Choice, Lesson 4

Table of Contents

• Determinism, compatibilism, and genetic-psychological influences
• Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma and a third possibility
• Models of choice: Syria, Switzerland, a place with problems, and Burma
• The hiker parable and the topography of internal and external influences
• Who is the person: determinism versus libertarianism, matter and spirit, and psychology
• Past and future: Einstein, Laplace, and a tree of causal chains versus new creation
• Knowledge and choice: Maimonides, “above time,” and the claim that information about a future choice does not exist
• Torah examples: Rashi on Moses and the Egyptian, Hezekiah, prophecy, and the Shelah
• Questions from the audience: coercion, the point of choice, Pharaoh, knowledge about a collective, and psychiatric-genetic issues

Summary

General overview

The text argues that the mistakes of compatibilism and of the idea of brain plasticity rest on the same basic confusion between free choice and being determined by factors, because as long as there is some set of factors that dictates behavior, that is determinism, whether the factors are internal or external. It rejects the caricature of libertarianism as though decisions are made in a vacuum, and formulates a “sober” libertarianism in which there are many influences, but they do not uniquely determine the action. It deals with Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma through a “third possibility,” in which an action does not stem from a compelling cause but is also not arbitrary; rather, it is done through judgment and for the sake of a purpose. It presents models and parables to distinguish between influence and dictation, and develops implications regarding the definition of the human being, the understanding of psychology, and the essential difference between past and future, including an application to the question of divine knowledge and free choice in Maimonides and the claim that future information about free choice does not yet exist, and therefore even the Holy One, blessed be He, does not “know it in advance.”

Determinism, compatibilism, and genetic-psychological influences

The text states that real freedom must not be dictated by any kind of factor, and therefore any set of factors that dictates behavior is called determinism, whether internal or external. It describes how studies that find genetic or psychological influences on behavior are presented in the press as conclusive proof of determinism, because they point to something structural that is not “our own decision” and that guides a mental state or an action. It argues that this inference is mistaken because it assumes a caricature of libertarianism in which there is no influence at all on a person, whereas a sober libertarian accepts that there are many influences but denies that they uniquely dictate the outcome. It demands that research wishing to prove determinism would have to show an absolute influence in which a certain gene always produces a certain behavior, and argues that it does not seem that such a full deterministic correspondence exists or will exist, and therefore such studies are irrelevant to the question of determinism.

Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma and a third possibility

The text presents Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma argument, according to which if there is a cause for an action then it is deterministic, and if there is no cause then it is indeterministic and arbitrary, and therefore not free choice involving responsibility, and from this it follows that there is no free choice. It argues that the way to deal with such an argument is to show that the dichotomy does not cover all the possibilities, and it proposes that even in the absence of a cause there are two sub-possibilities, not just one. It defines one possibility as arbitrary randomness, but proposes a second possibility in which there is no cause that dictates the action, and yet the action is not arbitrary because it is done through judgment, “not because of a cause but for the sake of a purpose,” and out of values and purposes. It argues that van Inwagen begs the question when he identifies “no cause” with arbitrariness, and that once one recognizes the third possibility, the either-or argument collapses.

Models of choice: Syria, Switzerland, a place with problems, and Burma

The text illustrates three models of choice by means of the image of elections: “the elections in Syria” are a situation with only one ballot slip, where the circumstances dictate the result, and so this is an illusion of freedom within a deterministic picture. It presents “the elections in Switzerland” as a situation in which there are several ballot slips but “there are no problems,” and therefore the choice is free but lacks any real deliberation; it is similar to flipping a coin and to what van Inwagen calls indeterminism. As a third alternative, it presents elections in a place where there are several possibilities and there are significant prices and consequences that are not under the voter’s control, so the choice is neither forced nor a lottery, because the voter activates considerations and values. It adds a “fourth possibility” from a story in Burma, where there appear to be multiple ballot boxes but they all fall into the same sack, and concludes that this in practice returns us to the Syrian model, in which the multiplicity is only apparent.

The hiker parable and the topography of internal and external influences

The text offers “the hiker parable,” in which a topographical terrain structure completely dictates the path of a little ball or a stream of water, but a person walking through the terrain is influenced by the valleys and the mountains and still can choose to climb a mountain despite the cost. It defines the internal influences, such as genetics and brain structure, and the external influences, such as education and environment, as the topographical outline that pulls and discourages but does not uniquely determine the action. It states that the person himself is the one walking on the outline and is not the outline itself, and therefore the influences are “the environment within which he acts” and not his full identity. It sums up libertarianism as recognizing influences alongside the ability to decide whether to respond to them or not, and as rejecting the idea that a person acts in a vacuum.

Who is the person: determinism versus libertarianism, matter and spirit, and psychology

The text argues that the dispute between determinism and libertarianism relates not only to behavior but to the question of who the person is: is he “the collection of influences,” or is there some further factor within him that decides within an environment of influences? It emphasizes that one should not automatically identify this dispute with materialism and dualism, because one can be a dualist determinist and say that spiritual components also operate according to laws that dictate. It states that psychology describes the inner environment of drives and pressures, and not the person himself, and therefore even with perfect psychological knowledge one still cannot predict with certainty what a person will do, because one must wait for his decision in relation to the influences. It presents this in the spirit of “humanistic psychology,” in which the environment is not the person, and the person can choose what to do with his givens, while recognizing that his decisions can also later change his psychological environment.

Past and future: Einstein, Laplace, and a tree of causal chains versus new creation

The text states that in the deterministic picture there is no principled difference between looking at the past and looking at the future, and the gap is merely technical, one of access to information, so that a being beyond time can know the future just as it knows the past, or calculate it. It quotes a letter of condolence by Albert Einstein about Besso: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” It brings Laplace’s idea that with “a sufficiently powerful computer” and all the data, one could know everything that will happen until the end of history, and presents the world as one chain rooted in the Big Bang. In contrast, it sets out a libertarian conception in which at points of human choice, “new chains are born” that are not derived from the past, and therefore the future is not already lying there but is created when a person chooses. It concludes that in the libertarian picture the future “does not yet exist,” and this is not merely a matter of inaccessibility of information, but of the absence of the event itself before the choice.

Knowledge and choice: Maimonides, “above time,” and the claim that information about a future choice does not exist

The text presents the question of divine knowledge and free choice that Maimonides raises in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance: if there is free choice, how does the Holy One, blessed be He, know in advance, and if He knows in advance, how can there be choice? It rejects the common explanation that the Holy One, blessed be He, is “above time” and sees the future, and argues that this answers at most the question of how the information is accessed, not the question of how a person still has a real possibility of choosing at the crossroads. It argues that this explanation assumes a deterministic conception in which the future already exists “somewhere” and one only needs to retrieve it, whereas in the libertarian conception there is not yet anything there to retrieve. It concludes that regarding free choices, the Holy One, blessed be He, “cannot know” them in advance because there is no existing information to know, and it proposes as a solution to the dilemma that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know the person’s choice in advance. It defines this not as a limitation on omnipotence, but as the absence of an object of knowledge, similar to examples of a wall that stops every ball versus a ball that penetrates every wall, and of a “round triangle” as a meaningless combination.

Torah examples: Rashi on Moses and the Egyptian, Hezekiah, prophecy, and the Shelah

The text brings Rashi on “and he turned this way and that way” in two interpretations, and asks that the interpretation of seeing the future, “that no one at all was destined to come from him who would convert,” seems trivial, because the killing itself prevents such a future. It therefore explains that what Moses saw was a diagnosis in the present of the root and the condition, not a certain viewing of the future. It argues that one can calculate the future of deterministic processes, but not the future of human choices, and therefore neither Moses nor prophets know future choices with certainty. It responds to questions about Hezekiah in the midrash and about prophecy by saying that this is an optimal prediction based on present circumstances, which can change if the person chooses otherwise, and it quotes the Shelah in the introduction to Shnei Luchot HaBrit, in the section Beit HaBechirah, who argues that even prophets do not know with certainty the future that depends on choice. It explains “everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted” to mean that what is foreseen applies to what does not depend on the granted freedom, whereas what depends on choice is not foreseen with certainty.

Questions from the audience: coercion, the point of choice, Pharaoh, knowledge about a collective, and psychiatric-genetic issues

The text responds that the discussion of coercion, “an impulse that cannot be overcome,” and the claim that choice is removed, will be dealt with later, and connects this to chapter 6 of the Laws of Repentance on the enslavement in Egypt and the question of the Egyptians’ responsibility. It accepts Rabbi Dessler’s approach that there are “points of choice” and argues that there are areas that are not in the point of choice of a normative person, and therefore they do not testify against general freedom of choice. It addresses the distinction between prophecy for an individual and for a collective, and raises the possibility of a statistical formulation of directing circumstances, such that it is likely that most Egyptians will enslave, even though the individual has choice, while acknowledging the difficulty regarding intervention if everyone were to choose otherwise. He is asked about homosexual inclination and emphasizes that even if there are innate elements, the fact that something is innate does not prove determinism of behavior; and the argument about responsibility is ideological, not scientific proof. After that, a psychiatrist in the audience confirms that this is a multi-factor structure, and that even with inborn tendencies, people can change.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So my claim is that the two mistakes—compatibilism and the brain’s plasticity—are rooted in the same issue. They don’t understand that freedom contains something that is supposed not to be dictated by any kind of factor. I don’t care whether you say that one kind of factor doesn’t affect me because some other kind does, or that this one doesn’t affect me because that one does. As long as there is some set of factors that dictates my behavior, that is called determinism. Whether that set of factors is internal or whether that set of factors is external. And I said that this failure to distinguish between choice and prior determination often shows up in statements based on studies that show some psychological or genetic influence or another on our behavior. Right, every so often there are headlines saying they found the gene responsible for stinginess, or faith / belief, or whatever, or a good mood. And very often—at least in the newspaper—this is presented as some decisive argument in favor of determinism. Why? Because we see that there is something structurally dictated, something not decided by us, that determines what we will do or what our mental state will be. And so supposedly there is no room here for free decision, for some intervention by the person or some human decision; rather there is something external—education, environment, genetics—that influences us. And my claim was that although there are things—well, before that, why is this considered an argument in favor of determinism? Because the libertarian picture—libertarianism is the view of someone who believes in free will—the libertarian picture imagined by the person making this argument is as if there is not supposed to be any influence on us at all. In order to say that I am a free person, there should be no influence at all, as I said earlier, right? Not internal influence and not external influence. So decisions are made in a vacuum. And these studies show that that is not true. Genetics does affect our decisions, education affects them, psychology, right? All kinds of things affect our decisions. We do not act in a vacuum. But that argument is mistaken, because the figure this argument attacks—the libertarian figure, the libertarianism that sees a person as acting in a vacuum—is a straw man. It is a caricature of libertarianism. It is not really libertarianism. A sober libertarian does not deny the fact that there are influences. Of course there are influences on a person, internal and external, of all kinds. What the libertarian claims is only that those influences do not dictate what we will do, but only influence what we will do. Meaning, if a person is born with a certain genetics, or lives in a certain environment, or received a certain education, of course that will influence what he does. The question is not whether it influences him; the libertarian agrees to that too. The question is whether it dictates what he does. “Dictates” means determines it unambiguously, meaning that given the circumstances I can tell you what the person will do. Here the libertarian says no, and the determinist says yes. Therefore, for such a study to show determinism, it is not enough for it to show that there is influence. It has to show that the influence is absolute. Meaning that once a person has a certain gene, he will always behave in a certain way. And I don’t think there is a single gene on earth, or a single mental or behavioral trait, that can be linked in a completely deterministic way. I don’t think such a thing has ever been done; I don’t even see how such a thing could be done, such a study. So all these studies are irrelevant to the question of determinism. This is a very common mistake. In addition, I said something else, and here I’ll more or less finish the summary. I said something else—that very often another argument comes up against determinism, and that argument basically says—I think I said this, maybe I’m already mixing it with another lesson, because there was another lesson where I also touched on these questions. This is the argument of Peter van Inwagen, an American philosopher of Dutch origin, I think. And he argues that there is no free choice on the basis of an argument from a dilemma—what is called in Talmudic language, “either way,” or on the basis of a dilemma argument. He basically says that either way, if there is a reason for what we do, then what we do is determined deterministically. If there is no reason for what we do, then our action is indeterministic, meaning it is random, it is in a vacuum, and so that too is not free choice, because free choice is something bound up with some judgment, with something that makes me responsible. If I act randomly, arbitrarily, then my actions are some kind of coin toss, so there is no basis for holding me responsible; that is not what is called free will. Therefore, says Peter van Inwagen, there are only two possibilities: either there is a reason for my actions, or there is no reason for my actions. There is no third possibility. And you see that under both possibilities, this is not free choice, not decision, not libertarianism. It is either indeterminism or determinism. So if that is the case, and since those are the only two possibilities—either there is a reason or there isn’t—there is therefore no free choice, because there is no such conceptual category. Because either there is choice and then it is determinism, or there is no choice and then it is indeterminism—what else could there be? And this is a kind of either-way argument, where you present two possibilities, under both of them the same conclusion follows, and therefore clearly that conclusion is true. In logic you say: if P implies Q, and not-P also implies Q, then you can discard P, and the conclusion is Q. Meaning Q is always true. If Q follows both from P and from not-P, that means that Q is true; it does not depend on anything. Okay, that is basically the structure of the argument. And how can you refute an argument like this or deal with an argument like this? The only way is to show that the two possibilities presented in the argument do not cover the full range. Meaning, there is a third possibility. It is not true that these are the only two possibilities. Now in the case of Peter van Inwagen, apparently these are the two possibilities: either there is a reason for my actions or there is no reason for my actions—what else could there be? My claim is that even if there is no reason for my actions, that still opens up two sub-possibilities. He assumes that if there is no reason for my actions, then that is indeterminism. I say no: even if there is no reason for my actions, under that heading there are still two possibilities. One possibility: there is no reason for my actions, and therefore it really is random, some completely arbitrary action, and that is what he calls indeterminism. But the second possibility is that even if there is no reason for my actions, that still does not mean it is an arbitrary action. I do it out of judgment, but not out of a reason. Meaning there is no reason that dictates what I do, but that does not mean it is an arbitrary action. For example, in this context I suggested that the action is done not because of a reason but for the sake of a purpose. Meaning, when I act based on considerations of what I want to achieve or which values I want to realize, then even if that action has no cause, it is still not right to call it an indeterministic action, an arbitrary action. It is an action that contains some kind of my own judgment. And Peter van Inwagen is basically begging the question. The moment he assumes that there are only two possibilities and no third, then of course he can prove by an either-way argument that there is no free choice—but he assumed it, he did not prove it. And if you reject this dichotomous assumption of either indeterminism or determinism, and I say that under indeterminism there are two sub-possibilities, then the argument collapses. I brought—I think I did bring—my favorite example, a little worn-out in my own eyes, about elections. Right, I said there are three models of elections; I’m just using them to illustrate the three possibilities I raised here. One possibility is elections in Syria. Elections in Syria are basically this: you enter the polling station, freely choose the only ballot slip that is there, and put it in the box. And whoever counts the slips and gets the majority of votes becomes president of Syria—which of course is always Assad. Why? Because there was only one ballot slip in the box. So I seemingly chose in a completely free way, right? But I had only one option. So what difference does it make that I supposedly chose freely? That is basically determinism. The circumstances dictate what I will do. It may be that my inner feeling was that I had freedom; nothing external told me what to do. So there are no internal circumstances dictating what I will do, and also apparently nothing external forcing me to do something. But that is an illusion. In the end this is a deterministic picture. Then there are elections in Switzerland. In elections in Switzerland, you enter the polling station, choose one out of several ballot slips there, put it in, they count the votes, and the majority determines who will be president of Switzerland. Seemingly this really is a free person, free elections. But the problem—problem in quotation marks—is that in Switzerland there are no problems. And if there are no problems, then what do I care who is president of Switzerland? You can hold a lottery. Meaning there is no significance to the fact that I freely chose between the slips, because all the slips will give me the same result. So in fact, yes, there is freedom here, but there is not what I call choice or judgment, what I called earlier. There is no significance to judgment here; toss a coin. So you are free in that sense—there is no cause making you do what you do, you freely decide what to do. But that really parallels what van Inwagen called indeterminism, because this is basically a kind of lottery. There are no considerations you can use to decide which slip to put in the ballot box, because there are no problems; you will neither lose nor gain anything from making the right choice or the wrong choice. The third possibility, whose existence Peter van Inwagen denies and I claim exists, is the possibility of elections in a place where there are problems. And still, if there are several slips in the ballot box and you go in and choose one of them, then these really are free elections. Why? Because on the one hand you freely choose among the options, and on the other hand there is a price that does not depend on you that tells you what the consequences are. Meaning, if you chose wrongly, you’ll get hit; if you chose rightly, you gain. Once there are costs around, once there are considerations by which you can decide who should be president or prime minister or whatever, then this choice is not deterministic because you choose it; it is not something forced on you, there are several options. But this choice is also not indeterministic, because it is not a lottery. You make considerations, you decide what seems right to you and what does not, what you support and what you oppose, and therefore it is not indeterminism either. It is a third possibility. I said there is also a fourth possibility, like the story in Burma. A friend of a friend of mine who was in Burma got to a post office there and saw, in some shack in a Burmese village deep in the jungle, he was supposed to—he saw a post office, went in to send a letter, and saw on the wall some kind of grid of boxes sorted by continents and countries. Unbelievable, in such a village that nobody reaches there in the middle of the jungle. When he got closer he saw that on the other side of this matrix of boxes there was one big sack catching all the letters. Meaning you send the letter through all the different boxes, but they all fall into the same sack. And what that means is that there is also a fourth model: a place where there are several options and there are also problems, but everyone you choose does the same thing—it makes no difference whom you chose. Here it makes no difference whom you chose not because there are no problems and not because you have no choice, but because all those among whom you chose do not really represent different paths; that basically takes us back to Syria. Anyway, for our purposes, this picture is trying to sharpen what it means to say that we have free choice. The claim that we have free choice means that although we do have internal influences and also external influences, those influences on the one hand do not dictate what we will do. You cannot calculate from those influences in a one-to-one way what the result will be, what we will think or what we will do. On the other hand, it is not true that there is no influence. There is influence, only after that influence we exercise some kind of judgment and still decide. There are influences, but we can decide whether to take them into account or not. And the third picture says there are influences around, but in any case they do not affect me at all—yes, that is the caricature of libertarianism that says a person acts in a vacuum; that is the third model. I want to go a little deeper into this picture of non-caricatured, sober libertarianism, in which a person really is subject to influences on the one hand, but they do not dictate what he will do; he has a choice in what he will do. So the claim I want—or the example I want to bring—is what I called maybe the hiker parable. Think of a person walking around on some terrain that has some pattern to it, some surface pattern, no matter, both things: there are hills and mountains and valleys and saddles, all kinds of land structure like we know from a topographic map. Now, if a small ball were placed on this terrain, then the structure of the land would dictate where in the end we would find the ball at any given moment. Right? Anyone who knows the laws of physics and has the data can calculate and tell us where the ball will be at every moment. Completely dictated. If there is someone flying over the terrain, then of course there is terrain but it does not affect him. He acts in a vacuum. Right, that is the first model. The ball is the deterministic one. The second model is van Inwagen’s indeterminism. The model I’m talking about is the model of a person walking on this terrain. A person walking on this terrain—then yes, in one direction say there is a very high mountain, and so it will be hard for him to climb it. It may be that most people really decide not even to try, not to climb this mountain but to go down in the other direction, toward the valley. But a person has the ability to decide that he is climbing the mountain anyway. True, he does not have the ability to decide what the price will be. It will be hard for him if he climbs the mountain. But he does have the ability to decide whether he takes that price upon himself, whether he does it or does not do it. And in that sense there is a difference between a person and the ball, or if you like some stream of water flowing on this terrain. A stream of water or a ball—the terrain dictates where they will go. I can tell you, in light of the terrain, what will happen here; that is determinism. But if what is there is a person, then notice that this parable draws exactly the picture I described before. On the one hand there are influences on him, meaning he knows that if he climbs the mountain it is hard, that deters him, that causes him not to try to climb the mountain. On the other hand, the direction of the valley naturally causes him or attracts him to go down that way because there it is easy—you lose potential energy, it is comfortable and easy. But that means there is influence; it is not like the ball and the water, where it dictates your behavior. And why? Because a person, unlike a ball or water, can decide that he climbs the mountain even though it is high. Therefore, he cannot decide that it will not be hard for him. Those are prices given to him by the surroundings. But he can decide that he takes those prices upon himself and does it anyway. Meaning, the terrain influences what the person will do, but does not dictate what he will do. That is basically the claim. What is the parable, what is the lesson? The lesson is—now I’m going to insert all the examples I gave earlier into this hiker framework, and from here on I’ll use it, so this is an important point. Because what I want to claim is basically the following. Suppose we have a collection of influences, like I said before—even the libertarian accepts this—both internal influences: genetics, brain structure, whatever, traits I was born with or traits that are in me; and external influences: education, environment, and the like. All these influences, the determinist claims, determine what I will do. And the libertarian does not deny their existence; he claims that they create the topographic map within which I operate, in the parable I gave earlier. Meaning the mountains, the valleys, the saddles, the hills, all the things I described earlier represent the collection of influences on me, internal and external. Quantify all of it, weigh all of it, and in the end it creates some kind of environment that says to me: it is worth going this way. It pulls me to go there because it is a valley, it is easier for me to go there. It deters me from going there because there it is a mountain, so it is not worth going there. And therefore it creates on me some series or collection of influences that try to pull me or stop me from going in various directions. That is what represents the totality of all influences, both the external ones—brain plasticity—and genetics, the internal influences. All these influences together, I claim, in the libertarian view are not the person; they are the environment within which he acts. Who is the person himself? The person himself is the person who walks on top of this terrain, and he can decide whether to go with the terrain—meaning to go toward the lower directions like the ball, like the water, and avoid the big climbs—or not. He can decide that he is going up the incline and not just sliding down the descent. So this is basically the third model I talked about. This is an action, this is a picture in which there are influences on me, but they are influences that do not determine what I will do, they only influence. I take them into account, but in the end I decide what I do according to my own considerations. That is basically the picture of libertarianism. From this we can understand two things, two implications of the debate between determinism and libertarianism. One implication concerns the question of who the person is. The determinist, in a certain sense, is basically claiming that the person is nothing but the collection of influences, the collection of what the influences produced. The topographic map is the person—that is, in the lesson of the parable. The fact that there is a little ball rolling there adds nothing to the picture. The terrain gives me all the information. There is nothing in the ball that is not in the terrain. Meaning, adding the ball into this game only expresses the fact that there are actions, but it does not determine what the character of the actions will be. The character of the actions is determined completely by the environment, or what I called the environment; and therefore for the determinist this thing is not an environment—for the determinist, this is the person. Whereas for the libertarian, this thing is an environment, and this whole environment influences the person from all directions, both internal environment and external environment. It is not me; it is the periphery within which I act. “Environment” not in the sense that it is external or internal—both the external and the internal are environment—but I myself am the one who acts under these influences and decides what to do, whether to respond to them or not respond to them, what to do. And in that sense there is a different perspective here on the question of who the person is. It is not only a question of how he behaves, but who the person is. Is there something else in us besides the collection of influences, or are we basically nothing but that collection of influences in question? So beyond the question of determinism and libertarianism, there is also a different perspective here on what a person is. I do not think it is right to tie this automatically to materialism and dualism—that is, to the question whether everything is matter or not—because one can be a determinist, I discussed this in the opening lesson, one can be a dualist determinist. Meaning, a person can be non-materialist, believe in the existence of spirit or spiritual elements in reality, but still be a determinist—meaning, say that those elements too do not act freely but according to some laws or circumstances that dictate what they will do. There is no logical obstacle to holding such a view or such a picture, and therefore I do not think it is right to identify the environment I talked about earlier with the material dimension. A psychological environment is also an environment in my eyes. The person is not his psychology either. Meaning, my psychology is not me. My psychology describes the environment within which I act—the system of drives and pressures and what influences me—but in the end I make a decision. Because if psychology is the description of me myself, we are back to a deterministic picture, because that basically means that this pattern within which I move dictates what I will do. If the psychologist could predict—if, say, he had full information; psychology today does not have full information, but let’s say theoretically we finished all psychological research, we have complete information. Okay? Can this ultimate psychologist predict with certainty in advance what I will do? My claim is no. Why? Not because we lack psychological knowledge. Very often people attribute it to the fact that psychology is complicated and we don’t know everything, we haven’t yet finished researching the field. I claim—that is certainly true—but beyond that, even when we finish researching everything, let’s assume that will happen someday, what we will still discover is the person’s environment, what the whole set of influences does to him; but in the end, when you ask yourself what he will do, it is not enough to know what the environment is—you have to wait and see what he chooses or how he decides to relate to those environmental pressures. And so this also casts psychological analyses of all kinds in a completely different light. Psychological analyses—the imperfection of psychology, and this is one of the great understatements I’ve heard lately—the imperfection of psychology does not stem only from the fact that our psychological information is incomplete, but from the fact that psychology does not deal with the person. Psychology deals with the environment within which the person acts, in this case the internal environment, but the environment within which he acts, the system of pressures and drives. In the end, that is the essence of humanistic psychology, I think. Humanistic psychology says that in the end your environment is not you. You can decide what you do with your environment even if the environment is given. Of course your actions can also later change the environment; you have an effect on your own psychology. What you decide to do can somewhat change your psychological structure. But in the end it really depends on you. So that is one implication of the debate between determinism and libertarianism. The second implication concerns the perspective on the axis of time. From the determinist’s point of view, looking backward along the time axis and looking forward along the time axis look the same; it is just a technical matter whether you are looking backward or forward. It just so happens that we are built in such a way that we have knowledge of the past and not of the future. Why? Because we have already experienced the past, so that knowledge is imprinted in us. Meaning, on the conceptual level there could be some trans-temporal being—think of the Holy One, blessed be He, in this context—who can know the future just as much as the past. After all, it doesn’t really matter; everything is predetermined. You know, even if He does not know the future, He can take the present circumstances, do a full calculation of the outcomes, and arrive at the conclusion of what will be in the future, even if He does not see the future directly—He can calculate it. Therefore, in principle there is no difference between the future and the past; both are completely fixed. The fact that we do not have that information is just because we are built in such a way that the information accumulated in us is only the information we have experienced. But future information also exists in some sense, in some place and time; it is just not accessible to us. That’s all. Let me maybe give you a nice example of this. There is a very famous letter Albert Einstein wrote, a letter of condolence to the family of a friend of his named Besso. He had been with him at the Polytechnic in Switzerland, in Bern. And when he died, Einstein wrote a condolence letter to the family. I’ll read you a passage. He writes like this: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” That is the deterministic picture with respect to the time axis. Einstein is basically saying: what are you mourning? That he died? It was simply true that Besso died on February 3, 1952; that was also true in the year 2000 BCE. It was there and it was fixed there. The only difference is that at that time you did not know it was going to happen, and now you do know. So you are not mourning what happened; you are mourning the fact that you suddenly found out what happened. Because in principle you could have known this even a thousand years ago. Why weren’t you mourning then? Simply because you didn’t know. In principle you should have been mourning even without that. Okay, so this attitude toward the axis of time is the second distinction or second aspect of the difference between determinism and libertarianism. And now I want to sharpen its meaning even more, which somewhat connects the two aspects but mainly the second. In the deterministic picture, as Laplace said, if you give me a sufficiently strong computer—right, he didn’t say it like that; today I’m phrasing it in our language—if you give me a sufficiently strong computer and all the relevant data, or all the data about the world, I can tell you everything that will happen until the end of history. Ultimately it is a matter of calculation. And therefore the fact that we are sitting here today and that I am uttering this word at this moment was actually already embedded in the nature of the world at the moment of the Big Bang. That is the deterministic conception. Meaning—and then why can’t we know this in advance? Again, as I said before, because the calculation is very complicated, we have no such computer, we don’t have all the data, first of all; and second, if we had experienced it we would know it even without calculating. But since we have experienced only the past and not yet the future, we don’t know it. But that is just a technical matter. Meaning, if there is a person, if there is a being who can look at the future, or a being who has infinite computational ability and ultimate knowledge of all the details in the world, he can know the future just as he knows the past. There is no difference between the future and the past. Therefore the world basically looks like one chain, or if you like some kind of tree that starts from one point, the Big Bang, and from it all sorts of chains unfold, all of them of course dictated by the structure of the Bang itself. Each chain branches into more chains, but everything, everything, everything could in principle already have been said at the moment of the Bang. In principle it was all already latent there; there is no gap in this unfolding tree. By contrast, the libertarian says no: this tree begins at the Bang, yes, let’s say we’re talking about one chain there, so it begins at the Bang and then suddenly something jumps in, begins here. And then something jumps in and begins here and continues forward with the time axis, continues advancing with time, but new chains are born. In the deterministic picture there is one chain from the Big Bang until the end of history. But according to the libertarian picture, there are points in this tree where new chains begin. They do not emerge from the previous stages of the tree. These are points at which something new is born. What are these points? They are the points at which a person chose something. Meaning, the moment a person chose something, that is an action not caused by previous causes. It is not located on the chain of unfoldings of this deterministic tree. Therefore it actually starts a new chain. From the moment a person did some action, from there on it has consequences in the world, of course causal consequences, and another chain is born. But of course all the time chains are suddenly being born out of nothing, and each such chain can continue and affect things in principle infinitely—but not everything comes out of one point. It is not a proper graph. In graph theory, that is—it is not that all these chains emerge from one point and unfold from it or are affected or dictated by it. There are beginnings of chains at one point in time or another. So that is basically the libertarian perspective as opposed to the determinist one. And as a result, an important implication follows, or several important implications. The libertarian basically claims there is an essential difference between the past and the future. We know the past not only because we experienced it. Or alternatively: we do not fail to know the future only because we have not yet experienced it, but because there is as yet nothing there to experience. Right—something that has not yet come into existence cannot be acquired, because there is nothing there to acquire. Not because there is some problem in the laws of acquisition. The laws of acquisition are fine, the act of acquisition is wonderful; there is just nothing there to acquire through that act. So here too, the view of the future in the libertarian picture basically says that I do not know the future not only because I have not experienced it, but because there is not yet anything there to experience. The future does not yet exist; it has not yet been born. Einstein in his letter said: the future is already somewhere out there in our spacetime; we just haven’t gotten there yet. It’s not time that flows; what flows is us along the time axis. But the world, the world of events, the event line according to what Einstein says, the world-line, exists—it lies there. We merely wander along it and each time encounter more and more events, and thereby turn them from future into past. But they were lying there before too; we just didn’t see them. In the libertarian picture, there is no continuation to the line yet. I create the continuation of the line at every moment. When I choose something, I create the continuation of the line; I do not discover a continuation that already existed there. This is a completely different perspective. One has to understand that this is something very, very significant. Let me maybe give an example of the implication of this. One of the troubling problems in the context of free will, certainly if we are speaking in a religious context, is the question of divine knowledge and free choice. Right, what Maimonides asks in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance. Maimonides says there that if a person has free choice, how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what will happen? Or alternatively, if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance everything that will happen because He is omnipotent, how can it be that we have free choice? After all, He knows in advance what will happen. In this matter there are explanations saying: the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time. And since He is above time, He can know what happens in the future. We have a limitation; we have not experienced it, we do not yet know what will happen in the future. But the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent; He can see what will happen in the future, and then it turns out that He sees what will happen in the future, but that does not dictate what will happen. I conduct myself as though I am choosing freely, everything is fine. He just knows in advance what I will do, because He knows how to skip across the time axis and see what will happen in a time that has not yet occurred, a future time. My claim is twofold. First, it seems to me that this explanation—and it is a very common explanation in religious thought, a very common one, perhaps the most common—this explanation actually seems to answer a completely different question. It answers the question of how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtains the information even though that information exists only in the future. So they tell me: He is above the time axis. But that is not the question Maimonides asks. That is a question about God. I am asking a question about me. If the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what will happen, how can it be that when I reach the point of decision, I can freely choose whether to go right or left? After all, the Holy One, blessed be He, already knows in advance whether I will go right or left—it doesn’t matter which, but whatever He knows in advance. So that means that when I reach the junction I do not really have the option to choose; it is already known in advance which way I will go. Therefore the question is not how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtained the information. So you tell me: He is above the time axis. My question is: assuming He has the information, how can it still make sense, how can it still be grasped, that I have free choice. I can go right, I can go left. If I go left and He knew in advance that it would be right, then it turns out He was mistaken—He is not omnipotent. If He knows with certainty what I will do and it cannot be otherwise, that is not free choice. And to that question, saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the time axis does not answer anything. Because that question is about me. How do I have free choice if the information already exists with the Holy One, blessed be He? So what do I care that He is above the time axis? If the question is about Him—how does He obtain the information—then you tell me He is above the time axis. But if the question is: once He has the information, He is above the time axis, He got the information—now the question is okay, the information exists with Him, how can you say that I have free choice? But I’ll say more than that. Even the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the time axis and therefore obtains the information is problematic. It is problematic because that claim assumes the deterministic view of the time axis, what I described earlier. Because it assumes that the information already exists there in the future and all that is needed is just to retrieve it. And we as human beings do not have the ability to retrieve future information, even though it already exists there, because we are limited and only have the experiences we have already gone through; we cannot know something we have not gone through. But it is still there, as Einstein wrote in his letter. It is there—we just have no access to it. So here you tell me: the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the time axis; all the information is accessible to Him, He can obtain it even though it is in the future. That I can understand if the picture of the world is deterministic. But if I look at the time axis in the libertarian picture, my claim is that there is nothing there ahead of us; that continuation has not yet been created. When I make my choice, only then will that future be created. So even if the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the time axis, there is nothing there for Him to obtain. The problem is not how He obtains future information. My claim is that future information does not exist. It is created only when I get there and make my choice. Therefore I claim that even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know what I will choose in the future. And my answer to Maimonides’ dilemma—Maimonides says, how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent, knows everything in advance, and at the same time I have free choice? My claim is: that’s right, it really can’t be. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance. Meaning, there are those whose proposed solution is: correct, these two things cannot go together, therefore we do not have free choice. They infer from this a deterministic conclusion. For example, in Protestant thought that is the Calvinist conclusion, Calvin and Luther—that is basically the conclusion they reached: that the world is deterministic and the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, and therefore we have no free choice and everything is deterministic. I claim that the conclusion is this: true, these things do not fit together, because that theory that He is above time and all those things does not really solve the problem; therefore one must give up His prior knowledge. He does not know in advance. Why is that not an impairment of His omnipotence? Doesn’t that contradict His omnipotence? So my claim is that to say that some being is omnipotent means that it can do everything that can be conceived, everything that is defined. But something that has no meaning, that is not defined at all—even an omnipotent being cannot do that, and that does not mean it is not omnipotent. For example, can the Holy One, blessed be He, make a wall that stops every projectile? Seemingly yes, He is omnipotent. Can He make a projectile that penetrates every wall? A shell that penetrates every wall? Seemingly yes, He is omnipotent. Can He make both? Obviously not. Because if He made a projectile that penetrates every wall, then there is no wall that stops all projectiles, including that one. And conversely, if there is a wall that stops all projectiles, then there is no projectile that penetrates all walls. So the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make both things, that is obvious. Maybe one of them yes, I don’t know, but both of them certainly not. Does that mean He is not omnipotent? No. It means that such a state is simply not logically defined. It is self-contradictory. It is like asking whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a round triangle. He cannot make a round triangle because there is no such thing as a round triangle. Not because there is some limitation in His ability, but because there is no such thing. It is like asking whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can do blah blah blah blah blah. Not say “blah blah blah,” but do what the blah-blah means, the meaning of the blah-blah. That is a meaningless question; it cannot be answered. I can tell you that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do that—but do what? You never told me what. The same thing with a round triangle. A round triangle is like blah blah blah. There is no such thing. What is a round triangle? It is just a string of words. There is no thing there that He could do. Not that this is no blemish in His omnipotence—He is omnipotent. Everything that can be done He can do. Everything that exists He can do, everything that is possible He can do. But something impossible—He cannot do it because it is impossible, not because it is a deficiency in His omnipotence. My favorite example in this context is the example of Puss in Boots. Right, Puss in Boots—the miller’s son inherits a cat and is totally despondent, he has no property, he is dirt poor, doesn’t know what to do. One day he goes bathing in the river, folds his clothes on the side, and the king passes there with his carriage and his daughter. The cat goes to the king and tells him: listen, sir, the count who is bathing here in the river had his clothes stolen. Perhaps you would be willing to give him some royal garment of yours, because it is not proper for a count to go without clothes. Fine, the king says: of course, we won’t leave a count without clothes, and gives him some garment to wear. Then the cat suggests that the king come to his master the count’s palace—which is the poor miller’s son, no palace and nothing of the sort. So the king says of course. The cat runs ahead and gets to the terrible sorcerer’s palace, and invites the king to come after him. He gets there before the king, enters the terrible sorcerer’s palace. The sorcerer sees the cat coming in and immediately turns himself into a lion. The cat gets very frightened and says: wait, wait, before you devour me, can you also turn into a mouse, not only a lion? So the sorcerer says: of course, does this—and turns into a mouse. Then the cat devours him and the story ends, and the king arrived and they got married and lived happily ever after. What is the problem in this story? The question is whether the terrible sorcerer can really turn himself into a mouse. Because if he can turn himself into a mouse, then he is not really a terrible sorcerer. Let me give you the lesson: can the Holy One, blessed be He, turn Himself into a human being? If He turns Himself into a human being, I’ll shoot Him in the head, and then there will be no Holy One, blessed be He. Alternatively, you can say: He won’t die even if I shoot Him in the head—but then He did not turn into a human being, because a human being who is shot in the head dies. Like the wall and the projectile, right? These are just different examples of the same point. So what does it mean? That the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot really turn Himself into a human being. That is obvious; He is a necessary being. The moment He turns Himself into a human being, it contradicts His essence. What does it mean that it contradicts His essence? That the demand that He turn into a human being is really a demand that He disappear and create in His place something else—a human being. But a necessary being cannot disappear from the world. And when I say “cannot,” I do not mean there is something lacking in His ability, that He is not omnipotent. Since the disappearance of the necessary being from the world—a necessary being that is not there—is like a round triangle. Knowing information that does not exist about the future is exactly the same thing; that too is a round triangle. Therefore, to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows information about a person’s free choice in the future is like saying He can make a round triangle. He does not know that information—not because there is something defective in His omnipotence, not because He is not omnipotent, but because that information does not exist. There is nothing there to know. It is something that has not yet come into existence. Since that is so, it does not help that He is above time and omnipotent. Being above time may allow Him perhaps to obtain future information, but if future information does not exist, there is nothing there to obtain. But all this applies only to information of that type—information that is the result of human choice, what a person will choose. Physical information, say, deterministic information about how some river will behave at a certain time in the future—that the Holy One, blessed be He, can know in two ways. He can try to foresee it, to look into the future and see what will happen with that river in ten years, and of course He can also do the scientific calculation, and since He has all the data and knows the laws of nature completely, He can make the calculation and know by calculation what will happen in the future. In this context there is another favorite example, also connected in a certain sense to the Exodus from Egypt, about Moses our teacher going out to walk there in Egypt, and he sees an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, “and he turned this way and that way, and struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.” Rashi there gives two explanations of what it means, “and he turned this way and that way.” The first explanation is that he saw no one was looking so they wouldn’t catch him. The second explanation is that he actually looked into the future and saw that no one would come from this man who would convert, and therefore it was not worthwhile to leave him alive, so he killed him. Now the question that always comes to me when I read this Rashi is: what guarantee is there in this prophecy of Moses our teacher, in Moses’ seeing the future? I could see that too. Once you kill him, of course no one will come from him who converts—you killed him. How will anyone come from him who converts? You didn’t see the future; you brought it about with your own hands. The moment you killed him, you created the future result that no one would come from him who converts. So to know that no one will come from him in the future who converts is not to know the future; it is to create the future with your own hands. I could do that too. I could have seen that no one would come from him who converts and kill him. Obviously—because if I kill him, no one will come from him. That is not prophecy. So what is it? Obviously the intention of this midrash—Rashi brings a midrash—the intention of this midrash is that Moses our teacher did not look into the future. Moses our teacher looked at the present. Moses our teacher looked at the man at his root, in his psychology, in his spiritual structure, and asked himself: what can come out of this fellow? According to what I see here with my spiritual X-ray, says Moses our teacher, nothing useful will come out of him, and therefore he killed him. He did not look at the future; he looked at the present. But this look at the present can really be relevant only to events that proceed deterministically, not to human choices. Here he looked at a person. Maybe the person will repent? Maybe he will reconsider? Absolutely right. That Moses our teacher cannot see. As I said earlier, even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot see what a person will choose. But Moses our teacher does not need to judge the person based on his ultimate end; Moses judged him according to what he was then. And according to what he was then, nothing useful could come out of him unless he chose otherwise and repented. But a person is punished according to his present condition, not according to what he may become in the future. Therefore when Moses our teacher says that nothing good will come from him, he does not mean to give a prophecy about the future. It is an indication of his present condition—that if his present condition remains as it is, nothing useful will come from him, and therefore he kills him. He kills him because of his present condition, not because of a future event. This is an example of the second kind of view of the future, which is a view that calculates the future, not one that sees directly what will happen; deterministic events can simply be calculated. But of course this cannot be done with the events we are talking about here, because they are events of human choice, not deterministic events. Therefore even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot see what will happen there. And I think this is an implication of what I described earlier as the difference between viewing the past and viewing the future. According to the libertarian, the difference is an essential one. We know the past not only because we experienced it, but because it is already there. Even if we did not know it—events in the past that we do not know about because we did not experience them, details in history that I do not know—still obviously they were there, right? It is only my lack of access; the information exists, I just do not know it. But what I do not know about the future is not only because the thing is inaccessible to me, but because there is nothing there that could be accessible to me. The future event has not yet happened; the choice creates it. This is exactly the chain I spoke about in the picture from the Big Bang to us, where in the libertarian picture new chains suddenly arise out of nothing. If you look at it from the point of view of the Big Bang, you will not see them at all. These chains are not expected in advance to come into existence; they are created the moment a person makes some choice. At that moment in time, the chain is created. Before that it did not exist. Okay, I think we’ll stop here. I’m going to open the microphones, and I ask only that even after I open them, everyone should keep their microphone muted, and only someone who wants to speak should unmute, because otherwise there will be all kinds of problems. Okay, I opened them. Anyone who wants is welcome to comment, to ask. There are also questions here in the chat, but it’s a little hard to deal with the chats in parallel with speaking out loud. They ask me: what about prophecy? So I’ll say briefly—maybe actually I’ll answer a few of the questions they asked here in the chat, because they really are natural questions that I didn’t get to answer. First question: what about the case of Hezekiah in the midrash—right, Hezekiah, sorry—where Hezekiah refrained from marrying because he knew that a wicked son would come from him? Right, “what have you to do with the hidden matters of the Merciful One?” So there I would make the same claim: Hezekiah saw that according to the present circumstances that is what was destined to come from him, but he cannot know whether that person would not choose to be righteous. Therefore there is no real certain look at the future here. There is some optimal prediction about the future, which the Holy One, blessed be He, can also make. So Hezekiah could do that too, and a prophet can do that too. And this is one of the questions people ask generally: what about prophecy, someone asks me here. My answer is the same answer. And this is what the Shelah writes in the introduction to his book Shnei Luchot HaBrit, in the section called Beit HaBechirah—there are ten “houses” there. In the section called Beit HaBechirah, the Shelah argues that prophets too do not know the future with certainty. If a person will choose to do something, it cannot be known in advance. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know it in advance. Therefore He cannot reveal it to a prophet either. And so all a prophet can prophesy is the same kind of prophecy that Moses our teacher made regarding the Egyptian. Prophecy is never a direct look into the future. Prophecy is a calculation of what is expected to happen, unless a person chooses some surprising alternative. Okay? Therefore it is only an optimal calculation, not really ultimate knowledge of the future. “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted”—I say exactly, that is what they are asking me: after all, “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted.” Usually people bring a proof from there, but it is the opposite. What is written there is exactly what I am saying. On the one hand everything is foreseen, and nevertheless this does not contradict the fact that permission is granted. Why? Because in principle if everything is foreseen, then permission cannot be granted. What they mean is: everything is foreseen except for the things that depend on the permission granted to us to choose. Those things are of course not foreseen, and depend on whoever sees them. Okay? I think with that I more or less answered. Good. One more question I didn’t answer, and then we’ll move to anyone who wants to comment orally: what about a ninety-nine percent influence? If a driver comes to a red light, he can keep going; or if an ordinary person can kill another person—if a person chooses, then that’s the end of society. Okay, what can you do? Fortunately not everyone chooses to kill. But that is true. We’ll get later to Maimonides in chapter 6 of the Laws of Repentance, where that is really the topic under discussion: if the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed that the Egyptians would enslave the people of Israel, to what extent do the Egyptians have free choice? That is chapter 6 of the Laws of Choice—of Repentance—and that is exactly the question, the next question we will deal with. The questions we will deal with. Yes, like Waze—I agree with that parable. It gives me a prediction of what is expected, how I’m expected to arrive, but if people choose differently, that prediction can change. One final question they ask here: like what the Holy One, blessed be He, says regarding Pharaoh. This is connected to the discussion I said I would have in the next lesson. It is possible that in principle the Holy One, blessed be He, removes a person’s freedom of choice, and then of course He can know what the person will do, and then of course He can also prophesy or give a prophet that information. Obviously. I’m talking about a situation in which a person has choice. If the Holy One, blessed be He, takes away his choice, then there is no problem, of course. In principle even Laplace could have done that. If you have a sufficiently strong computer and all the data, you can know what a person will do if his choice has been removed. Okay, now if there’s anything to ask out loud. That was the chats. Ask out loud and not in the chat; now that the microphones are open, it’s preferable.