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Free will – soul

שו”תCategory: faithFree will – soul
asked 8 years ago

Good week
You wrote in your book “The Science of Freedom” that the very existence of the will refines the soul because matter is deterministic or random and there is no room for free choice.
But my question is that since the will is a creation out of nothing – and has no prior cause, why assume that it is based on the medium of a soul –> That it activates free will, instead of assuming that there is a creation out of nothing of a will that moves matter itself.
This is why there needs to be a prior entity – a soul that activates the will. Instead of assuming that the will is completely created and does not need to be on a prior medium. (Soul)
 

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מיכי Staff answered 8 years ago

Call it whatever you want. There has to be something non-material beyond the body. If you want to say it’s the will itself – for health. As long as I haven’t said anything about what the soul is, there’s no point in getting into these questions. You just have to notice that beyond the will, there are other mental functions within us (emotions, thinking).

אסף replied 8 years ago

A. The question of whether it is possible for something to be created from nothing as a complete entity – will.
Or is it better to stick to the more familiar and claim that there can be a creation of a *state* without a prior cause – will, but the one who caused it is an entity that has the power to act forward (soul).
And so I reduce the creation of something from nothing to just a new state instead of a complete entity.

B. You wrote that there are other mental functions within us and there needs to be an entity that is not physical/natural that can contain it. Otherwise, we will fall into the fallacy of emergentism so that something that does not exist at the micro level is created at the macro level.
But isn't it better to assume that at the micro level there is indeed a mental consciousness for every particle in nature, for example, quark and quark? (panpsychism). And the unity of our consciousness is due to the fact that we are only one particle out of the entire brain/all particles that have the power to combine into one sensation. Does the Rabbi see panpsychism as a sufficient explanation for mental cognition? After all, it is ultimately unnecessary to dwell on the unknown.

david replied 8 years ago

To Asaf
1. See here: https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%94%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%9E%D7%9C%D7%92%D7%99%D7%AA-%D7%99%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%AA-%D7%99%D7%A9-%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%99%D7%9F/

אסף replied 8 years ago

David, thank you very much, I did assume something similar.

Can the Rabbi answer 2 questions?

מיכי Staff replied 8 years ago

It's hard for me to get into a discussion at such intervals again. In any case, I don't see panpsychism as anything more than a slogan. If you assume that every particle has consciousness/consciousness, you've solved the whole problem. The only drawback is that it's probably simply not true. This is a common fallacy to choose an easy and unlikely solution and support it with Occam's razor. According to this, Newtonian physics is superior to relativity or quantum theory because it's simpler. Its only drawback is that it's not true. Occam's razor comes to distinguish between theories with an equal level of probability and equal explanatory power. When there is an unlikely theory, even if it's simpler in the Occamian sense, there's no reason to accept it.

אסף replied 8 years ago

Thank you, why is this theory less plausible?
After all, we have cases in which it has been proven to us that Newtonian physics does not work in them, and therefore we needed the complicated theory of quantums, because there was no choice.

What is not true here is that we have no proof against the fact that every particle has consciousness, and it also explains why we have consciousness, and simplifies the problem of the connection between matter and consciousness

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