One-on-One – Rabbi Shmuel Lorincz and Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham: On Free Choice, Second Nahalim Conference on Jewish Thought – Elnatan Gutwirth – Paper

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, let me step back a bit before I get there, because this really is a question that takes us one step further. Before that, we need to clarify a few background points. The first question I think we need to ask ourselves when we approach this issue can be asked in two directions. On the one hand, I think everyone’s initial intuition is an intuition of freedom—that our decisions are in our hands, including the greatest determinists. I think that they too, at least the people I’ve spoken with, agree that this is our initial intuition, the feeling that is built very deeply into us. And that raises the question: so why abandon it? What reasons cause those people to doubt that feeling and perhaps even decide to give it up? You could ask the question in the opposite direction: there are certain reasons, which I’ll spell out in a moment, that lead us to a deterministic conclusion, and then the question arises: so what’s the problem? Why not? What makes us nevertheless believe in free will? What I said earlier was that this feeling, or initial intuition, built into us is basically the fundamental factor that doesn’t allow us, me… to accept the arguments, which are not simple arguments to deal with. These are not arguments it is right to dismiss lightly, arguments that lead to materialism. So I’ll focus on the first question. The first question is: why really be a materialist? Meaning, if we have such a deep intuition of freedom, why abandon it? What are the arguments? What leads to that? It seems to me that this can be divided into three arguments. Two of them are relatively old, and the third is new and connected to neuroscience. One is philosophical, one is conceptual, and one is scientific.

On the philosophical plane, it seems to me that this is the main argument raised against the concept of freedom: it’s really the principle of causality, or the scientific perspective. In the end, when a person moves a hand or performs some action—even when he thinks—electrons are moving in his brain. In the end this is a physical phenomenon. Something is happening here in physics, in the physical world. I move a hand—that means a body with mass moves, accelerates, receives velocity, stops. These are physical phenomena that mechanics deals with. What causes that? From the physical perspective there are even Newton’s laws, which I assume are familiar to most people in the room. In order for a body with mass to move, there has to be a force that moves it, that accelerates it; acceleration is proportional to force. That force is of course a physical force. It equals mass times acceleration according to Newton’s second law, but there has to be a force for there to be acceleration. What is that force? That force is exerted by a muscle. But the muscle too is a physical object; it activates and moves the hand. So what causes the tension in the muscle to arise? It’s electrical currents that the nerves conduct—I’m presenting this very schematically. The nervous system carries it from the brain to the muscle, the brain decides to move a hand, activates the muscle, the muscle activates the hand, and the hand moves. It may also do something that then moves something else in the world, and that thing in the world continues this physical chain further and further.

The question is: what causes it? Right now we’re at the electrical current in our neurons, in our nervous system. What causes that? An electrical current is also a physical phenomenon—it’s electrons moving. They too, in a simple view, are bodies in motion, and in order for them to move there has to be a physical force that moves them. So there too there is a physical force, and that physical force too is a physical entity, and there too there has to be a physical cause, so that in the end, if we don’t artificially cut off this chain somewhere, the laws of physics take us all the way back to the Big Bang. In other words, in the end the laws of physics say that every physical thing has a prior physical cause; that cause, which is also physical, has a previous cause, and so on—go all the way back, turtles all the way down, and you get to the Big Bang. There’s no way around it. Nothing along the way can cut this chain or start a new one. That is the philosophical problem. In other words, the philosophical problem is connected to science, but it starts with the principle of causality. The principle of causality is a principle that physics assumes. Physics did not discover it; it assumes it, and that’s why I call this a philosophical problem. On the philosophical level we assume that everything that happens has a cause. And if there is a cause, that means I could not have done otherwise, because a cause means a result is dictated to us. That is the philosophical problem.

The conceptual problem is an argument that comes up in almost every discussion in this context. It basically says that the concept of free choice is just a collection of words with no content. It doesn’t say anything. In a somewhat simplistic formulation it goes like this. Suppose I performed some action. There are two possibilities. Either something caused that action—after the whole chain, somewhere at the initial point—or it didn’t. Either something caused this event to begin, or this chain to begin, or it didn’t. If something caused this chain to begin, then we are in a deterministic world, because that’s not my choice—something caused it. And if I caused it by my choice, then of course the question is what caused my choice. In other words, how did the first electron in my brain move? That’s why, from the physical point of view, it isn’t lawful. So if something caused it, we’re still in the deterministic world. If nothing caused it, then it’s random—it’s just a lottery. And again, that isn’t choice, because choice is something that involves deliberation, not something we decide just like that—flip a coin and whatever comes out, comes out. We deliberate and determine our path based on various considerations. The concept of deliberation is itself at the center of the deterministic attack. Because if you have a cause, then it’s not your deliberation; deliberation is nothing. In the end the cause is what produces the result, not your deliberation. Deliberation might be some accompanying awareness, but the process is a physical process that happens on its own according to the laws of physics. And if there is no deliberation, then it’s randomness. So what is choosing, then? What is free will?

Whenever I say there is free will, they ask me: wait, wait—so what caused you to choose this way? And my answer is: nothing caused me to choose this way. Ah, nothing? Then it’s random. That’s not called choosing; it’s just a lottery. There’s no reason to do this rather than that. So if something did cause it, then we’re back in the causal world. In other words, free choice somehow falls between two chairs that seem to have no space between them. Either you are in the deterministic world, the deterministic conceptual world, or you are in the random conceptual world. What is free choice? There is no such thing on the conceptual level. That is the second problem, the conceptual problem, that causes many people to deny free choice.

And I’ll say briefly where the mistake is here, or the begging of the question in this argument. This argument assumes there is no middle state between these two possibilities. That if you are not a determinist, then you believe in randomness. But that isn’t true. Because the person who believes in free choice—this is exactly his claim. His claim is that there is a third mechanism, which is neither randomness nor physical causation. Briefly, I’ll say this: it’s a mechanism driven by a reason and not by a cause. In other words, determinism is a mechanism that shows me that everything that happens happens because of a cause. A human action—it is not correct to describe it as an action done because of something; that’s just a manner of speaking. It is done in order to, not because of. Now, a random thing is not done in order to. A random thing happens because it happens, just like that, that’s how it came out. Okay? A deterministic action is an action done because of. An action of choice, an action of deliberation, is an action done in order to. And that is a third type. Someone who assumes there are only two types and no gap between them—it’s no wonder he denies the existence of free choice, simply because he assumes מראש that it doesn’t exist.

But who makes that choice, if the choice is “in order to”? Who carries out that choice? Okay. So maybe I’ll say something about that in a second, if I may, all right? Because there’s still—I haven’t yet said the scientific point. I’ve said the philosophical problem, the conceptual problem, the scientific problem, and then I’ll come to your question, which is the essential next step.

The scientific problem is really a relatively new problem. At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s there was a series of experiments by Benjamin Libet, an American neurophysiologist, who himself, by the way, was a libertarian—for those who know this fellow from the book—who conducted this series of experiments. He himself was a libertarian, and so he is not suspected of cooking or fabricating findings in favor of determinism, and he was very surprised by the findings he got. Libet’s experiments, which perhaps we’ll focus on a bit more later, so I won’t go into them here, I’ll just complete the picture in schematic terms—in effect, they supposedly prove scientifically that we do not have free choice. And that joins the previous two types, the previous two spheres, the philosophical sphere, the conceptual sphere, and the scientific sphere. And that is what has been added in this whole world of neuroscience. Neuroscience is now adding a third dimension to the discussion, or an attack from a third direction on the concept of free choice—a scientific attack.

So maybe we’ll discuss Libet’s experiments later, but here I come to your questions. Many people who don’t want to give up physics—as I said before, they are committed to physics, and I am a physicist, I’m committed to physics too and I’m not giving it up—and on the other hand don’t want to give up freedom of will, whether for religious reasons or, as I said, for philosophical, humanistic, and other reasons, and plain common sense, really find themselves in distress here. There is a whole series of attempts to fit free choice into physics, so as not to give up either side. Attempts to show that within physics there are degrees of freedom that allow a mechanism of free choice to emerge or appear. And what do these approaches gain? They gain that there is no extra something, no homunculus, what people call the little man sitting somewhere inside us moving us, right? No spirit or soul, as people say in other contexts. Rather, physics itself can explain to us, or at least allows us to speak about, free choice. And this is either through chaos—which is simply a mistake—or through quantum mechanics—which is a somewhat more sophisticated mistake, and it takes a bit more time to explain why it’s a mistake—or through emergence, which again is a mistake. In other words, there are three mistakes here. We could talk about each one, but this may not be the place to elaborate.

In the end, the bottom line is that there is no way to do it—no way that I know of, at least. These three approaches fail. Quantum theory, even if one uses it, will lead us to randomness and not to free choice. Chaos and emergence are complete determinism. There is no deviation from determinism there at all; that’s just a beginner’s mistake. In other words, it has nothing to do with the issue. Since that is so, the only way to keep both sides of the coin—both a physical worldview and common sense, without giving up the principle of causality, and also a belief in free will, in choice, in the uniqueness of the human being, and so on—is really to arrive at dualism. To close the circle, one has to reach the conclusion that there is something else in us besides physics that somehow—and this is no simple point, and if you want we can talk about it in a moment—somehow manages to intervene in physical processes. Because I’m not leaving it outside. That would be easiest. I could leave it outside in some parallel world. We’d have two entities that don’t talk to each other, the spiritual and the material. The material is pure physics, and the physicists are completely right, and Sampolinsky is completely right. At the same time, we have consciousness and spirit and thoughts and desires and everything—but one does not affect the other, or at least the second does not affect the first. But that, of course, throws out the baby with the bathwater. It basically means we don’t really have free choice. Because it means that even if we can—the human being is, how does it go? Bound in intellect and free in imagination, something like that. A person may be free in imagination, but that freedom will not come to expression in the world. In other words, it does not affect the world. So that means that in fact he has no free choice. He may have perhaps some free dimensions somewhere in some spiritual realm, but that says nothing. Our world is a completely physical world. None of this will affect anything that happens in the world—not human action, and of course not the world itself.

The only possibility of holding both sides—and it’s not a simple possibility, and if you want we can talk about it later—is to adopt what is called dualism. On the one hand to accept both the existence of spirit and the existence of matter, but an interactionist dualism, meaning that there is interaction between matter and spirit and between spirit and matter. Without that there is no freedom—that needs to be understood. And this has serious costs; in other words, it’s not a simple thesis, but in my humble opinion it is the only way out.

[Speaker A] I’d really like to ask you about the Libet experiment. A great many lecturers say that the dilemma was decisively settled by this experiment. Here—we managed to prove in a simple way, really by examining the time dimension, that it’s not the brain—not I—who chooses, but rather first a reaction occurs in the brain and only afterward I have the feeling of choice. They tested it. Maybe tell us a bit about that experiment. A lot of lecturers, a lot of researchers, say that this closed the coffin on the debate. In your book you wrote that it absolutely did not. So if you could please explain briefly how this experiment works—the experiment is very simple—and why we do not have to assume now that we have no free choice.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, the Libet experiment. Libet was the first to conduct a series of experiments like this, but since then and to this day these experiments have continued; they keep refining and expanding them. Many hundreds of such experiments have been done, if not more, and they’re still being done. Because this experiment really caused a very deep shock that maybe leaked a little into the public sphere, but only a little. In general, by the way, this subject has remained in academic ivory towers, and that’s one of the problems. In other words, a small handful of academics in philosophy and science are allowed to formulate some kind of worldview, and once it becomes crystallized and they come out with it as some coherent doctrine, nobody will be able to stand against it. I think it’s very important to be involved at the stage when these processes are happening, when these conceptions are being formed, and therefore we must not give these guys free rein—in the positive sense of the phrase, of course. We need criticism, we need intervention, we need to raise questions, we need to point out the differences between interpretation and findings. It’s very important not to feel inferior, not to give too much credit. With all due respect, there are smart people here, people who are experts in their fields—but in their fields. And even in their fields they can make mistakes. All the more so when we are talking about going beyond their fields into philosophy, and when we are dealing with a field that is so multidisciplinary—and it is very, very multidisciplinary. Here it really is, unlike all the other fields where it’s only to get research grants. This field is prone to substantive failures, because the physicist will naturally stumble in philosophy. The philosopher will stumble in physics, and the mathematician will stumble in physics and philosophy, and the computer scientist or biologist will stumble in the other fields. And in order to form a picture, you have to make sure that when you pool all these perspectives together, something isn’t getting missed in the combination—that people are actually managing to talk to one another without leaving something unresolved that everyone missed, each from a different side. And that happens a lot in this field. In my book I show quite a few examples of this.

One of them—well, I’m really, really dying to hear what the experiment was. Okay, so the experiment was like this: Libet sat a person in front of a clock running fast. It ran fast in order to give high time resolution, and there was a button in front of him. And he tells him: whenever you feel like it, press the button. You decide—press the button. When he presses the button, we record the time, the time at which he presses the button. Now, in addition to that, a system of electrodes is attached to the person’s head, checking for the appearance of an electrical signal, RP, readiness potential, and this signal precedes the pressing. And we already know—this was known even before Libet—that there is some readiness potential that precedes the pressing. What Libet added was that he introduced a third factor into the equation: the person’s feeling, or consciousness, or awareness of when he decided. We ask the person pressing the button: please tell us—you’re looking the whole time at the clock running in front of you—when did you decide to press? Not when did you press. When you pressed, we know—we saw that you pressed, there’s a clock recording that time, the computer—it’s connected to a computer—we record when you pressed. We also know when the action potential appeared in your head because we take that from the EEG, okay? We measure that electrically. What we do not know is when you have awareness of a decision, because that is a subjective phenomenon, it is not accessible to instruments. By the way, that’s one of the problems in these fields: you can’t measure human consciousnesses; you can only hear people’s reports. So we are dependent on his report, and we ask him: tell us, when did you decide? Tell us where the hand of the clock was when you decided. So there are three events here:

[Speaker A] You place a person—there’s a clock in front of him, a big clock—and he has a button. Event one: from the electrodes we know when there was an awakening in the brain for the whole thing. Event two: the pressing of the button, which we also know when it occurred. Event three: he reports when he thinks he decided to press the button; he looks at the clock and gives the exact time. So what are we expecting to see? What interests us here is seeing which comes before which.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the libertarian view, or in the view that a person has free choice, we would expect the order among the three events to be as follows: first the person decides, then that decision of his will creates, in the second stage, the electrical signal, the readiness potential. Then the EEG signal will come, and then the brain, once it translates the decision into an electrical signal, sends an instruction to the muscles and he presses the button. In other words, the order of actions in the libertarian view, in the view of freedom, should be: first decision, then action potential, then pressing. Right, obviously. And what did they actually find? To Libet’s astonishment—and again, he was a libertarian—to his astonishment he discovered that the person’s decision appears after the readiness potential and not before it. In other words, first there was the electrical signal, then the person says, “I decided,” and then he presses. And that basically means, seemingly, that yes—I didn’t really decide first; something happened, something happened in my brain, and then suddenly I felt that I decided, so the decision is a feeling and not a reality. Yes. That’s basically what Spolansky was talking about in that interview, because he said that in practice what happens is that consciousness or our awareness—as if we make a decision, we are free and have decided through deliberation to do something—is itself a result of electrical processes. It is basically a side effect, an epiphenomenon in philosophical language, meaning it is an accompanying phenomenon. In fact there is a process here that is entirely physical. The electrical processes produce the signal, the signal causes me to press, and alongside that I have some illusion of decision—but that illusion appears after the readiness potential. In other words, the experimenter could have told me that I was about to decide to press, without even asking me. So then the determinists are right—it was proven, and that’s that, no? Yes. I’ll leave the questions for the end because otherwise it breaks the flow a bit, right?

Seemingly, yes. Seemingly they’re right. But with several limitations that in effect completely drain this of content. In the book I offered this on four levels. I argued that such an experiment, including all the refinements I can imagine—even ones that haven’t yet been done, and some of them are on the way to being done; I’m not sure I’m fully updated through today, but clearly not all of them have been done yet—will ultimately not be able to decide this question, even if they do every experiment and neutralize every problem. It will not succeed in solving the philosophical problem, and therefore in fact we still remain in a domain where the decision is philosophical and not scientific. Why? I’ll just give it in outline form; I can’t go into all the details of the argument here.

One basic point was raised by Libet himself. He speaks about veto. And this has been debated to this very day, with various attempts this way and that. Libet’s claim was that the conditioning is only in one direction. In other words, there is never a press that was not preceded by an action potential. The action potential always preceded the press. But there are cases where there was an action potential and no press followed. In other words, the person can impose a veto on the brain’s decision, on the electrical signal. The electrical signal tries to move me to press the button, and in the deterministic world it is in fact obvious that I will press. Libet says no. It’s true that I won’t press without an action potential having occurred, but if there is an action potential, that still doesn’t mean I will press. I can decide that I impose a veto, and that basically means that the physical chain can be frozen by the person’s decision. And this is under very great debate on the experimental level—can one show that there was such a veto? But one cannot argue with the possibility that there really is such an escape hatch, one that leaves freedom of will intact. You can say that the experiment did not demonstrate a veto; you can say that we never saw a person impose a veto. You cannot say that it is impossible for a person to impose a veto, that there is no situation in which a person imposes a veto. You cannot say that—that is not a scientific statement; it is speculation. And therefore Libet’s first objection is an objection that definitely carries weight even after all the debates over whether he is right on the scientific level, whether his findings can really be interpreted as if we have demonstrated a veto there. Maybe not. But that still does not mean a veto is impossible. And if a veto is possible, then that means that even if this experiment is exactly as the determinists describe it, it still does not mean that a person has no free choice. That is one plane of the discussion.

A second plane, which is more substantive and connected to the first—it continues the first—has to do with the nature of the decision. What kind of decision is the person being asked to make there? Pressing a button. Now, when you sit in front of that button and have to decide at some moment when to press—what are your considerations? This way or that way? There are no considerations at all, right? It isn’t a dilemma. There is no deliberation here over whether to press now, maybe not, maybe yes, with considerations in this direction and considerations in that direction. It’s some sort of thing that happens not out of any real decision, right? I can’t imagine what considerations there could be—maybe the desire to finish quickly because I’m already tired. But if I sit there for two hours under compulsion and it doesn’t matter when I press, then there is no consideration whatsoever as to why to press now or in ten seconds or in five minutes, right? So why does it happen? Why does a person press? In a dilemma we use deliberation. According to the libertarian, according to a person who advocates freedom of will, I claim—contrary to the determinist—that I weigh things in my mind, reach a conclusion as to what I want, what values I believe in, and then I decide what to do. But here it’s not that kind of decision. It’s just some sort of thing where one decides to press a button. It seems to me the word “decide” here is being used loosely. It’s not really a decision. It’s just something.

Now I ask: if there really is something where I have no considerations this way or that, and an action potential appears in me trying to cause my hand to press a button, why would I veto it? In order to veto it, I need to decide no, I don’t want to now. I’ve decided, yes? I need some deliberation that says I’m not pressing the button now; I have a reason to press it in another minute or three minutes. So haven’t there been corresponding scientific experiments that present a person with a dilemma requiring a decision? As far as I know, such experiments have not yet been done. They’re working on it. A friend of mine who works in neural computation in Jerusalem told me they’re working on such an experiment, and such an experiment will already present us with a more serious challenge. In other words, if they attach electrodes to the head, an EEG, and do the same experiment when a person is faced with a value-laden dilemma—not pressing a button, which is a meaningless decision, but a value-laden dilemma—if there we succeed in predicting in advance what he will decide, that will of course pose a greater challenge to the concept of freedom of will.

[Speaker A] And in my opinion, even there no. Just a question: if I’m a person who isn’t an expert—I’m not a physicist, nothing—I’m just asking: if I believe in dualism, I have a dualistic view that there’s some soul there making decisions, why should I care if I say the soul was what activated that thing in the brain that did everything? Why is that—it seems simple to me. Not so complicated.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that was one of the first objections raised to the Libet experiment. I don’t agree with it. On this point I actually do agree with Sampolinsky. The claim is that basically there could have been some free decision even before the action potential was aroused. In other words, let me remind you of the series of events: an action potential is aroused, after that I think I decided, I experience a decision, and after that I press, right? Those are the findings. Now the defensive libertarians say: what do you mean, where did the action potential itself come from? It came from some prior unconscious decision, and that was a free decision. The point is that even if that is true, it won’t help at all. Because if I make my free decision unconsciously, that cannot serve as a basis for moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is assigned to me when I engaged in deliberation and made a decision. But if there is something free, not driven by the physical chain, completely free, yet it makes decisions for me without my being aware at all, without my deliberating, without my being aware that a decision process is going on here, then I’m not making decisions.

[Speaker A] But that one is me; that one is my soul.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But it’s not conscious. You can’t judge a person when he is not conscious. A person who acted when he was not conscious—even

[Speaker A] On the legal level too we exempt him from responsibility. You’re separating my body from my self. So you’re saying that the body did something unconsciously, and the self is someone else ruling over it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, the self did not do it through deliberation.

[Speaker A] But maybe it did—let’s say through unconscious deliberation.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Unconscious deliberation—I don’t judge anyone for that.

[Speaker A] So it’s not a basis for moral responsibility. Consciousness. The claim that the decision comes after the readiness potential—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the winning claim.

[Speaker A] —that consciousness is in the brain, he can measure it and see it, and it could be that consciousness is free—if I’m a dualist, that’s my soul thinking and creating, independently as well.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then again I say: the decision was already made before the readiness potential. When I now deliberate and make a decision, that decision already exists. I am not really now making that decision; I’m only living under the illusion that I made it. So even if the original decision—that hidden, unknown one—was made freely, it still cannot serve as a basis for holding me responsible for what I did. It simply happened not out of my deliberation.

[Speaker A] So that objection—the body and the soul? No, he and I. Not just the soul. Obviously. But consciousness is soul, not body. Fine, but consciousness isn’t the one that… when I feel that I decided, maybe that’s a result that comes afterward in my brain. But the decision itself was chosen within the… within my self, which I don’t really experience directly, but it finished the whole process even before the…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here there’s a slightly different nuance. Here you are claiming there is some delay between the decision process and the awareness of the decision. Those are different arguments that have been raised, a somewhat different nuance of the argument. Because basically it means I made an earlier decision, and the later awareness reflects processes that happened in me; all that deliberation really did happen in me originally, I just wasn’t aware of it, and the awareness was born in me only at a later stage. That is a slightly different thesis. In that sense, I argue, it also doesn’t help at all. Because I think that in the end a person is responsible for actions he did consciously. If he made that decision without being aware of it, then as far as I’m concerned it has no meaning to assign him moral responsibility.

[Speaker A] That’s something I haven’t exactly been convinced by right now, but I know you’re more expert in the field than I am.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, it’s not about expertise.

[Speaker A] But I want to ask you: okay, fine, so you managed to explain that the Libet experiment is not unequivocal. Now we’re left in a dilemma. A few hundred people are walking out of here today who want to go home, but really, really don’t like doing so under some feeling that they don’t want to go home—exactly—that they only think they want to. So then I’m lost. You said there are experiments, things could also be otherwise, so we’re left in a fog, yes or no. How do I reach a conclusion in a situation like this, where two possibilities lie open before me?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, here we really come to what I called at the end of the book the diagnostic stage. In other words, I said there are philosophical problems, scientific problems, conceptual problems. And I neutralize the scientific problems—science says nothing for now about this subject, contrary to what Sampolinsky and his colleagues claim. But still, okay, the question remains open in the philosophical sense. Philosophically, what do we do with it? So here I say, first of all: my initial intuition, my intuitive insight, is that I have freedom. And therefore, in order to cause me to give that up, people need to raise good arguments. The burden of proof is on them. That’s point one. Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, if they haven’t convinced me that this consciousness is an illusion, I won’t give it up. Just as I wouldn’t give up anything else that someone comes and tells me I think, and then tells me it’s an illusion. They may be right, but as long as you don’t bring a good argument establishing that, why should I assume it’s an illusion? So I say that even on that primary level, before I even get into the arguments, in my view that’s good enough—unless you present me with good arguments, and it seems to me there are no such good arguments.

Second, if a person is not convinced that this really is his intuition—and I’ve met a few rare individuals like that—you can, as I suggest in the book, run a series of experiments on yourself, to diagnose where you stand on this issue. Because as I said earlier, if you discover that you stand in the camp that advocates freedom, you have no reason to give it up as long as strong arguments against it have not been presented. So it’s very important for each person to examine himself and see where he stands in this context. I’ll give maybe one or two examples of such experiments that anyone can do at home; you don’t need a particle accelerator from CERN in Switzerland for this.

One experiment is a thought experiment. Do you know Buridan’s donkey? Buridan’s donkey is that donkey that stood at equal distance between two troughs and died of hunger. Why did it die of hunger? Because since the distance was equal, the situation was symmetrical, it had no way to decide whether to go to the trough on the right or the trough on the left. I don’t know—yes, never mind—to go to the trough on the right or the left. And because of that it remained in the middle and died of hunger. In the deterministic view, a person who found himself in such a situation would die of hunger—you need to understand that. Because in the end, the decision whether to go right or left is a decision made by physical mechanisms, and there is a theorem in mathematics that the symmetry of the solution is at least the symmetry of the problem. In other words, if the symmetry of the problem is symmetrical between left and right, and what determines my behavior is a mathematical equation, it’s laws of physics, that means the mechanism determining my behavior will have the same symmetry as the problem. In other words, there is no mechanism that will succeed in causing me to go right or left, and therefore I will die of hunger.

[Speaker B] There’s no randomness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it’s by chance, then—

[Speaker B] Then it’s not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it’s—

[Speaker B] If it’s by chance then it’s not your behavior. By chance you went right? I understand. If I happened by chance to turn left—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —it’s equally distant for me—

[Speaker B] —there’s no reason to turn your head.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so you have no reason to turn your head, only you skipped a stage. You had no reason in the first place to move it rightward beforehand. After you moved it rightward you’re right, but the question is why did it move rightward? No, but if it didn’t move—the whole story of this donkey is a situation where you are exactly in the middle. If you’re to one side, then it’s not. You’re assuming, you’re assuming—that’s the question. I don’t know. In the physical world there is what is called spontaneous symmetry breaking. Spontaneous symmetry breaking means something like—say, suddenly some wind comes from the right, or some random thing like that, and it causes me to move my head or causes something to happen. I’m speaking about a world in which there is nothing whatsoever that breaks the symmetry—a hypothetical world, a thought experiment. I am in such a world with my head facing forward, beside me are two tables laid out with every good thing, in a perfect vacuum, no wind—it’s a thought experiment, I don’t mean it can be performed. And I ask: let each person ask himself, what do you think would happen in such a situation? If you are willing to accept that in such a situation you would die of hunger, then first, you’re a donkey, and second, you can go on being a determinist. Right, I’m saying this is not an argument against the determinist. If the determinist tells me, yes, I think I would die of hunger, I have nothing to say to him. That’s why I call this the diagnostic stage. These are not arguments against; these are considerations each person can use for himself to check where his intuition stands regarding this question. If he is convinced that he would not die of hunger, then he is not a determinist.

[Speaker A] Amichai, simply because our deterministic clock is chasing us quickly, at this stage I really want to say thank you so, so much. You’re welcome. A personal thank-you, because I learned a great deal from this book, I really felt that. Second, I want to thank you a bit as a kind of messenger, because this subject is one that has a kind of taboo around it and there’s hardly anyone dealing with it. To the best of my knowledge, very little has been written about this subject—surely you know more than I do—but almost nothing has been written on it. And you took on a mission here. There are really things here that truly provoke thought, and you gave meaningful answers in the field of the arguments. So thank you very much for that. And really, thank you very much for coming here as well and enlightening us all. I warmly recommend it. This topic has only just been opened, and it is huge. And I have to say: you don’t need to be a great scientist, you don’t need to be this or that, in order to understand the principles at stake here. So all of you are invited to read, to think—it ultimately touches the very inner being of your lives.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And to think, and to wake up to the discussion, and to ask, and to raise theses, and to intervene in the process by which the picture is being formed, because that picture is being formed right now. And we must not allow one opinion to have a monopoly in this intellectual field.

[Speaker A] Right, that happens a lot. I see there are young people here on the one hand, and I think even some retirees as well. So all of you still have time to do things. So young people and retirees can now get into this subject, get into neuroscience, and start raising the flag.