Reason and Emotion, Lesson 2

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] says, clearly not everything that everyone does is automatically permitted. But what everyone thinks is right—that is a permission. That’s not the same thing. The fact that everyone fails is something else, but the fact that everyone thinks that this is what’s correct—that’s different. Everyone thinks that this level of clarification is reasonable for making decisions, even in capital cases. Fine, that’s what the person did. It’s like the responsum of the Radbaz; I think I mentioned it. About compulsion in one’s beliefs. Radbaz says that if there is someone who thought—or at least claimed—that the people thought Moses our rabbi was the Holy One, blessed be He. Meaning, that he was God. So there is some kind of very deep heresy here, and the question is whether to throw this miserable fellow into a pit and not pull him out. So Radbaz says, fine, he was a heretic, but he was compelled by his understanding. What do you want from him? That’s what he thinks. Meaning, if that’s what he thinks, then he is coerced. Now really this is very delicate; the diagnosis here is very difficult. I think the distinction exists, the distinction between an animal soul and a divine soul. The diagnosis of when we are operating in this mode and when we are operating in that mode is a very difficult question. Even self-diagnosis, I think, is not always easy to make, or very often not easy to make. Certainly regarding other people. Whether someone got carried away or not—we are not ministering angels. But still, I think it’s important to be aware of this distinction. Now I want to—up to this point this was just a summary—I want to continue. What is the actual meaning of this in more practical terms? I want maybe to describe the process of our choosing, how we conduct ourselves in the world, by way of some parable that I also spoke about once before; in the book The Science of Freedom I develop this more fully. When a person—obviously a person is under the influence of a great many impulses, drives, influences of different kinds, internal and external, from every possible direction. Genetics too is an influence. So what does that mean? Usually we understand that a person’s decision is the sum total of all the influences, that it is the weighted result of the influences, and in the final analysis, after they struggle among themselves, in the end that determines what I will do. This is completely parallel to the picture I described with the good inclination and the evil inclination. And parallel to that common kindergarten mistake about the struggle between the good inclination and the evil inclination, here too there is a mistake—or at least if you believe in free will; unless you’re a determinist. But if you believe in free will, then here too there is a mistake. Why? Because the human being is not the sum total of the influences. The sum total of the influences determines where the impulse will take him, but now he has to decide whether he lets go of the reins and allows the impulse to lead him, or whether he holds the reins and decides what to do with it. That decision is something additional beyond the sum total of the influences. And the parable for this is a person walking around on some topographical terrain, with mountains and hills and valleys and saddles and all kinds of different landforms; the ground cover too, really—everything affects him. And suppose he is standing at a certain point, say a saddle, then there are two sides going down and two sides going up—or let’s say he is on a slope, not a saddle. There is one side that goes down and one side that goes up; of course you can also walk sideways along the same contour line. There are always four directions in the world; a plane has four directions. So he has to make a decision. Now the mountain in this parable describes something that is very hard for him to do in terms of his impulses, drives, or emotions. Meaning, his emotions tell him: go there. That’s like the valley over there—I’ll slide down there if I let go of the reins. Meaning, if my nature takes me, or the circumstances—not only my nature, everything that affects me takes me—then I will go downward. By contrast, I can decide to climb the mountain, to go upward, even though the sum total of my impulses tells me that this is a mountain; meaning, it tells me not to go up there, it exerts a force on me downward. This topographical terrain describes the weighting of all the drives and influences acting on me: genetics, environmental influences, education, whatever you like. When you put it all together, some kind of map is formed. After everything, a certain map is formed. In that map—let’s describe it as topographical terrain—when I stand there, that map, really the potential energy or the gradients, describes where the impulses want to take me. If I were a little ball, a tiny inanimate ball, just a little spherical piece of plastic, then I would flow wherever the terrain caused me to flow, right? Why? Because a little ball acts according to the sum total of the influences. Meaning, a little ball is a physical entity, and the sum total of the influences determines what the net force acting on it is, and the net force determines where it will go. That’s a little ball. Now the question is whether a human being is a little ball. When a person stands in such a situation, usually the psychological view—the view of many people—is that a human being is basically a kind of little ball, just a complicated one. Meaning, it’s very hard to construct this terrain within which the person operates because it’s very, very complicated, but bottom line there is some such terrain. We don’t know how to draw it, but there is such a terrain. If we were to research psychology all the way to the end, we could draw every person’s terrain. Every person operates within some such terrain; we could draw the terrain, and then we could fully predict what he would do at every stage. Once his terrain is drawn—and the whole world’s too, because there are influences—we could describe what he would do at every moment. That is the psychological view. It is a view that basically says that if psychology fails to predict what you do, it’s simply because it’s complicated, that’s all; it’s only a question of complexity. If we were equipped with complete psychological knowledge and full diagnostic ability—those are two different things: knowing all the principles of psychology, that’s the scientific knowledge, and knowing everything about the person standing before us, meaning having full diagnostic ability—if we had the tools to do both of those things, we could say exactly what every person would do at every moment, in every given set of circumstances. Therefore, from this perspective—a deterministic perspective, basically—this is a perspective that sees psychology’s failures, or the uncertainty of psychological analysis, as resulting from complexity. It’s only a question of complexity, that’s all. Meaning, basically just because we don’t have all the knowledge, either diagnostic or theoretical, but we don’t have all the knowledge. By contrast, in the libertarian conception, the conception that advocates free will, it says that a human being is not a little ball. And basically, in the previous conception, psychology in relation to a human being does what physics does in relation to a little ball: it calculates all the forces acting on it, and then you know what it will do, you know what its trajectory will be. The same applies to a human being in the previous conception, the deterministic conception. By contrast, the libertarian says: that’s true of a little ball, but it is not true of a human being. Why? Because a human being can stand on a given topographical terrain and decide to climb the mountain and not roll down into the valley.

[Speaker G] And that decision—does it also arise from some…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no—that’s the claim. No, it doesn’t arise from anything. After you decide, then you’ll arrive somewhere; it’s a decision directed toward a goal. It does not arise from something else. Because if it arises from something else, arises in the causal sense, then it’s not a decision; then the cause did it.

[Speaker C] No, again,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then it also wasn’t a mountain. Yes, it’s the same thing, it’s saying the same thing. Okay? That’s exactly what this distinction does: my decision did not arise from some influence on me, because if it were an influence on me then it wouldn’t have been a mountain I decided to climb, it would have been the valley. Sometimes it’s hard to slide into the valley; there may be another respect in which it’s difficult. But bottom line, after you total up all the influences, it’s the valley. Meaning, I will get there if I let go of the reins, if I let my nature take me. Okay? Now this really means—and this is the point that’s hard to understand in libertarianism, in the conception of free choice—that this decision does not arise from impulses, this decision does not arise from any cause external to it. It is a decision out of nothing. You won’t be able to explain it. No psychologist who looks at this will be able to explain why I decided this way. He can explain what the impulses were that might have led me to decide this way, but ultimately the decision I made is not within the psychologist’s mandate. The psychologist is responsible for the scientific parts of the decision, for the terrain. He can explain what influences acted on me. Very often of course I will act in line with those influences, and then he will also be able to predict or explain what I did. But there will be cases where not; there will be cases in which I decide to do otherwise, and then the psychologist will not be able to explain it even if he has complete knowledge and knows me through and through. Even if everything is correct, he still won’t be able to explain it. Why won’t he be able to explain it? Because explanation always relies on principles; I explain something in light of certain principles. But here there are no principles. I make this decision because that’s what I decided; that’s the value I decided is right. And I act accordingly. It is a decision out of nothing. We once spoke—or more than once, I think—about the three elections in Switzerland and in Syria and in ancient Assyria. Ancient Syria, today’s Syria is the same thing, except there are no elections.

[Speaker B] There are elections, and they’re armed.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, elections with ballot boxes. So the claim is that circumstances dictate what I do even if ostensibly no one tells me what to do. But when circumstances dictate it, that’s determinism. Meaning, freedom is where, given the circumstances, you still cannot know what I will do. But even that still isn’t enough to define freedom, because it could also be randomness. Randomness too is a situation where, given all the present circumstances, I still can’t know what will happen in the next moment. Randomness—and people very often get confused about this—raise arguments against free will that implicitly identify it with randomness. That’s not correct. Randomness only means that given the terrain, I draw lots and that’s how I decide. But I am talking about something else: given the terrain, I make a decision. Making a decision is not a lottery. Where is the difference? It seems to me one can formulate it this way; I presented this in the book too. In randomness there is no rationale at all for what you did; it’s simply arbitrary. By contrast, in choice there is a rationale, except that it does not act on you causally but teleologically. Meaning, you decide to do something in order to achieve a certain goal or value, and not because there was something else. We often use the phrase, “because I’m democratic I did such-and-such.” The word “because” here is misleading. Rather: in order to achieve democracy I did such-and-such, not because. Meaning, I decided that my value is democracy and therefore I did such-and-such. Democracy did not cause me to do it; democracy is a value I chose, and it dictated what I would do—dictated in an intellectual sense, not in the sense of psychological causality, not in the sense that it caused me to do it. Therefore this is a teleological explanation, a purposive explanation, not a causal explanation. In randomness there is no explanation at all. In determinism there is a causal explanation. In choice there is a teleological explanation. I think that is what defines these three mechanisms. So when I talk about free will, I am talking about the third: choice, not randomness and not determinism. And when I stand on this topographical terrain I make some decision that cannot be pinned on anything prior, but it isn’t arbitrary. It’s not that I make decisions and I’m like in quantum theory: even though you have a mountain, maybe a ball will decide to climb the mountain. It will suddenly climb the mountain; that’s legitimate in quantum theory, it’s legitimate there even for inanimate objects, but there it is randomness. Meaning, the claim is that even mountains are mountains only sometimes, not always—let’s put it somewhat crudely. Okay, but here I’m talking about a mountain that is always a mountain, not a mountain only sometimes, and only I decide to climb it despite the fact that it is a mountain. Now sometimes it’s terribly hard for me—not sometimes, it’s very hard for me—to climb it because it is a mountain. Fine, but still the decision is in my hands. The great wonder is that psychology can nevertheless, I think at least, work. I think very often it doesn’t work, but at least in principle it can work. It can work because not only randomness creates statistics; choice also creates statistics. Meaning, suppose we are in a situation where there is a mountain and a valley, and suppose this is a situation where, according to the psychologists’ assessment, seventy percent will go down into the valley and thirty percent will go up the mountain. So if we take many people and place them in such a situation and see what they decide, each such decision is not a random lottery, it is a choice. On the face of it, I would not have thought that it would obey some statistical rule such that you could describe it by a scientific law. But perhaps—at least that’s what psychologists claim—you can do that. Meaning, there really is a statistical description even though the individual event is not a random event but an event of choice. And still I can say that seventy percent of people in such a situation will do such-and-such. And broadly speaking, the law of large numbers will work here, even though when each person chooses it is not like throwing dice—throwing dice is not such a good example either, never mind—but it is not like a situation in which each action separately is random. Each action separately is an act of choice. On the face of it, why should statistics work on a collection of actions that are not random actions but actions of choice? But apparently it works there too. There are statistics on this plane as well. There is a dispute between Maimonides and the Raavad in chapter 6 of the laws of repentance. Maimonides asks there: why were the Egyptians punished? This is somewhat related to what we discussed earlier. Why were the Egyptians punished? The Holy One, blessed be He, said at the covenant between the pieces that ועבדום ועינו אותם ארבע מאות שנה (“they will enslave them and oppress them for four hundred years”), and afterward also וגם את הגוי אשר יעבודו דן אנוכי (“and also the nation they shall serve I will judge”). Already at the covenant between the pieces the Holy One, blessed be He, said He would punish the Egyptians, while He Himself says that this is what they will do. So Maimonides asks: why does He punish them? Maimonides says that He did not decree upon each and every Egyptian that he must enslave Israel; He only said that in general they would enslave Israel. The Raavad argues against Maimonides that this is childish talk—I think that’s his expression—things a child would say. Why? What do you mean? If each and every one chooses, then how do you know? Maybe all of them will choose the good? How can you know in advance that they will choose evil? And what Maimonides answers to this question is what I said before: the law of large numbers works on a collection of choices too, not only on random things. Even if each person individually can choose whether to enslave Israel or not, the Holy One, blessed be He, as one who has complete psychological or diagnostic knowledge, can say: yes, I tell you that the Egyptians will enslave Israel, because the balance is such that, say, seventy percent will enslave and thirty percent will not. There is no chance that all the Egyptians will choose not to enslave, even though each and every one has free choice and in theory can choose not to enslave. The law of large numbers works even in such a situation, although this is a collection of choices and not a collection of random processes. That is basically what Maimonides says, and the Raavad apparently does not accept that. Meaning, there is some debate here. The debate is whether statistics can work on a collection of choices and not only on a collection of random actions. And Maimonides says yes: even on actions of choice I can do statistics. And psychology—to the extent that it’s worth anything, I always speak cautiously because I’m not so…

[Speaker B] It’s not necessarily connected specifically to psychology as a science; also psychology on the everyday level, meaning—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: the question whether we can assess things—I think in some sense yes. Yes. And therefore the law of large numbers, or statistics, really is a tool that can serve us even with respect to human choices. Although of course others will say that this itself is what shows it’s not true, that human beings have no choice; rather, the description determines what they will do. Fine, that’s basically good—so those are exactly the two pictures set against each other. Maybe let’s give an example that illustrates the issue, this debate about…

[Speaker C] Let me ask something. The point is, take the slope. So you say the statistics can say thirty percent will choose to go up, seventy percent will choose to go down. But that’s not it. The question is how many will choose at all. Some people won’t choose, and therefore there is a bias of the slope.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but there are still statistics about that, even though that is a result… What if the decision whether to choose or not choose is itself also a choice? That’s actually the only choice, as I said earlier, because after all you have no way to choose evil; usually that doesn’t happen. You choose not to choose, and evil follows automatically. Therefore really only there is there choice.

[Speaker C] So what do you do? You run an experiment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You see that in most cases, in seventy percent—

[Speaker C] of the cases people choose, they go after the…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Such an experiment proves nothing.

[Speaker C] Why does it prove nothing?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean? I’ll run an experiment: I go outside and check all the horses, okay? And I see that seventy percent of the horses I saw are brown. So I infer that seventy percent of the horses in the world are brown. That’s only true if it’s a representative sample. Right. And only if the distribution between brown and not-brown is random. Right. Now you have to assume that with respect to human beings too. Right. But if that assumption is not true—if you run an experiment and seventy percent of people choose to go down and thirty percent choose to go up—you won’t be able to say about the next person that there’s a seventy percent chance he will go down and thirty percent chance he will go up. Right. So that’s what I’m saying. But that is the assumption: that statistics also works on actions of choice.

[Speaker C] I’m only willing to say that this doesn’t mean thirty percent choose to go up and seventy percent choose to go down.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, that is the choice—they choose to choose.

[Speaker C] Sixty percent choose to choose, and some of them go down and some go up, and another forty percent choose not to choose.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Although even someone who chooses to choose can choose to go down and not go up. Fine, it’s more… it’s not exactly thirty and seventy, but it reflects the choice. Fine, that’s… okay, so that’s the picture in general.

[Speaker G] Now those who decide not to choose will fall on the slope anyway. That’s what I’m saying. Not automatically.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You have to be careful with the physical analogy. Meaning, this thing is an analogy. On the psychological slope you can say that the slope itself is only a statistical slope. Meaning, it is not deterministic as in physics. Fine, no?

[Speaker G] Like balls that have personality? A plastic ball with personality. I get it. The Holy One, blessed be He—this is supposedly in what…

[Speaker B] Supposedly in psychology it ought not to be statistical at depth, meaning… okay, leave it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, I think there is a nice demonstration of this issue in the discussion of whether human beings have free choice or not. This discussion got a serious boost at the end of the previous century, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, with the experiments of Benjamin Libet, an American neurologist, who himself was a libertarian. Meaning, he himself thought that human beings have free will, and he ran a very interesting experiment. He says he tried to test it experimentally, for the first time—

[Speaker C] First time, as best he could, to prove the opposite.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, he was the first to think of the possibility of scientifically testing the question of determinism. It’s interesting, because the experiment is very simple. It doesn’t require very sophisticated technologies, but…

[Speaker E] You can’t scan a brain?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, you can scan a brain, but EEG already existed, yes, it existed earlier. It’s a fairly crude scan, not something… not what we have today with fMRI or something like that. In any case, he says that he sat a person in front of a clock running very fast, because you need high time resolution, the clock is running fast, and he tells him: there’s a button here on the table. He says to him: press whenever you decide. But as you do that, keep looking at the clock. When you decide to press, look at the clock—where was it when you decided? Not when you pressed. When you pressed, we also see when you pressed. We want you to report where the clock was when you decided to press. Okay? Fine. So he sat subjects down and documented from them, wrote down what they said. In addition, he attached electrodes to them, EEG, and those electrodes test what is called the readiness potential, that is, RP, which is some action potential, so to speak—“readiness potential” in literal translation—which appears before a person makes this decision. You can see there is some peak at a certain point that appears before you make the decision, and he checked when that peak appears. So in short, he has three pieces of data for every press: there is the datum of when this peak appeared—that he sees on the machine; there is the datum of when the person tells him he made the decision to press; and there is the datum of when he pressed, which we can observe. Okay? Now it turns out—and it’s obvious that if, say, the readiness potential appeared before the pressing, that’s obvious; a person first decides and then presses, that’s not surprising. It turns out that the readiness potential appeared before the person made the decision to press, not only before the pressing. Which means: even before he made the decision to press, I could already know that he would press. And what does that mean, basically? That he does not choose to press; his brain chooses for him. This consciousness, or awareness, that I am now choosing to press arrives after I have already decided. I as the experimenter can know that the person has decided even before he himself has actually decided, in his conscious awareness. What that means—the claim was, or the claim of others is—that this consciousness is an illusion. We in fact do not decide; our brain decides for us, and consciousness is some kind of side effect, that is, an accompanying byproduct. Meaning, afterward we live in a kind of awareness as if we have now decided, even though in fact that decision was already dictated beforehand.

[Speaker E] What basically causes that peak in the brain?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The structure of the brain, I don’t know, something happening in there. What? Random? Random, or a result of what—

[Speaker C] of what he heard in his ear, someone saying he has to press?

[Speaker E] Yes,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But not his decision.

[Speaker E] Wait, but if we assume that there is something that does influence him, then again I can claim there is free will, can’t I?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But this happens not by my will; it happens on its own.

[Speaker E] But something caused it to happen.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not you caused it. What do you mean, you caused it? You told me when you decided—that happened afterward. Your decision was afterward. You can say that I had an unconscious decision. So there were claims—one of the objections, there are many objections to this, to the results of Libet’s experiment. Judith Ronen’s son did a master’s thesis on this. Anyone who wants can read his master’s thesis; she gave it to me after I finished writing the book, or before I published it, so some of it got in, I added a few notes. But he did it in Jerusalem with Benny—I think I once told you about Benny Shannon from Jerusalem—who is a friend of a friend of mine, a psychology professor in Jerusalem. My friend was once in Bolivia on backpacking trips, and he reached some Indian tribe there who have hallucinogenic substances from plants. And the claim was that whoever comes there, no matter what culture he comes from, sees the Account of the Chariot when he takes those plants. It’s not culture-dependent; even someone who never heard of it, some non-Jew from Germany there once, as it happened—

[Speaker B] What, like as described in Ezekiel?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With four—yes, some such description, I don’t remember the details exactly, something like that. And he tried it too, and he told me as well—totally secular, even anti, not connected to any of this. But he tells me: it’s true, those are the facts. He claimed it is something in our psychology; never mind, we have something in our psychology. It doesn’t prove that the Account of the Chariot is true, yes? But that was the claim. In short, so Benny Shannon, who is his friend—

[Speaker C] It could also be that the prophet was on…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the claim of many people, just as it could be that the Rabbi of Brisk had OCD, you know, it’s the same… In any case, this is exactly the same tension: between a psychologistic explanation of human decisions or human conduct, and an explanation that says this is what they decided. It’s exactly the same thing, exactly the same tension on all these planes. I once asked Hofnung—I’m now rolling back the carpet—I once asked Hofnung how he would diagnose the Rabbi of Brisk: as OCD or fear of Heaven? Hofnung is a psychologist here in the synagogue, for those who don’t know, and he works with OCD. He even sent a few people to me here and there for various issues, because many people have compulsiveness. Questions. Questions of faith and things of that kind. So he says: talk with them a bit; you also have to give answers, not only treat them. Meaning, there are also questions, and they are good questions. The fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, as they say.

[Speaker C] So the best thing is to give answers?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes—no, what I’m saying is, here it won’t help to give only the Torah answers, but you also have to give answers as part of the… In any case, so we talked about OCD, and then I said to him: how would you diagnose the Rabbi of Brisk—was it OCD or fear of Heaven? So he tells me: listen, only if it bothers him. There is no way to diagnose between those two possibilities. If it bothers him and he comes to me, I can try to help him, whether it works or not, but it could be that it’s all OCD or all not-OCD; the only question is whether it bothers you or not. And that’s all. You somehow have to learn to get along with it, to live with it. That’s what you go to a psychologist for. He doesn’t know how to diagnose whether it’s OCD or not. He has no way of doing that. Fine, how did we get to all this? Benny Shannon. I’m rolling the carpet backward; we’re still inside the parentheses. So this Benny Shannon, a psychologist in Jerusalem, heard about this and got very excited; he had to do research on it, spent about half a year in the jungle there, researching the issue. I set up some meeting with him in the middle; he came back home for a short break and then ran off for another few months and in the end we never met here. Then after a few years I heard a lecture of his at Bar-Ilan at some conference; I no longer even remembered that it was him. And he described exactly this matter, he spoke about it, and then suddenly it clicked for me that this was the guy I’d set up a meeting with, so we talked a little afterward. In any case, now I’m closing the parentheses—Judith Ronen’s son did the master’s with him, on Libet. In any case, one of the claims was what you asked—I am returning now, here I’m answering your question—one of the claims against the interpretation of Libet’s experiments was that perhaps we make a free decision, but it is not conscious. There is freedom; it is not dictated by our physiology, but it is unconscious. If so, maybe that’s true, but then it is pointless. Because why posit the existence of…

[Speaker C] What is the meaning of an unconscious decision?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That there is something not dictated by the circumstances, but it is not conscious.

[Speaker C] If it’s not conscious, then what is it called—how is that a decision?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A lottery. I don’t know, something not dictated by the circumstances. Fine, that’s what I’m saying. It has no meaning in our discussion. Because even if there were some freedom within us such that the circumstances, the physiology, did not dictate the result, that in itself has no significance. That’s a question for physicists or psychologists. It’s not a question that concerns us. When we speak about whether a person has freedom, in the sense of moral responsibility and all these senses, we are talking about conscious freedom. We are talking about the fact that when a person thinks he decided, that is where he really decided. Because a person is not judged on the fact that he thinks he decided. If he himself did not decide, then he is not guilty of what he did even if he thinks he decided. Why should that matter? Therefore it is clear that freedom, for purposes of ethical discussion, for the discussion of free choice, is conscious freedom. There is no point in talking about unconscious freedom. This, by the way, is one of the errors of a parallel mistake to what is called compatibilism. Compatibilism is a very common approach today among philosophers, which says that there is no contradiction between free will and determinism. The fact that I am free only means that I do what I think, without anything else influencing me. That is what it means to be free. Why should it matter that someone who knows exactly how I am built could predict it in advance? Because it’s me. That’s how I make decisions. That’s a mistake. It’s a mistake because people confuse internal influences with the self. Internal influences are also part of the topographical terrain. The topographical terrain is the sum total of all influences. Internal influences or external influences—it makes no difference at all. Fine, so let’s return to Libet. In short, Libet ran into results that hit him in the face. He was a libertarian; he thought that human beings have free choice, and it turned out to him that they do not, that a person’s decisions are dictated to him; he doesn’t make the decisions himself. So he proposed several things, but basically one mechanism in particular: the so-called veto mechanism. He essentially argued—and apparently the findings of the experiment too, I don’t remember the details anymore. This experiment too involved a lot of averaging and so on, so there are many more methodological problems here, and they have been dealt with extensively. There is an enormous literature on this, and of course I don’t know even the edge of it. That was what was good about that thesis: you can see a summary of the whole business without reading all the articles and all the details and all the… In any case, Libet’s claim was that a person has a right of veto. Meaning, always before you made the decision to press, there is a readiness potential which says that you actually decided before you decided. That’s true. There cannot be a situation in which you pressed and before that there was no readiness potential. That cannot happen. There is always a readiness potential before you press, and it predicts the pressing. But it predicts it incompletely. If there was a readiness potential, it’s not certain there will be a pressing. If there was a pressing, clearly beforehand there was a readiness potential. That, yes. What’s the idea? It means that a person has the ability to impose a veto. Meaning, if he did not decide but was impelled to press—fine? impelled to press, he did not decide to press—then that is what is supposed to bring him to decide, but he can also decide not to press. It is supposed to lead him to press, but he can decide not to press.

[Speaker I] Were there such cases?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, in the experiment. Yes, he shows in the experiment that this is a condition that goes in only one direction. That before every pressing there was always a peak. But not after every peak was there always a pressing. Okay? And then that basically means that the readiness potential is a necessary but not sufficient condition. And that basically means what I told you before: that the readiness potential reflects the terrain within which I act. The sum total of the considerations and influences tells me now to press. Now I can press and I can refrain from pressing. Here lies the choice or the decision. When the conscious decision is the decision not to surrender to the readiness potential—to be with the divine soul—not to press. By the way, one can also decide yes, to press. And I think the decision to press is also a decision. Because the decision said: okay, let’s go with the readiness potential and press. Because I could equally have decided to impose a veto and not press. So the decision to press is also a decision. Okay? We once spoke about good and evil, and I said that the Holy One, blessed be He, must allow me to choose evil, because if every time I chose evil He removed the possibility from me, then even the choice of good would not be the result of a choice. It would not be a choice. The fact that I can also choose evil means that when I chose good, that was a choice of good and not just doing good. If He were to remove from me the possibility of doing evil, then even when I did good, I would not have chosen good; I simply did good—there would be no choice. Here too it’s the same. The fact that I can impose a veto means that even when I do not impose a veto, that was a choice to press. Okay? What did come out there is that there is a terrain. That the decision to press or not press does not come out of the blue. Fine, that’s not so surprising. Obviously, we all feel that there are influences on us and pressures and pushes, and there are people built differently so they act differently. That’s psychology. We see that there are different terrains that influence differently. That’s not some great novelty in principle. We know there are influences on us. But if we can impose a veto on the influences, decide to climb the mountain and not slide into the valley, that means there is choice; that’s the meaning of choice. That we can impose a veto. And exactly this mechanism of veto—and people don’t understand what veto really means—veto means the picture I described earlier. You think it’s half a choice. Veto—that’s not correct, it is full-fledged choice, veto. They say, as it were, that he barely saved choice. He didn’t barely save choice; this is what the concept of free choice is. Meaning, in principle, if I were clever enough—not sure I would have been clever enough—but if I were clever enough before the experiment, I as a libertarian should have told them: this is what will happen there. מראש—not only is this not a blow that I now have to explain away. This is what I should have known in advance would happen. Because the naive conception of libertarianism is a conception that says this is done completely detached from the environment. You decide yes, decide no, and you yourself generate the readiness potential, basically. The decision itself—the assumption was that there ought to be first a decision, then a readiness potential, and then a press. Okay? But that is naive libertarianism. That is a libertarianism which says that basically there are no influences on us… it’s grotesque… Meaning, people make a caricature of free choice. They basically say that free choice means totally free, no influences. Like those questions that ask: if the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us, then what does it mean that we have free choice? After all, He commanded us and there is punishment too, and so on, so it’s not free choice. Not at all. The fact that there are influences and sanctions and prices and consequences does not negate free choice. This returns me to Switzerland and all those other matters.

[Speaker C] Like running a red light. What? Like running a red light.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. You have free choice whether to run it or not, and if they catch you, you’ll get it. Meaning, these are two independent things. That question comes from the fact that people think that free choice means completely free. Free choice is not completely free. There is terrain. There are mountains and valleys; sometimes it’s hard, sometimes easy. That doesn’t mean… free choice does not mean that different human beings don’t have different tendencies to do different things.

[Speaker C] If it were completely free it would have no value.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not quite right; it wouldn’t have much meaning, נכון. And therefore I say that in principle a thoughtful libertarian should have predicted the results of Libet’s experiment in advance. Not in the form of readiness potential specifically, never mind, but in the form that you could see there is something that inclines you to press, whether it appears precisely that way or some other way is not important.

[Speaker C] What does Yosef Poloninsky say about this, about the right of veto?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, Libet’s right of veto is meaningless to him. He is a determinist not because of Libet. He says simply that nowhere do we see anything else.

[Speaker C] In one lecture I sent you he does talk about it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He mentioned it, but only in passing. I also spoke with him. He doesn’t say it’s a marginal matter; it’s not…

[Speaker G] Can someone check from the moment I made the decision until the juices, the acids in the muscle cause it to contract and press?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sure, but before the decision something else already happened.

[Speaker G] They saw some signal before the decision.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Before the decision, not before the press. Before the press that’s obvious. Before the decision. Now more than that: in later experiments, with Libet it was something like a 0.3-second gap, which is pretty fast. Maybe there could have been some error there or something like that. But in later experiments they got up to five and eight seconds of difference, where a clear readiness potential could be seen five or eight seconds before you decided. That’s already a significant gap.

[Speaker F] Why—do animals have such a mechanism? Meaning, if the Holy One, blessed be He, gives you the ability to choose good or evil,

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Will they have a veto at all? Probably not. I don’t know whether anyone has done an experiment like that, but probably not. Look, I’ll just give you an example that’s also connected to the Libet experiment—the implication of the whole thing. When we decide, and this is one of the problems with Libet experiments in general, whether to press the button or not—what are our considerations for pressing now, or in a few seconds, or in a minute? There’s no right or wrong time here. So the hesitation about when to press is not hesitation between competing considerations. In a situation like that, there’s no reason at all to talk about free choice. Free choice is where you’re in a dilemma, and the question is what to do. But if you were asking me now, as a clear libertarian, and you asked me: tell me, does a person have a choice whether to press a button? What kind of choice is that? Whenever he feels an urge, he’ll press the button, because it’s a silly action. He has to press at some point, so obviously—when will he press? He’ll press when he feels like it. In principle, he could have a veto and not press. Fine, theoretically. But why would he impose a veto? If he has an urge to press, why would he veto it? Does he have some dilemma from the other side? Some principle? Some cost to pressing, so that he decides not to? Sometimes he decides not to just in order to struggle against some urge he has, maybe. But on the level of principle, דווקא in an experiment of this kind I also wouldn’t expect there to be even a veto. That’s why it’s a very non-indicative experiment regarding free choice. Because there’s nothing here on the scales… I said that I spoke with someone from neural computation in Jerusalem who works there, so I asked him whether they’re planning to do a Libet experiment on real dilemmas. It’s a bit hard, because if you simulate a dilemma, then you’re simulating it, so again people know that nothing really depends on it for them, so they’ll just do it randomly. It’s not clear they’ll really choose seriously.

[Speaker G] When are they asked to press the… what did the clock do?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The clock just tells him when he looked at the clock, so he can know when he made the decision.

[Speaker G] Yes, but how does this experiment tell me—if, say, now, I’m just saying—if he pressed ten times in a minute? Fine…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, he presses—

[Speaker G] Once, once he presses. If you press once and that’s it, you go home.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Before he pressed, we saw—he doesn’t press many times. So you can know whether there was even more…

[Speaker G] No, no, every—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In each experiment they press once.

[Speaker G] There, what he—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He didn’t press; he said when he decided—

[Speaker C] To press, and then they saw that there was already something in the brain before that. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying—he told me they’re working on that right now. It’s very hard to do. He says they’re working on it right now. It’ll be very interesting, although I argued in the book that even that wouldn’t be an indication of determinism. But that doesn’t matter; it’s less important for our purposes. In any case, why am I bringing this whole story? Because it reflects exactly the picture I described earlier. A picture of a divine soul. A picture of a divine soul basically means—or a picture of choice itself, right? A divine soul can exist only in a being that has choice. That’s why the animal soul is called animal, because an animal in its essence is decisions of an animal soul. It’s not decisions—it’s the conduct of an animal soul. A divine soul in its essence is when I use my choice and don’t let my animality, my lower part, take me over. Right, remember Dov Sadan.

[Speaker I] That spike says that it’s not my decision.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s why I’m saying: now the question is whether that spike makes the decision, or whether it’s the divine. No—but the divine soul is when I impose a veto on the spike.

[Speaker I] Yes, exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The spike itself is the animal soul—that’s exactly the point. But also the one who acts—what does that mean?

[Speaker I] It’s chemicals acting?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Doesn’t matter—our physiology, with everything in it. The point is that when I speak about a divine soul, it doesn’t mean that I have no urges. Of course I have urges, and there’s a topographic outline within which I operate, and there are drives and pressures. But the question is what I do with that, not whether I have it. Of course I have it. The question is what I do given that. Is my action dictated given that, or given that can I still decide? That is the question; that is the difference between an animal soul and a divine soul. Not the question whether I have such an outline or whether I have such influences. Okay? It’s obvious that I do. It’s not…

[Speaker E] What is a divine soul?

[Speaker G] I don’t… what stands behind it? The ability to decide.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We talked about this in the previous class. Apparently you weren’t in the previous class. Yes—to decide.

[Speaker G] So I’ll go back to the source. The Holy One, blessed be He—what, He decided?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Holy One, blessed be He, certainly can decide. That’s why it’s called a divine soul: that He put into us some ability that He has—to make decisions that are not driven by the environment, not dictated by circumstances. In that sense, that’s our resemblance to God. This ability to decide—which probably, I don’t know, I have no way of knowing, but probably other creatures don’t have.

[Speaker G] And if He chose Abraham?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not connected to Abraham. All human beings. Human beings have free choice.

[Speaker H] So we said that the individual has freedom of choice, but the collective—in Egypt, say—doesn’t have freedom of choice because they’re influenced by statistics. So I’m asking: what is the meaning of punishment or reward for a group if they make some choice—say, the Jewish people, I don’t know, worship idols. Fine, so they’re influenced by statistics—so what’s the meaning of punishing them? What does “influenced by statistics” mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is whether the Holy One, blessed be He, calibrated the weights. Theoretically, everyone could have chosen the good. It’s still a statistical prediction.

[Speaker H] But according to the law of large numbers that can’t happen; there’s no such possibility that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, there’s no such possibility? But each individual who chose evil is responsible for it. Okay?

[Speaker H] But the Holy One, blessed be He, knew there would be statistics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Doesn’t matter. Statistics have no criminal significance.

[Speaker B] That’s the question—meaning, why is there collective punishment?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean by collective punishment? Punishment for Egypt? Punishment for the individuals.

[Speaker B] No, because the righteous also get punished?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know whether the righteous were punished or not, but it could be that the righteous are also punished because they’re part of the… But clearly there is guilt here, so it doesn’t matter that there are statistics.

[Speaker C] But how could one know that this is what would happen with the Egyptians as a nation?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not certain knowledge. The Holy One, blessed be He, also did not know it with certainty. It’s statistics.

[Speaker C] The law—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of large numbers—even there you don’t have certainty. In principle, fine, there’s a very tiny chance, a very thin tail, that it won’t happen—that’s the law of large numbers—but there is such a tail. Even the Holy One, blessed be He—that’s the claim—even when He said “כי ועבדום ועינו אותם ארבע מאות שנה” (“they shall enslave them and afflict them for four hundred years”), He could not have known it with full certainty. But it’s a large enough number to make a good prediction here. That’s all. And in any case, responsibility still falls on you, because each person made his own decisions.

[Speaker C] But how could He make such a prediction? What—the Egyptians had some genetics of evil-heartedness?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, He calibrated the weights. Again: the Holy One, blessed be He, calibrated the weights in such a way—He hardened Pharaoh’s heart, as it says there, right? What does that mean? That the Holy One, blessed be He, calibrated the weights. He said: unlike every human being, who has a choice to do good or to do evil, with the Egyptians I’m making it something like eighty-twenty, not fifty-fifty. If I had made it a hundred-zero, they would have had no criminal responsibility; they wouldn’t deserve punishment, because I would have forced each and every one of them to do it.

[Speaker C] It was harder for them to choose the good.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. They had a higher mountain, but they still could climb it. And that’s why the medieval authorities say there that His hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was a punishment for earlier sins—in other words, it was itself part of the punishment, this calibration of the weights, because in the end it’s clear that you… he is less guilty, fine, but he got that because of certain previous sins he had committed, and therefore the weights changed. Okay? So basically the… wow, that took a lot of time. Basically, what I just want to add here from the description I gave is really a more plastic, more concrete description of what I talked about in the previous class: that basically the animal soul marks out for us where our inner beast is taking us, and the divine soul—and this exists in any case in every person—the divine soul is supposed to be the one that takes the reins in hand and decides what to do with all those influences. Now, in this sense—and this is the important point with which we’ll continue later—when… when a person has urges or emotions or all kinds of such things that belong to the topographic outline, to this topographic framework, these are planes that are not the result of choice. A person doesn’t choose whether to be bad or good—bad or good in his nature. A person chooses what to do with something. It may be that he can influence it, fine, but I’m saying there are basic givens with which you’re born, there are influences that cause this.

[Speaker C] Right, he can work on—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It, but that too is a decision. Yes, exactly. He can—the outline is not his evil, but the difficulty of getting out of the evil. That’s the outline he’s fighting against. But still, these things are not matters of choice. Why am I saying this? I’m already jumping straight to the end so you can see why I opened with these things. When we get to commandments that deal with emotion, this will raise a problem. Because commandments that deal with emotion are really commandments addressed to something we’re not responsible for. I am the one who exists within the outline; I am not the outline itself.

[Speaker I] The outline itself is the environment within which I act.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now, if emotions and urges and things like that are the environment within which I act, then they don’t depend on me. What does depend on me is what I do with those things. So how can there be commands—commandments or prohibitions—that speak about emotion? Emotion is emotion. The question of what I do with my emotions is another matter, but how can one command emotion? That’s really the issue. What command is there about emotion? “ואהבת לרעך כמוך” (“love your neighbor as yourself”), “ואהבת את השם אלוקיך” (“love the Lord your God”), “ואהבתם את הגר” (“love the stranger”), to hate evil, “ושמחת בחגך” (“rejoice on your festival”). There are many commands that touch on emotion. And the question is how that applies—to that we’ll still get. There’s still a little time before we get there, but I’m saying that’s where I’m heading. Okay.