On Determinism in Light of Your Book The Science of Freedom
Hello Rabbi. My name is Yuval Shapira, 22 years old from the Yeruham Yeshiva. I recently discussed with Professor Amos Tanai, who deals with computational biology at the Weizmann Institute, the issue of free choice. He presented a very interesting argument, which I believe can be answered in your book, which I read before, “The Sciences of Freedom.” I would appreciate an answer or alternatively a reference to the exact place in the book.
His argument is as follows – he believes in absolute materialism and, consequently, he believes in a kind of determinism. In his opinion, everything is predetermined, but we are not capable and cannot have a computational tool that can predict our behavior. I will point out that the professor educates his family to be exemplary and moral at the highest level, as I can testify from my acquaintance with his daughter. He attributes ‘freedom of choice’ to the gap between the true fact that everything is predetermined and the fact that we have no real ability to predict. This gap allows for a kind of freedom of action and gives importance to moral behavior.
I would be most grateful for your response regarding his perception.
I would also be happy if you could address in your answer his claim that it is impossible for us to have a means of prediction, and that in the 15th century they were able to imagine the quantum computer?!
Thank you for your quick response, Yuval.
This is a common mistake of computationalists and physicists who deal with chaos. The question of choice is not at all related to our ability to calculate and predict, but to the question of whether there is real freedom in the system. A chaotic system whose future cannot be calculated in advance is still a deterministic system. Therefore, it is impossible to introduce free will into it. The fact that I do not know how a person is motivated does not mean that he is not motivated.
I devoted an entire chapter to this in my book, the chapter on chaos. There I stated that the founders of chaos made exactly this claim, and of course they were wrong. Then I moved on to discuss quantum mechanics, where (and only there) there is supposedly true freedom.
In short, he simply has a conceptual error.
The fact that a person behaves morally does not mean much. If he is a deterministic system (even if chaotic) then it is what leads him to his moral behavior and therefore it has no value. He does not choose it but perhaps lives in the illusion that he chooses it (due to the lack of predictability). He is led to it deterministically. I think that he himself does not understand that his position is contradictory, and therefore he secretly believes in free choice. It is always the question of how to interpret the positions of people who are unaware of the problems within their doctrine. I touched on this a little in column 456 (where I argued that a moral atheist is either inconsistent or a secret believer) and in other columns.
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