovered, to their surprise, that indeed in experiments of choosing and not picking, there is no readiness potential preceding the decision. In other words, there is experimental indication that there’s a difference between picking and choosing. Of course that doesn’t prove that choice exists, but it gives some indication that there is an important distinction that needs to be taken into account between picking and choosing. And therefore, the coffee-or-tea example does not prove your claim. That doesn’t mean your claim isn’t true—I’m only saying that this example doesn’t prove it.

[Speaker B] Okay. My feeling is that this Libet experiment—I don’t feel that it relates to the issue of determinism. I don’t think you can—or that you need to—do an experiment at all in order to “prove,” in quotation marks, determinism in this context. Let’s take, for the sake of argument, not picking but choosing, or a situation of a moral dilemma. Okay? The standard moral dilemma goes like this: a train is moving, and if it keeps moving it kills four people. Trolley? Yes, and if you pull the lever, then it kills one person. What happens there in the consciousness of the person acting? Does he have a choice, and what is this choice that he supposedly has there? So I claim that in such a situation of choice, a given person has a set of opinions he acquired over the course of his life, and a set of associations, and a set of all sorts of things that lead him, at the moment of decision, to a particular decision, and he acts this way and not that way. To make it sharper, I’ll oversimplify it: a person with education X will choose one thing, and a person with education Y will choose something else. And that—but the human entity, the human brain, is much more complex than the education it received, yes? It could also be a single childhood experience that changed things. Nature and nurture?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] First of all, there’s nature and nurture, yes, it’s a combination of both. Yes—

[Speaker B] But—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not just education, but also nature—meaning genetics, natural constitution, physiology, of course. And there is also nurture, which consists of education, environment, and so on, external influences.

[Speaker B] And those are the things that determine—I want to say, totally—the decisions, the choices, the opinions of every person at every given moment. And if that is indeed the case, then we do not really have free choice—or the concept of free choice. Please.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’ll repeat what I said before. I understand that this is what you’re claiming. The only question is what the evidence and considerations are in favor of it. In other words, you presented your thesis, but you began with an example that tries—I don’t know whether to prove it, but at least to support it. And my claim is that the example of coffee and tea does not support that thesis. I understand that this is your thesis. What I wanted to say is, first, that in my view there is a difference between picking and choosing. There is a difference between picking and choosing, and therefore if you want to support this, you’ll have to do so on the basis of cases of choosing and not picking. And second, there are experimental results that clearly show a difference between picking and choosing, so even if you say they are both the same thing—just one second—even if you say they are both the same thing, now the burden of proof shifts to you. Okay. Sorry, wait—

[Speaker B] Again. I want to say—I think, and I think right now—the burden is on the other side. What do I mean? I said that no sort of evidence is needed to prove the claim of determinism in the context of so-called choice. Again I go back to… or if you could give me a clear example of choosing and not picking.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Before the example, one more sentence about what you said before and what you’re saying now, because it goes to the same place. You said you don’t believe in experiments and you don’t think experiments are needed. Now the question is, yes?

[Speaker B] Wait, I just want to clarify: I very much believe in experiments, just not in this context. Okay? In this context. Wait, I just want to say—it’s not that… I think there is no experiment I can imagine that could support or refute this idea, exactly the same way as I think—but to a large extent I’m not sure I’m right in this context—that there couldn’t be an experiment that refutes the idea that there could be a triangle with more than three vertices. That’s—yes. No, the claim—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The claim is not whether one needs an experiment, but whether there is one. Now you argue that there cannot be such an experiment, but there are many people who argue not only that there can be, but that there has been, and that this experiment has already had its say. And therefore I think the big question is not whether one needs it and whether it can exist, but let’s check what actually happened. And what actually happened is that there was one, yes? Yes, yes.

[Speaker B] My claim is that determinism really has nothing to do with experiment. It has to do with how we analyze, almost entirely conceptually, this thing we call choice. Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I completely agree. Good, I—

[Speaker B] So do you agree with me that when a person makes a certain choice, what led him to make that choice was his nature and nurture? Meaning… no. No? No. Okay, excellent, now we’re getting started. What do you think—what do you think—besides nature and nurture and the sum total of a person’s experiences up to that moment, what else do you think influences his choice?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, one more sentence about before—I have to close the previous point. I think the question is not whether experiments are possible, but rather we need to check what happened in practice, and in practice experiments have been conducted, and we need to consider what the results of those experiments mean. I told you that I completely agree that there can’t be an experiment that checks this—not that there can’t be, but that at present I don’t see an experiment that checks it. It’s too presumptuous to say there can’t be, because… but from my point of view that itself is a result. In other words, after there were experiments, and I thought about them and examined their meaning, I came to the conclusion that indeed there aren’t—and at least for now it doesn’t seem that there can be in the near future—experiments that would test this. I object to the a priori claim that isn’t willing to relate to experiments in this context and says they can’t exist, and therefore experiments are not interesting on this topic. That’s a remark about the earlier point. Yes.

[Speaker B] It seems to me that we have here—it seems to me we have here a subtopic that is interesting and important. Maybe we should move to it for a moment—the subject of experiment. What is the significance of experiments, and what alternative is there to experiments? I’ll just note in this context that my favorite philosopher, and someone I sort of see as my great teacher, is Karl Popper. And Karl Popper, of course, greatly valued experiments and believed in experiments in the context of science. And with regard to Popper, I once saw some guy—maybe you know him—there’s some libertarian thinker, Hoppe, some German I think, Hoppe, anyway—

[Speaker A] who—

[Speaker B] who criticized Popper in a way that I—he did… he treated Popper as a positivist, all kinds of things, said all kinds of nonsense. But he also said some correct things that I think Popper didn’t address. And what he said is very interesting to me. Popper based science on experimental testability, on falsifiability, right? And what this Hoppe suggests is that there are all kinds of truths—truths that one cannot and need not try to refute, or subject to some experiment, in order to know with certainty, as much as one can be certain, as much as one can know something with certainty, that they are true. There are all kinds of theories—for example, what did he give there? I don’t remember exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But what? I can give you some examples myself. I completely agree. Meaning, for example, the principle of causality that you used earlier does not come from observation and cannot come from observation; David Hume already pointed this out. The principle of induction, the rejection of action at a distance—a physical assumption, action at a distance—various things of this kind are things that do not come from experiment, but science assumes them a priori. There are many things of this sort. But if we return—yes?

[Speaker B] If I may, I think it’s more than assuming them—it’s really accepting them as something we intuitively see to be true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A kind of evidence, yes—evidence, like the kind Descartes talks about. Yes, yes, that’s what I meant by assuming. Assuming doesn’t mean arbitrarily. Assuming means seeing intuitively that it’s true. For me, that’s what assuming means. Now, if we return to the topic for which we gathered, the fact that Popper puts things to the test of falsification, including the criticisms you raised here, does not undermine in any way what I said earlier. Because let’s suppose that we really did discover that in an experiment of choosing, the signal precedes the moment of decision. Suppose we discovered that in an experiment, and that is a possible result—we measure everything and can see what comes before what. If it precedes it, that means we essentially have a refutation of the libertarian claim, because then I see that I can predict what a person will decide even before he is at least aware that he has decided. Therefore there is a falsifying experiment here. With all the limitations of scientific experiments, it is not true that a priori this issue lies outside the domain of science—not true. In principle, if they succeed in doing an experiment where there is a signal that precedes choosing, then I’ll raise my hands and say, you’re right, I was wrong. The world is not libertarian, the human being is not libertarian but determinist.

[Speaker B] I’m asking—I’m not sure I fully understood this experiment. Could you explain it to me? The point that’s problematic for me is: what is the meaning of this signal? Why is so much weight attached to this signal in relation to freedom of the will? What is the significance of this signal?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll explain again, maybe, because I really didn’t elaborate enough in the description of the experiment. They put an EEG cap on the person to monitor the appearance of the signal in his head, and they check when the signal appeared as against when the person decided. Now suppose the signal appeared three seconds before he decided, yes?

[Speaker B] What is that signal?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] An electrical signal that we know how to measure. It doesn’t matter what it is.

[Speaker B] Why doesn’t it matter what it is?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What—what needs to—

[Speaker B] happen in order for there to be a signal?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll explain why it doesn’t matter. The moment there is a signal, I know the person is going to make a certain decision. Never mind how, for the moment—I know. That’s a fact. I know. It’s a fact that this signal always precedes the decision to press the button. That’s a known scientific fact, by the way, even before Libet. And therefore, the moment there is such a signal, I can basically tell you what you’re going to do before you have decided to do it—assuming, indeed, that these are the results of the experiment, that there is such a signal also before acts of choosing. If so, then you do not have free choice. Why? You do not have free choice. It doesn’t matter at all where the signal comes from or what its meaning is. The very fact that I can tell you in advance what you’re going to do before you have decided—that is the meaning of determinism.

[Speaker B] I don’t think I agree, but wait, if possible, I think this would help us—if you could say a few words about what free choice is in general. What is free choice for you?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Free choice is a situation in which the given state of affairs—a necessary condition for free choice, not the whole of free choice—a necessary condition for free choice is that the given state of affairs does not dictate the result. Meaning that in one given state of affairs, where you know all the data for the sake of discussion, yes, hypothetically—you know the state of the person, the state of the universe, every grain, everything, you know everything, like Laplace’s dream—even in such a situation, two different results can emerge as far as the person’s decision is concerned. That is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, because that necessary condition also describes a random process, not only a process of choice. In a random process too, within a given situation there can be two outcomes, as in common interpretations of quantum theory, for example. What else is needed for a choice to be a choice? First, there must be no determinism, meaning there must be two possible outcomes from one given state. Second, the decision as to which of the two outcomes I choose, or which of the two directions I go, must be a decision entrusted to me, and not a decision that merely happens to me, but one entrusted to me. I make it through deliberation, however you want to describe it. Those two things together, cumulatively, are what I call free choice.

[Speaker B] So wait—I’m not sure I understood, and I apologize, I’m not sure I understood, and I suspect there may be some problem in this description. If you could please say it again—so first of all, we have, let’s see if I understood, okay? And stop me, correct me. First of all, we have Laplace’s known deterministic world, where everything, all the data, are known, and the idea was that if all the data are known, we can know what is going to happen in a given situation. And you’re saying one condition for the world not to be deterministic, or for a person to act non-deterministically, is that there are at least two—that even when everything is known, there are at least two possibilities of what could happen. And you say that this is one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics: that implicitly reality is not such that even if we knew everything, necessarily only one thing would happen, but rather it is always subject to some kind of statistics, some probability, that it will turn out this way and not that way. It is random to some extent, right? Yes. So you say that one condition for the free choice of a particular person is first of all that there is some such “quantum” reality, in quotation marks, where there is more than one possibility for something to happen in an essential sense. And the second thing you said is that this shift, this difference between X and Y, between the two possibilities for the sake of argument, is something that depends on the person himself and not something completely random and arbitrary as in the physical quantum context.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct? Yes.

[Speaker B] Okay. Now I personally really don’t understand anything about physics, but from my point of view this whole business of probability in the quantum context and so on seems completely absurd, and to my mind it’s only a matter of point of view. We simply don’t know, so whatever we don’t know, we assign probability to it. The very concept of probability, to my mind, does not deal with metaphysics but with epistemology, with predictive ability and not with metaphysics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, it’s good that you prefaced that by saying you don’t understand physics, because this very question has been discussed by physicists, and an experiment was even conducted to test whether this is metaphysics or epistemology. And that experiment apparently shows—unless there are remote possibilities that have not yet been ruled out—but aside from that, the experiment shows that it is metaphysics and not epistemology. In other words, quantum theory is not probability as a result of lack of information. That’s basically what you are describing, and that’s something epistemic. I don’t know everything, so I use probabilities to quantify the chance of each of the possible outcomes. But in quantum theory, that is exactly the root of the difficulty. That’s why it’s so hard for people to understand it, even though in other contexts we have no problem using probability and statistics. Because quantum theory is not probability and statistics—that’s a common mistake. Quantum theory is vagueness. What is more appropriate here than statistics is fuzzy logic, because reality itself is vague, not because I lack information about it. That is the accepted interpretation, there are also experiments that support it, and therefore quantum theory does not describe an epistemic problem; it describes an ontic problem, yes.

[Speaker B] If we can linger on that—but first I want to note that Zoom is going to close in about eight minutes. Before that I’d be happy if we could summarize this meeting, and then if we want we can meet again whenever you feel like continuing this conversation with me. So I want to say: the very concept of “vague” is an epistemological concept.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, then use another concept—that’s my term. Use another term, it doesn’t matter. The claim is that it’s in ontology, not in epistemology. However you want to describe it—call it vague, call it something else—it’s not important.

[Speaker B] So again, I go back: in my opinion, that cannot be true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For that, one needs to understand physics. It doesn’t depend on “in my opinion.” There is accumulated knowledge in this field; this is not a matter for armchair opinion, sorry if I’m being a bit—

[Speaker B] No, no, that’s perfectly fine. It’s just that the point—I’ll say a little where I’m coming from—and it comes from exactly the same place as the previous issue of determinism and free choice: that in my opinion there is some conceptual mistake here, not some metaphysical thing. I’m simply coming from logic and my own reasoning, which says that a probabilistic, vague, fuzzy-logic kind of point of view assumes some kind of logical vacuum, some kind of logical arbitrariness that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not logical—ontological.

[Speaker B] Ontology and logic—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] are different domains.

[Speaker B] I don’t see it that way. I see it as something logical, a logical problem. Einstein expressed it by saying, “I do not believe that God plays dice.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “I do not believe” doesn’t mean it’s a logical contradiction. “I do not believe”—he didn’t think so, but that’s—

[Speaker B] Yes, but I claim that there is, in my opinion, a logical problem here because it means there is some occurrence that has no cause.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. An occurrence without a cause is not a logical problem. An occurrence without a cause is a metaphysical problem. I also don’t think there are occurrences without a cause, but to say that there is an occurrence without a cause—the problem is metaphysical and not logical. One of the indications of this is that there is a rule in logic that says that if you have a system containing a contradiction, you can derive from it any conclusion you want, and its opposite too. Okay? If you were right, then quantum theory would have no informative content, because if it contained an internal contradiction, you couldn’t derive any meaningful conclusion from it. And that is an indication that there is no logical contradiction within it. You can disagree, you can disagree philosophically, you can disagree in terms of scientific interpretation, however you want, but the claim that this is a logical contradiction is, in my humble opinion, a misunderstanding.