Free Will and Choice – Lesson 13
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- [1:01:30] The dilemma of decision-making and execution
- [1:02:42] The connection between the soul and the body — a bug in communication
- [1:03:57] The existence of stage three — judgment
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, let’s begin. Last time I finished the discussion of Libet’s experiments and what followed them—experiments that try to examine the question of determinism and libertarianism in the laboratory. And the claim was that with scientific tools one can decide this philosophical question: do we have choice or don’t we have choice? Let me remind you once again of the broader context. Right now I’m at the stage where I’m trying to summarize our whole discussion in the context of neuroscience. In other words, the question is whether neuroscience can change or affect our views regarding determinism and libertarianism. The claim of quite a lot of researchers is that it can. Not only can it affect them, but in fact it already has affected them. In other words, the claim is that basically we’ve already decided the issue—maybe I’ll turn this up a bit. The claim is that we’re already past that point; the findings of brain research already show us that we have no free choice. And in that context I said that there are basically—or I’ll focus here mainly, because I think these are the strongest issues—first, Libet’s experiments, which is what I finished last time. And the conclusion was, at least as I understand it, that these experiments not only did not show that we have no free will, they actually cannot show that. Even in the future, if they refine the experiments and do more things, they still won’t really be able to show that—to reach that conclusion by scientific means. Along the way I also brought up that experiment by Liad Mudrik, which even gives some indication that our decision-making in places where there is a dilemma is essentially different from the decision-making involved in what’s called “picking”—just random button presses. That leaves the question open on the one hand, because it could still be that this too is arrived at deterministically, but in another area of the brain or in a different way. But the very fact that there is a difference between picking and choosing in the way decisions are made means that this is probably really a different kind of decision, and that does to some extent support libertarianism. So here I think it’s even a bit more than neutral. But still, if one insists, one can remain where one was, and the question at this point remains open. In other words, Libet’s experiments are not supposed to change our position, and this remains a matter for philosophical judgment. That is, we have to make our decisions about this independently of science.
The other candidate in neuroscience that tries to make claims about the existence of free will—and perhaps even more so, I think this deals less with the question of libertarianism and determinism and more with the question of materialism—is what I’m now talking about: split-brain experiments. Split-brain experiments examine not so much our ability to choose freely, but the question of whether there is something in us beyond the brain, or beyond physiological, physical things. Of course, as I explained in previous chapters, if we really arrive at a materialist conclusion, then very likely we also have to be determinists, because in the scientific world there is no room for free choice; that world is deterministic in a certain sense, up to chaos and quantum effects, and we talked about that. Therefore there is a much more fundamental decision here than in Libet’s experiments. In other words, Libet’s experiments at most show that the picture is deterministic, but still do not rule out the possibility that there is something in us besides the body. Split-brain experiments actually deal with the more fundamental question, the question of materialism. Once we are only molecules or only cells, then the conclusion is not only that materialism is right, but determinism follows from that as well, because as I said, within the scientific picture you can’t insert free will. So what I want to do today is basically deal with this part of the arguments, meaning split-brain experiments. Then we’ll move on to summaries—we’re already getting close to the end of the whole discussion.
The split-brain experiments can really be started with a man named Phineas Gage in the middle of the nineteenth century. He was a manager in some American railway company, and one day he was carrying out some explosion—they were paving some route there, cutting some path for the railway—and he set off some blast to break an especially stubborn rock. He inserted some iron rod there in order to dig a hole so he could put in the explosive material, and as a result of the explosion, the rod flew—the iron rod flew and entered through his left cheek into his head, into his head, and came out the other side. It passed through his head and came out. Now astonishingly, this fellow did not lose consciousness. They took him while he was on his feet; he simply walked with this hole that had passed through his head, walked on his own feet, got into the carriage, traveled into town, and received medical treatment. He recovered very nicely, and overall quite quickly he returned to normal life. Except that after his recovery it turned out that his personality had undergone a dramatic change. He started becoming kind of rude, foul-mouthed, insulting his friends, a very, very unpleasant sort of person. He became impulsive, couldn’t plan ahead—a dramatic personality change. His friends said, this isn’t Phineas Gage at all. Some demon got in there; this is someone else, a different personality. Not necessarily in the sense of wickedness—there was also a crude or nasty dimension there—but the very difference itself: he was simply a completely different person, with different traits, a completely different character, functioning in a completely different way.
He went to a couple of doctors—someone named Harlow and someone else, I don’t remember. There were two doctors who treated him, and afterward they also followed the case a bit. But at that time—remember, this is the middle of the nineteenth century—there weren’t technological means advanced enough in brain research to understand this phenomenon in a more systematic way. There wasn’t the information, there wasn’t the technology. People understood that it was somehow connected to the trauma he had undergone, the brain injury he had suffered, but that was about it. In the end they didn’t really—let’s say this is the most famous story in brain research that contributed nothing to brain research. It’s a story that raised a great deal of awareness of the role of the brain in shaping our personality and our decisions and our behavior and our character, but there weren’t tools to use this story in order to try to gather concrete information, to try to see what exactly was going on there. By the way, at some stage one of the two doctors who treated him took his brain—he died after twelve years; of course he couldn’t hold down any job or anything, and in the end he died—one of the doctors took his brain and stored it somewhere. Today it’s at Harvard University. Phineas Gage’s brain is at Harvard University. And there’s a couple of neurologists, the Damasios, the Damasio couple—they have books that were also translated into Hebrew, Hanna and Antonio Damasio—who photographed his brain from every angle and tried to analyze what happened, the damage that occurred and the effects that such damage should have on a healthy brain in terms of the knowledge we have today. And they really did manage to explain quite a few of the behaviors that were observed then and of course received no explanation at the time.
What matters for us is that what’s demonstrated here is a dramatic influence of the state of the brain, or of damage to the brain, on behaviors, on character, on all sorts of things like that. Now at first glance, my initial impression was that the amazement over this case, or the sense that this is really something very dramatic, seemed exaggerated. Because basically at most what this demonstrates is that the physical affects the mental. In other words, something happens in our body and it affects things, our mental dimensions. That’s not new. Even on the most everyday level: I have a wound, and therefore I feel pain. A wound is of course a physical thing. Pain is a mental phenomenon. Right? Pain is a mental phenomenon. It doesn’t hurt me in the body. Pain is a sensation. What’s in the body is a wound. The pain is not in the body; pain is my sensation, of my mental side, of my soul if you like, expressing the fact that I have a wound, or some other cause of pain. So does pain too basically raise the same threat to dualism as the case of Phineas Gage? What’s the difference? In both cases there’s something physical that basically creates a mental phenomenon. So one could come and say: in fact there’s no such thing as the mental. Why? Because if everything mental is determined by what happens to the physical body, then who says there is any such thing as the mental at all? So all there is, is just a physical body. That’s basically the claim. Therefore I’m saying that on the conceptual level one could have raised this claim even without Phineas Gage, simply because in our daily lives we know this. I’m not even talking now about psychological phenomena. Pain is hard even to call a psychological phenomenon. People call it a physical phenomenon, even though the pain itself is of course only in the mental dimension. But they call it a physical phenomenon because it merely reflects a physical matter.
In the case of psychological influence, for example, a person undergoes some traumatic experience, even an accident, let’s say—a physical experience—and afterward falls into depression. Now depression is a psychological phenomenon, right? Mental. Here the effect is less direct than the effect of the wound on the pain. The wound and the pain are an electrical effect; that effect is automatic. Depression is an indirect effect. Something happened to me, I process it, all kinds of things happen, and then I fall into depression. So here already there is a much larger gap that one is basically leaping over. In the context of the relation between pain and wound, the relation is immediate, so there we’re already used to the idea. But in psychology, there we would not have thought that it too is determined simply by our bodily condition, full stop. And it turns out that even that—even things that require processing and take time and so on—ultimately are brought about by physical events.
[Speaker B] Why is that different from LSD or drugs or something, where it changes the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not different at all. I just gave those examples; obviously there are a thousand examples. No question. We’re used to this—it’s everyday life. The bodily affects the mental. There’s no argument about that. So the question is why the case of Phineas Gage, and the cases we’ll see later, similar cases, threaten the dualistic conception more strongly—the view that says there is both body and soul in us—and free will and so on, more than all these everyday phenomena that we know, where there’s an influence from body to soul.
So here it turns out—or not “turns out,” rather these phenomena deal with things that we would attribute to our decisions, to our highest part. In other words, if such an injury affects a person’s judgment, affects a person’s character, a person’s morality, that’s much stronger than if it causes me pain or even if it makes me depressed. Because pain and depression are still the sort of results that all of us have always known are not in our hands. In other words, it’s something that happens to us; it’s not something we decide. No one blames me for being in pain or for being depressed. It happened to me, so I go for treatment, and either I’ll succeed or I won’t. But they do blame me if I have a bad character and if I behave immorally, if I make poor decisions. Therefore, if the dimensions in which I make decisions can also be explained on the basis of physiological or physical events, then that really is a more significant threat to the libertarian conception, to the dualist-libertarian conception.
You can see that I’m not distinguishing between them. Dualism is opposed to materialism, and libertarianism is opposed to determinism. The question of whether we have free will or not, and the question of whether there is a soul or there is only a body—those are two different questions. But I’ve already said quite a lot about the connection between them. For our purposes right now, it’s almost the same question. At least in one direction. If we are materialists, then we have no free will. And if we are not materialists, then we can discuss whether we do or don’t. So in that case one can really understand why phenomena like Phineas Gage constitute a stronger threat to the dualist-libertarian conception. Because here you really see that our highest functions—our character, morality, decision-making, if you like even worldview—all are basically determined by the state of the brain. When the state of the brain changes or suffers an injury or something like that, all those things change. Doesn’t that mean that there really is nothing beyond the brain? The brain is what determines our worldviews, our character, our moral conduct, and then in fact these are deterministic processes. There’s no point blaming us for them, there is no moral significance to them, one cannot judge us morally, as we discussed in previous sessions. In other words, here there really is a stronger threat than the threat that arises from pain and wounds, okay? Or even from trauma, depression, and the like. Here we really do arrive at the highest human functions. If decision-making, judgment, morality, my values, my character, and so on are also determined by the body, or by the brain which is part of the body, then what remains? In the end this really does look like a death blow to the dualist-libertarian conception.
[Speaker B] Just a question: what would happen if this man had killed someone? Would the court say it wasn’t his fault, it happened because of the accident, and therefore he’s exempt?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, that’s exactly the question. And you know what, since you asked that, I’ll address it in a few sentences. Some time ago I wrote something for a friend of mine who is a retired judge, and they’re writing a book in his honor. They asked me for an article on neuroscience and the law. And I said there that on the conceptual level, the usual arguments that say that if basically everything about us is only brain, and we have no independent spiritual dimension, some kind of judgment and so on—people often say, well, if so, that empties the law of meaning, because then it means you can’t judge a person for what he did, because it’s an automatic product of his brain state, and therefore you can’t really judge him for it.
In response to that, the determinists say that this is not true. We already talked about this. The determinists say this is not true. Why? For two reasons. First, because I too, as the judge, am a product of my brain, so I judge him because I am compelled to judge, just as he sinned because he was compelled to sin. In other words, this whole story is a kind of fixed game, and therefore I as the judge am not exempt from this deterministic picture either. But that’s the technical argument. What they say on the substantive level is that there is still a point in judging, because if you judge the person, it creates deterrence, and deterrence itself can influence both that same person in the future and other people as well, so that they won’t commit crimes—deterministically influence them. Again, this is not a sanction against someone who behaved badly. In that sense, that really doesn’t exist in a deterministic world. But there is still meaning to judging a person or punishing a criminal, because punishment itself is one of the deterministic influences that will cause him and others not to sin, because they’re afraid of getting hit for it. So the brain processes that and reaches the conclusion that it’s not worthwhile to sin, not worthwhile to commit crimes. Therefore there is logic in punishing, judging, and punishing a person even in a deterministic world.
But there’s one important point that fewer people pay attention to, and that is the question of how to relate to the exemption of people who are under an irresistible impulse or under brain damage, like in the case of Phineas Gage or something like that. Here there is a real problem, because in the legal world they accept testimony from psychiatrists, and today also from brain researchers, who testify that a given person’s brain state caused him to commit the offense and therefore he is exempt from responsibility. In the United States, by the way, there have already been such cases. In Israel not yet, I think, but in the United States there have been such cases that have already reached the courts. In criminal trials there was testimony from brain researchers who brought brain scans and showed that the person who committed the offense was in fact compelled to do it according to the brain map. There are already structured decisions in American law about what to do with this; there’s an ongoing debate there, much more than in Israel. By the way, here there is almost no discussion of it. One of the reasons I wrote the article was to stir discussion here too, because my feeling is that if this discussion wakes up too late, then we’ll already be after the conclusions. And then jurists will find themselves forced to accept dictates from neuroscientists, from brain researchers, and they’ll adopt them into the legal system without this having gone through any discussion at all. That’s basically what is happening today. In brain research institutes all kinds of things are happening, people are reaching all kinds of conclusions, and in the end it will trickle outward, and it will reach law, philosophy, and everything else—but it will arrive as a consolidated position. It won’t be open for discussion, because it will already come after the brain researchers have formed their position, and the world has a certain tendency to accept the findings of a scientific community if a consensus forms there—a problematic tendency.
[Speaker B] Even in Jewish law, a person deemed insane is exempt from punishment.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, נכון, because with a person deemed insane you can say that in Jewish law they believe in free will. But what do we do today if we assume that neuroscience really shows us there is no free will? Then what would a legal system do today in such a situation?
[Speaker C] It could argue—the legal system could argue—that the judge too, for him as well it’s deterministic. When he encounters such circumstances, he has to decide that way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the previous point I made. I said the first answer given by the determinists is that the judge too is not exempt from deterministic processes, and just as the offender was forced to commit the offense, the judge is forced to judge. So what do you want from him—that he not judge? He too has no choice whether to judge or not to judge. So that’s one answer. And I said that beyond that there is also substantive logic in judging and punishing, since judgment and punishment themselves influence the offender and the whole community not to commit crimes. Therefore even in a deterministic world there is logic to doing this.
But I said the real problem is what happens when a person comes before us and we have testimony from experts—psychiatrists or brain researchers or whatever, neurologists—who tell us that the person was not responsible for his actions. There we are used to exempting him; that is grounds for exemption in law. In other words, every legal system in the world that I know of, as far as I know, there is no legal system in the world that does not recognize such claims on the conceptual level. You have to prove it, but conceptually there is no legal system that does not recognize such claims as exempting claims.
[Speaker D] But there’s a difference. What? There’s a difference between—according to what I understand, the question is why there is a difference. Because from what I understand, the problem here is that all human beings are in any case compelled according to determinism, and therefore there is no essential difference between a person deemed insane and a normal person. Is that the question?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s the question. I was just about to say it, so okay, fine.
[Speaker D] From what I understand, then there is an essential difference. That is, between a person who is insane—the whole rationale for carrying out punishment according to the deterministic system is in order to influence people. Right. But this person here cannot be influenced, because he is insane.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He absolutely can be influenced. Of course he can be influenced. Maybe I’ll explain the question, because first of all let’s state the question so people know what we’re talking about. The question I really want to raise here is: why exactly does the claim that a person acted under an impulse he could not overcome, or under some pathological brain state, exempt that person? What’s the difference between that and a healthy person? A healthy person too is really acting under an impulse that is not conquerable. Everything a person does is an impulse that is not conquerable. He is not responsible for his actions in any case, whether healthy or sick. The only difference is just in the question of what he does. A diseased brain causes you to act one way, and a healthy brain causes you to act another way. Either way, that’s not your decision; it’s the result of brain structure. And then the claim—and now I’ll continue, and I’ll also answer what Moshe noted earlier—my claim is that there is a way to punish even such a person. After all, if the purpose of punishment is to fix the brain so that such offenses won’t happen again, then a diseased brain can also be corrected. There are effects even on an imbecile. Even an imbecile, when he gets beaten, will try not to do it so he won’t get beaten again. You don’t have to be very sophisticated for that. At most, what you need to show is that you give him the blows right after he committed the offense so that he understands the connection—like conditioning a dog, so to speak. You have to give him the feedback immediately after he did what he did so that he understands that this feedback is for what he did. It doesn’t matter, but on the principled level there is no difference with an imbecile. But that isn’t really an exemption claim; it only says: punish him in a way that suits what… By the way, that’s true of every person. If there is a person for whom prison will not cause repentance, and we know that with most criminals that’s the case, right? Then what’s the point of putting them in prison? That doesn’t fix their brains; afterward they go back and sin again. So what’s the point of doing it? In law today they say, what do you mean, there is a point. Even if it doesn’t fix them, they deserve a sanction. Not only because of the therapeutic element—that is, the preventive one—but first of all because there is some kind of poetic justice, that a person who sinned should get hit for it. And that of course does not exist with a person who is not responsible for his actions, an imbecile or brain-damaged person or something like that. So our whole theory of punishment really collapses immediately. Meaning, there is no moral or social logic in punishing someone because he sinned. There is logic in fixing things so he won’t go back to being a sinner, that’s perfectly fine. So make the relevant corrections. But what does that have to do with punishment? Why should the severity of the punishment be according to the severity of the offense? There is no connection at all between those things. The type of punishment should fit the offense, not the severity of the punishment. Meaning, you have to tailor the punishment to the type of offense in a way that will optimally cause people not to sin again. No one in the legal world thinks like that. No normal person thinks like that. Okay. Now notice that on the one hand there is a pretty broad consensus in this world of brain research, a deterministic consensus, that everything is determined by our brain structure, damaged or healthy, it doesn’t matter. And in the legal, moral, and social world there is a completely different consensus—completely. These are really two opposite poles. And somehow we live with both of these things in parallel: the legal system continues behaving the way it behaves, brain research continues behaving the way it behaves, and everything is fine. I’m afraid that at some stage brain research, as I said earlier, will come out into the open, and then all of a sudden the jurists will find themselves facing a consolidated theory that they will have to adopt. Because brain researchers are the experts in this field, and jurists are supposed to accept expert opinions. And then the legal system will find itself giving up its most basic principles without society, jurists, philosophers, and so on having taken part in the discussion that created that theory. That is the great concern that led me to write the article and the book and so on, because I think that a consensus is taking shape in the brain institutes in a completely incorrect way. Because they are mixing science with interpretations, with many philosophical errors. Of course there are different researchers and different kinds of researchers, but generally I’ve seen many times a very broad consensus taking shape that has no philosophical basis at all. They are mistaken in their interpretation of their scientific findings. These are excellent researchers. I gave seminars in certain places about these things, and I met—I was at the Weizmann Institute in their brain research department, I spoke with all their researchers there, I gave a lecture there—and I found people who had a fairly broad deterministic consensus, at least that was my impression from what they said there. And when I presented to them the fact that they were relying on mistaken philosophical interpretations, they had no answer. I’m not a brain researcher, and they are better than I am in brain research. I am speaking only about the question of the meaning of their findings, not the findings themselves. What the findings mean. Many times these people are simply not sufficiently skilled on the philosophical level, and therefore there are errors in interpretation. And once there is no interaction between brain researchers and people who can give them some philosophical, psychological, or other kind of feedback, then all kinds of very problematic conclusions can arise—conclusions that can also project outward. Because today, in principle, if you adopt this view, then basically any person can be exempted in criminal law. Any person. Meaning, criminal law could be abolished and transferred to closed psychiatric wards. Instead of punishment there should be treatment. That’s all. Whoever can be treated, fine, and whoever we don’t know how to treat, then we don’t know, okay. But on the principled level there should be no legal discussion at all; there should be a medical discussion. That is a very far-reaching conclusion, you have to understand. And I think these excuses—that I’m compelled to judge, and that punishment is corrective, and so on—do not really explain our legal approach. They are just strained excuses. And therefore I think this discussion is very important. But let’s get back to our subject. So I return to the split-brain experiments. In the end it became clear that what… what happened to Phineas Gage was that the iron rod passed through what is called the corpus callosum. The brain is composed—as we saw in previous lessons—of two hemispheres, a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere. The connection between the two hemispheres is made mainly—although there is also some other frontal connection—but the main connection is through the corpus callosum. That is, there is some structure that connects—there is a hemisphere here and a hemisphere here, and this structure connects them, and that is called the corpus callosum. Why is it important? We already saw that each of the two hemispheres has a different function. The left hemisphere is responsible for speech, mathematics, analytical associations. The right hemisphere is responsible for intuitive, creative, emotional associations, things of that sort. And now when a person weighs something or performs some action, many times you need to combine associations that belong to the right hemisphere with associations that belong to the left hemisphere. Meaning, a certain action requires these kinds of associations and those kinds of associations. That is the role of the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is supposed to coordinate between the two hemispheres, create some kind of integration between what this one does and what that one does, and come to a decision or act in a way that takes all aspects into account. Now what happens the moment you cut the corpus callosum—it can happen either in an accident like with Phineas Gage or in surgery, and by the way they did this a lot, surgeries that cut the brain as treatment for epilepsy and all kinds of things like that. At one time it was very common to do such surgery, to cut the corpus callosum. In the end they came to the conclusion that the damage was greater than the benefit. The benefit was sometimes there and sometimes not, and even when there was benefit, by the way, there were terrible damages, and they almost stopped doing this surgery. In certain cases they still do it today. And sometimes this happens from accidents. Then what happens, once there is a disconnection between the two hemispheres, is that each hemisphere functions separately but there is no integration between them. And then a whole collection of really strange phenomena occurs. Now, in order to understand the strange phenomena I’ll remind you of something else that I also already said, which is that the relationship between the brain hemispheres and the body is crossed. Meaning, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, the left hand and left leg, okay, and also the left eye and left ear and so on. And the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. Again: limbs, ear, eye, and so on. Okay. Now the left hemisphere is responsible for speech too, by the way. Here we only have one— the left hemisphere is responsible for speech. Okay, that’s the division of labor. Now what happens is, let’s say they show me some picture in front of my eyes and cover my left eye, so in effect I see it with my right eye, fine, I see it with my right eye, which transfers the information to the left hemisphere. Okay. Now the left hemisphere processes it with its own tools. But the processing that would be done in the right hemisphere does not happen, because the information doesn’t reach the right hemisphere, since the left eye—which transfers the information to the right hemisphere—is blocked, it doesn’t see it. And then what happens is that sometimes pathologies can result from this, or an incorrect analysis of the situation. When the corpus callosum is in place, then the connection between the hemispheres can deal with the issue, right, because the information still passes from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. But think what happens when I cut that connection. The hemispheres operate separately; there is no integration between them. So I have the left hemisphere, and the right hemisphere has nothing to say about the situation I’m seeing, and then understand that my reactions or my analysis or my attitudes can be completely different. And we arrive at phenomena—fascinating phenomena—and let’s see a few examples. For example, they took a split-brain person—and again, doing such experiments is very complicated, because of course you can’t intentionally create a split-brain person, that would be immoral. You have to take people to whom this happened in an accident or who needed the surgery for medical reasons, and then you can try to ask them to participate in an experiment, because they already have a split brain anyway. Okay? Now what happens in a split-brain person? So let’s say they showed this person’s left eye a snow shovel. Fine? And they blocked his right eye, so he saw it with his left eye, and the information reached the right hemisphere. Then they ask the person: what does this remind you of? He saw a snow shovel. Then they ask him: what does this remind you of? Point to what it reminds you of. So he pointed to snow. Okay? He pointed to a house covered in snow. But now they told him: say what it reminds you of. Now I remind you, to say means to speak. Speech takes place in the left hemisphere. But here the left hemisphere, first of all, saw nothing because they blocked the right eye, so the information didn’t reach the left hemisphere, and the connection between the hemispheres does not exist because he is split-brained. So in effect he saw the snow shovel in the right hemisphere, but he is supposed to report through the left hemisphere. Now it turns out that what he said had no connection whatsoever to the snow shovel. Basically, if for example they had transmitted to the left hemisphere information that he saw a chicken, then he says that the snow shovel is for cleaning the chicken’s house. Meaning, he did not know how to interpret what he was seeing—sorry, not that he didn’t know how to interpret it; he didn’t know how to say what he was interpreting, because the saying comes from the left hemisphere, while the information exists and is analyzed in the right hemisphere, and there is no connection between the hemispheres. So what he says is a bunch of stories that have absolutely nothing to do with what he sees. Right? He basically chose various irrelevant pictures and somehow connected them to the snow shovel with creative explanations that had nothing to do with the matter. Because he had to invent a story without having the information. He didn’t see the snow shovel. The right hemisphere saw the snow shovel, but the hemisphere that talks—the left hemisphere—did not. So it had to invent some new and totally unrelated story. Then they started telling him, okay, please explain, because even when he chose—let’s say with the right hemisphere he chose a house covered in snow, he knew how to point, yes, to a house covered in snow. Then they asked him, okay, explain that pointing. Now to explain means with the mouth, right? So he has to speak. So now he takes the explanations from the left hemisphere. You wouldn’t believe what creative explanations came out there. He explains that the house is covered—the left hemisphere saw a chicken—so he explains that the house, I pointed to the house covered in snow because the house covered in snow was the house inside which the chicken was found. The truth is that he pointed to the snow-covered house because it reminded him of the snow shovel. The association is obvious. But the left hemisphere doesn’t know that; it happened in the right hemisphere. So the left hemisphere, which is responsible for speech, in the speech where I explain why I chose specifically a picture of a house covered in snow—the truth is that it’s an association from the snow shovel, but only the right hemisphere knows that truth. The left hemisphere has to explain it. Suddenly there are creative explanations, and he begins inventing some whole story about why exactly I chose a house covered in snow, what it has to do with the chicken I saw, because the chicken brought the snow and covered the house and all kinds of things. We invent imaginary stories just to somehow organize the data with the partial information we have. Now notice, that information was in us, only it was in the right hemisphere, and the one who speaks, the one responsible for speech, is the left hemisphere, which is not equipped with the information. It has to invent. And it turns out that our left hemisphere, although creativity is in the right hemisphere, our left hemisphere is very creative. Meaning, it can cover up for a great many information gaps with all kinds of stories, one way or another. There is also, for example—let’s say they place a spoon before his right eye—sorry, before the left eye of a person, a spoon. Fine? And they ask the person—afterward they place it on the right side of the screen, so he says, I see a spoon. When they put it on the left side of the screen, which is accessible only to this side, they ask him what do you see? Nothing. He sees nothing. Because then the left hemisphere does not know how to say what he sees. So that means that inside this person, once his brain is split, there are basically two human beings with no connection between them. The right person and the left person, and there is no connection between them; no integration is made between these two parts of the person. In a healthy person the integration does happen, because the corpus callosum connects these two hemispheres to one another. But in a split brain that integration does not happen. Or another example, for instance: they place before a person some picture where the right half is a man and the right half is a picture of a woman—simply combined on a computer, yes, half a picture of a man and half a picture of a woman. So once again, the person looking at this picture—when we ask him what do you see, yes, there is a picture standing before me where the right side, the right half of the face, is a man’s face, and the left half of the face is a woman’s face. They ask the person what do you see. They make sure that the right eye sees the right side and the left eye—let’s say they put some divider in the middle, okay—what will he answer? What do you say? I see a man, of course. Why? Because the right eye sees the man’s half, transfers the information to the left hemisphere, the left hemisphere is responsible for speech, so when he has to answer with his mouth what he sees, he sees a man. But when they ask him, say—when they tell him point to what you see, point to what you see—he points to a woman. Because pointing is controlled by the right hemisphere, speech by the left hemisphere. The left eye, which sees a woman, transfers the information to the right hemisphere. Therefore, as far as the functions of the right hemisphere are concerned, the person standing before me is a woman. As far as the left hemisphere is concerned, the person standing before me is a man. And when there is no corpus callosum connecting my two hemispheres, then I cannot understand that what I’m seeing here is actually a split picture; I cannot perform that integration. Then each wing of our brain functions separately. Okay, they also did similar experiments with hearing. Yes, they ask a boy like this who had a split brain, they ask him in a loud voice so that both ears hear, “Who is your favorite,” and then they finish with “girlfriend” in a low voice so that only the left ear hears it. Only the left ear. And he is supposed to answer the question. What will he answer? He gives an embarrassed chuckle; he doesn’t know what you want from him, he can’t answer. Because as far as speech, which is controlled by the left hemisphere, is concerned, he heard the question “Who is your favorite.” Only the right hemisphere heard “Who is your favorite girlfriend.” Okay, so in effect what comes out is, yes, it’s the famous question: what’s the difference between a rabbit… You know those nice nonsense lines? What’s the difference between a rabbit whose two ears are equally longer than each other? Right? So “Who is your favorite” is the same thing as “what’s the difference between a rabbit.” Meaning, it’s not a question you can answer. As far as the mouth is concerned, which is controlled by the left hemisphere—or in other words the right ear, yes, the right ear transfers the information to the left hemisphere—the mouth cannot answer the question “Who is your favorite.” If he had to answer by pointing, he would point to the girl he loves most, because pointing is controlled by the right hemisphere. I’m showing you that this is not only in the eyes; it’s also in the ears. Which means it isn’t the eyes and it isn’t the ears, it’s the brain. Basically, the connection between the hemispheres is damaged because the brain is split. I’ll tell you more than that: they asked such people about their political opinions. A person who was clearly right-wing, let’s say—it was during the Nixon period when they did these experiments—they asked them what they thought of Nixon. A person who had been a Nixon supporter began criticizing him, and vice versa: a person who had been Republican gave Democratic answers, and vice versa. And that means, as I said at the beginning, that even our highest functions—worldviews, ideologies, values—even those are determined basically by our brain state, and not by some independent judgment. That already really raises a serious question about the dualist-libertarian view. It basically means that the brain toys with us as it pleases, and if the brain is damaged then the results will be accordingly. It is not our psyche or intellect or soul that actually answers, thinks, determines ideologies and values and so on. The brain does that. And if you cut the brain between the two hemispheres, then we have two brains and we’ll get two different answers—one answer in pointing, one answer in speech—and those are two different answers. So that means that when the brain is cut, there are two people inside us. So that means that the person is the brain. Meaning, there is nothing in a person besides the brain. That is really the claim. In the book I brought a passage from an article by Ran Seidel—some brain researcher—where he speaks already about the 1980s, and he really says that these findings show very clearly that there is nothing in a person besides a brain. The brain determines everything. Change the brain and you’ll get different answers in ideology, in values, in everything, in political worldviews, in every matter. So in the end we have an illusion that we decide and that we have judgment and so on, but no. The brain does the whole story. Now, Seidel himself, by the way, is a wonderful example of the bugs in the thinking of brain researchers. We need to check their brains. There are typical bugs. Because he says: therefore, as a result of this, he draws the conclusion that we have a problem assigning moral responsibility to a person with a defective brain. Because a person with a defective brain basically cannot integrate between the two hemispheres and reach balanced decisions for which he is responsible; rather, the injury caused him to make different decisions, and therefore you cannot assign responsibility to him. Of course, for a person with an intact brain, where there is a connection between the two hemispheres, there you can assign responsibility. This is of course complete nonsense. Because if you conclude that the person is only a brain, then what does he think—that if the corpus callosum is cut, the soul escaped? Only then the person is a brain? And a healthy person, who has an intact corpus callosum, has a soul? No, of course not. After all, what he wanted to claim from these split-brain experiments was to show that even in a whole person, all there is is only a brain—except that his brain is healthy. So what? You still can’t assign moral responsibility to him. Because moral responsibility is assigned to someone who can formulate a decision and be responsible for it, who has judgment. But a person whose brain dictates the outcome—what difference does it make whether the brain is damaged or intact? If the brain deterministically dictates the result, you can’t assign responsibility, as I said earlier. There are dozens of examples of this, and it is simply a very basic philosophical confusion. You don’t need a long day of philosophical study for this. You see that people who are successful brain researchers can fall into silly mistakes in philosophical arguments simply because of lack of philosophical skill. And many times people read what they write as though these are the words of an expert who is qualified on the matter. And if he says that a person is only a brain, then he must know what he is saying, because after all he is the expert. People don’t understand that there are whole layers here of interpretation, far beyond the objective findings. Basically the claim is—maybe I’ll add one more sentence. There is a very, very well-known brain researcher in the United States named Michael Gazzaniga. He also wrote a book considered a foundational book in this field. In my opinion it is full of errors. Again, not in brain research. In brain research he is a far greater expert than I am. Full of errors in interpretation, in explanations. Really childish mistakes. There is almost no brain researcher who escapes these mistakes. It’s quite astonishing. I entered this field and was amazed at how people can be such—split-brained, you could call it, yes? They are great experts in the scientific field and really childish in the philosophical field. So the interpretation of the findings that they offer is simply foolishness. So this Gazzaniga, who won prizes—he was even once nominated for the Nobel Prize—speaks there about these deceptions, that the left hemisphere toys with us and tells us stories. Then he tries to explain this on the assumption that the person is only a brain, and yet still to generate a theory that allows us to relate to the person as a creature that has responsibility and things of that sort. So he explains that the left hemisphere… the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, somehow we create some kind of integration between them, and therefore even though the left hemisphere confuses us greatly, we manage with the help of the right hemisphere to integrate all these aspects and produce a harmonious personality rather than a polyphonic one, yes, with many, many voices. The big problem in what he says, without going into details again, is this: who is “we”? Who is that one who integrates and uses the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere and things like that? There is no such someone to whom the hemispheres report; the hemispheres are us. You cannot go down that route and explain the difference between a whole person and a damaged person. This recurs again and again among brain researchers. There is no way to do it. Both a whole person and a damaged person—if the person is only a brain—there is no possibility of speaking about the person as some comprehensive entity. It is only a collection of many, many voices inside. More than that, if I really were the left hemisphere or something like that, then I ought to hear all this running around among the different positions and different aspects, and only afterward integrate them. But I don’t hear that. I live in a fairly harmonious way; I don’t live with some chaos in my head. Meaning, there is something here beyond the brain, necessarily. You have to say there is some something. This unity of the phenomenon—of consciousness, sorry—says that there is something that performs the integration between all these parts, between all these parts of the brain. Basically, I want to say briefly why I think all these phenomena do not really show what people claim they show. I do not think these phenomena show that we are only a brain. And at this point, as I said earlier in the context of Gazzaniga, I can even show that there is something in us beyond the brain. But now I’m speaking about the arguments I brought earlier: assuming that the brain state really does determine our ideology, our reactions, and our character, does that in itself prove that we are only a brain and nothing beyond that? And again I say: even if we have a soul, and the brain deterministically determines what the soul will do, that would not change anything for me. Because for me what matters is the question whether there is in a person some extra soul, meaning some something that can overcome what the brain is trying to make him do, can exercise judgment, and as a result can also bear responsibility for his decisions. Because if I have a soul in some sense, or a psyche, but the brain unambiguously determines what the psyche or soul will do, then that really does not interest me. Then the psyche or soul is just one more stage in this deterministic process. So what? That doesn’t make me essentially different from a table or a dog. Okay? Therefore it is clear that when I speak about a soul, I am speaking about a soul that deliberates and chooses, not a soul that the brain causes to do all sorts of things. So let’s try to go back for a moment to the models we already saw, and I said that these chapters are an integration of everything we have seen so far. Once we understand what we have seen so far, we immediately see that all these claims of neuroscience don’t even get off the ground. In the deterministic view, I put the diagrams up here so it would be easier to see, the thing works like this: there are circumstances, which are everything that exists around me. Those circumstances affect the brain through the senses—the brain receives information about the surrounding circumstances, does electrical processing, and gives an instruction for action to the organs: to walk, to hit, to do, to sit, to sing, whatever you decide to do. Or if you want, to be Republican or to be Democrat—that too doesn’t matter; it’s the same thing, a deterministic decision where the brain gives an instruction what to do. That is the picture of deterministic decision. And therefore, basically, the determinists say: once the circumstances—that is, the circumstances plus the brain, meaning the brain state—determine the action, there is nothing here except circumstances and brain. Therefore this is the picture, that’s it. There is no room here—where does anything else enter? Right? That is basically the question. If I summarize all these questions about damaged brains, that is really the question that arises here. Now I want to remind you what the picture is, what the libertarian picture is. There is a picture of libertarianism that people present, and that is this picture: free decision. Yes, I believe in free decision; the circumstances do not determine what I do. I decide, I give the brain a command to carry out what the soul has decided. Let’s say I’m a Republican, okay? So now I go to the ballot box, and I decide to vote for Donald Trump. Fine? I give the brain an instruction to take the body, move the legs, go to the ballot box, take Trump’s slip, and put it in the envelope. And that is the action. Fine? That is often how the libertarian picture is presented. But we have already seen several times: not true. That is an incorrect presentation. It is simplistic. It is a caricature of libertarianism. The real libertarian picture is here. This is the real libertarian picture. There are circumstances, the circumstances pass to the brain, which receives them and processes the circumstances. And now as a result of that we have a soul—let’s call it now the soul, not the brain—or the will and the intellect together. For me these are the higher capacities of the human being, the intellect and the will, which together, the will and the intellect together, make the decision. Okay? After there is a decision—I’m describing now the libertarian picture—after there is a decision, an instruction passes to the brain, and what we saw above happens. From the decision through the brain to the action. These three things, the three circles on the right, really do parallel the picture we saw before. This is the libertarian picture. But that is only the second part of the picture. At the beginning there are also circumstances, reception by the brain, and the transition from receiving the circumstances to the decision. When the soul makes a decision, it needs data, right? Then it needs to decide what to do. That data passes—I marked it with a double arrow because it is really a transition from the brain to the soul. Again, I don’t care right now if this is metaphorical, but it is an exit from the electrical circuit. Then we come back again and the arrows go back to being electrical. Okay? But here there is a deviation. Now notice what happens, what the effect of this picture is. It changes the whole situation entirely. Why? Let’s suppose the brain gets damaged. Okay? Will that affect the bottom line, the action? Notice, I now think there is a soul, and the soul makes decisions as traditionally understood, yes, freely, non-deterministically. Will damage to the brain change the final outcome, the action? And for me action includes ideology too, I don’t care—also voting at the ballot box, worldview, action in whatever sense. My answer is unequivocally yes. Not only will it change the action, it can change it in two different ways. One way the action can change is because if the brain is damaged, then the reception and processing of the data are not done properly. Then the decision I make here is made on the basis of incorrect data. So why be surprised that the decision changes? Not because the person is a different person or because there is nothing in the person besides a brain, but because even the person beyond the brain, when he makes decisions, does so on the basis of data. And if the data are different because the brain is damaged, then it passes along bad data or incomplete data or incoherent data, and of course the decision can be different. Since the data on the basis of which the decision is made are different. But I’ll say more than that: here too the brain functions. In the libertarian picture the brain enters in two places, not one. One is in receiving and processing the data. The second is in translating the decision into an instruction for practical action. Now if the brain is damaged, it could be that the soul made the correct decision, but it gets translated incorrectly. For example, the soul may think that it sees before it a house with snow. But when it tries to tell me that, it has to pass the instruction to the mouth, and that goes through the brain, the left hemisphere of the brain. If the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged or not connected to the right hemisphere, then what will come out is speech that does not reflect what the instruction told it to do. Therefore, even though I can make the correct decision, in the end the execution will be faulty execution. Why? Because the transition from the decision to the execution is faulty. So when something in my brain gets damaged, that can affect my decisions even in the libertarian worldview. It can affect things in two places, not only can it affect them, it can affect them in two places. One place is this place, which says that once I have different data, of course I will make different decisions. For example, let’s say I see a person in front of me and I’m sure this is the person who punched me a moment ago. Mistake—it’s someone else entirely. But that’s what I’m sure of, I have an optical illusion. So I punch him back. Okay? If I had seen correctly, then I would have understood that this wasn’t that person and I would not have punched him. So here damage to the brain caused a different moral action. Does that mean that my morality does not exist and it’s all just brain? Of course not. After all, I made a moral decision with my soul, but on the basis of erroneous data, because the brain is responsible for passing the data to me—what can you do? And if the data are wrong, I will make a different decision. So the fact that a damaged brain causes a different decision does not mean that I do not have a deciding dimension beyond the electrical circuit of the brain. And similarly the second place where it affects things is here. Let’s say I made the decision not to punch him because I correctly identified the person. But another part of the brain got damaged, the part that translates the decision not to punch into an instruction, and it nevertheless gives my hand the command to punch. So I made the correct decision in this case, but still, in the transition to the instruction for action, there was a disruption, and so I punched. So I can punch in an inappropriate way either because the data I received were incorrect and then my decision is incorrect, or the data are correct and the decision is correct, but the transition from decision to execution is incorrect. This is always the dilemma. People who are vegetative—we can never know whether they understand what we are saying and want to answer but simply cannot, or whether they are not with us at all. Because it could definitely be that they understand and they are with us and their brain works perfectly; they just cannot express it in speech because what is damaged in them is precisely stage number four, the stage that moves from the decision of what to say to the saying itself. They cannot translate that decision into action. What is damaged in them is stage four, not stage two. That is exactly the dilemma. Is the person lying there damaged in stage two or in stage four? Meaning, does he not even receive what I’m saying—that is what is damaged in him—or no, he receives it and understands, and has intelligent reactions to what I’m saying, he just cannot convey them to me because he cannot give his mouth the command to say it. But that does not mean he has no soul, it does not mean he is entirely brain, it only means there is a bug in the connection between the soul and the body, either in the output or in the input, yes, either in the input or in the output. We’ll talk next time about the implications of this.
[Speaker F] Is it the same with a person with dementia?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Absolutely. Any brain injury. A person with dementia is not a person whose soul is damaged. We know there are brain indicators for dementia. A person with dementia is a person whose soul cannot manage to express itself in his body or in his cognition or in his actions in the world. That’s all. His soul can be perfect. It’s the coachman and the horse: if the horse doesn’t work, the coachman won’t reach his destination even though the coachman is built perfectly.
[Speaker F] His problem is stage four and not stage two. Maybe.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying either two or four, I don’t care.
[Speaker F] So in dementia too we have a problem either in stage two or in stage four?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think—I don’t know, I’m not an expert in dementia—but any brain injury can cause a problem in stage two or a problem in stage four. In both cases the brain injury will affect the bottom line. Does that mean there is no stage three, the stage that makes decisions and exercises judgment? Absolutely not. Of course there are decisions. Or at least for me as a libertarian that is obvious. I’m saying these experiments or this information in neuroscience prove nothing to me. You may not accept my view, but there is no refutation of my view here. That is what I want to claim. Okay, shall we stop here, or is there another question?
[Speaker E] We still don’t know whether there is free choice or not.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think that scientifically at least we don’t know. I have no doubt that there is, but there is no scientific answer to that. I’ll talk about that in the concluding chapter.
[Speaker G] Hold out one more week.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I still don’t know—maybe in the next lesson or the one after.
[Speaker G] Thank you very much and Sabbath peace. More power to you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All the best.