Ontic and Epistemic Doubt V: Pseudo-Ontic Doubt (Column 326)
In the previous columns I discussed the distinction between epistemic doubt and ontic doubt. After a conceptual and scientific introduction, I went on to illustrate this with two halakhic topics (berera and kiddushin that are not subject to bi’ah). I then examined the connection between the two topics and its meaning for quantum collapse in halakha. In the previous column we looked at the issue of doubtful p’sik reisha, where we again encountered an implication of the distinction between epistemic and ontic doubt. In this column I continue the discussion from last time and show that in the case of doubtful p’sik reisha a third category of doubt appears: pseudo-ontic doubt.
A philosophical-physical difficulty: does classical physics contain ontic doubt?
In the previous column we saw the view of R. Akiva Eger, according to which a case of aino mitkaven that is not a p’sik reisha exists only when there is an ontic ambiguity. If the doubt is epistemic, then it is a doubt about prohibition; consequently, in a biblical prohibition it will be forbidden. Thus, for example, when a person drags a bench and a groove may be formed but is not necessary, this is not a p’sik reisha, because here there is ontic doubt (the hardness of the ground allows a groove to form but does not necessitate it). By contrast, if we have a box and doubt whether there are flies inside it, that is an epistemic doubt. Reality itself is determinate; we are merely missing some of the information.
However, this distinction raises a fundamental difficulty, as several readers have already noted in earlier columns. In the first column of the series we saw that from the perspective of current physical knowledge there is no true ontic ambiguity in physical reality apart from quantum-mechanical uncertainty. Admittedly, in the column before the last—where I dealt with legal-halakhic doubts—we saw room to define ontic ambiguity, but that was because the “reality” in question was juridical rather than physical. In the physical world, such a reality does not seem to exist, since the physics of our everyday life is deterministic (barring a few phenomena on the minute quantum scale).
The classic and agreed-upon example of aino mitkaven and p’sik reisha is the bench and groove case described above. In soft ground, where it is clear in advance that a groove will be formed, it is a p’sik reisha; but in hard ground, where there is doubt whether a groove will be formed, it is not a p’sik reisha. Yet this example is first and foremost a matter of physics, not law. The connection between the hardness of the ground and the formation of the groove is a physical connection; and when we deal with the physics of benches and types of ground, we are operating squarely within classical physics (that is, in large everyday scales). In such a case it is clear that there is no place for ontic ambiguity. Any sensible person understands that if there were an expert who knew well the nature of the soil, the weight of the bench, and the relevant laws of nature (strength of materials, mechanical pressures, and so on)—that is, someone in possession of all the relevant data—then it is clear he could predict in advance whether a groove would form or not. And even if no expert could actually carry out this calculation in practice, it is still obvious that this is nothing more than a lack of information. The question of whether a groove will or will not form is determined unambiguously by the structure of the ground, the manner of dragging, and the properties of the bench. In this sense, even if there is computational difficulty, we are dealing with a problem more akin to chaos than to quantum theory (see the first column). At most, there is an issue of computational complexity here, but certainly not ambiguity in reality itself.
In short, given a ground and a bench, the outcome is predetermined deterministically (“before Heaven it is known”); at most, we cannot know what it is. That is epistemic doubt, not ontic. Now consider that I dragged the bench and a groove formed. If a groove did form, that proves that this ground was, from the outset, of the sort in which a groove should form. It is simply the result of the ground and the bench—full stop. There is no ambiguity or gap in the physics itself. The groove is not the result of a miracle or of free choice, but of the relation between the bench and the ground. If so, the formation of a groove proves that there was p’sik reisha from the outset. How, then, can there be a case of aino mitkaven that is not a p’sik reisha? It would seem that on R. Akiva Eger’s approach there is no possibility to speak of a situation that is not a p’sik reisha: if a person acts without intent and a prohibited result occurs, that shows that, given the preexisting circumstances, the outcome was already fixed to occur (at most, we—or the actor himself—did not know it in advance). This is epistemic, not ontic, doubt; hence there is a doubtful p’sik reisha, which is forbidden. One must remember that the Shabbat labors and other Torah prohibitions do not deal with phenomena on the quantum scale; therefore the relevant physics for these cases is classical physics. Consequently, all our doubts in these contexts are epistemic doubts and not ontic ambiguities. In short, how could there even be ontic ambiguity—such that aino mitkaven would not be a p’sik reisha—in halakhic contexts?
Pseudo-ontic doubt
Here we arrive at a third category that emerges from this sugya. My claim is that according to R. Akiva Eger, halakha does not adhere to the true physics but to people’s (baalebatim’s) perception of physics. If you ask people on the street, they will tell you that a case of medium-hard ground constitutes an ambiguous reality (ontic doubt) and not our lack of information (epistemic doubt). In their view it is unclear whether a groove will form in the ground or not (it depends on how the person chooses to drag the bench, how he holds it, etc.)[1]. I contend that according to R. Akiva Eger, halakha views such a situation as ontic ambiguity, because that is how the reasonable (non-expert) person relates to it. Even if, factually, there is no ambiguity here but rather a lack of information, halakha treats such cases as though they were ambiguous on the ontic plane.[2] By contrast, regarding the question of whether there are flies in the box, any reasonable person will tell you that this is an epistemic doubt. He will explain that, while we do not know, one of the two states definitely obtains in reality itself.
We thus learn that there is a third category of doubt, beyond ontic and epistemic doubt: pseudo-ontic doubt. This is doubt that is essentially epistemic, but laypeople perceive it as ontic—and therefore halakha also treats it that way. Below we shall see that such treatment characterizes additional domains, not only halakha. Before moving to other domains, I will illustrate again from halakha—but this time from a different angle.
A possible implication: an interesting ruling of R. Shlomo Zalman regarding worms
In Minchat Shlomo, New Edition (vols. II–III, §63), R. Shlomo Zalman discusses the prohibition of eating worms. He cites decisors who write that when a person eats a fruit and there is a worm inside, he is considered a met’asek or aino mitkaven,[3] and therefore, on this view, there is no prohibition:
“So too what is written in Shivat Tzion §28, and it is also brought in Imrei Bina, Hilchot BeB”Ch, end of §4, in the name of one Gaon; and in Darkei Teshuva §84, note 28, it is cited from the author of Beit Ephraim—that with respect to a worm to which one’s mind is not directed, it is considered only as met’asek; and even though there is no met’asek in chelev because he benefits, here it is different, since the benefit is only from the fruit and not from the worm.”
He explains that eating the fruit with the worm is a doubtful p’sik reisha with regard to the past (since the doubt is whether there is currently a worm in the fruit or not, exactly like the question of flies in a box). Accordingly, it would seem to depend on the dispute between the TaZ and R. Akiva Eger. In R. Shlomo Zalman’s view it appears that one should prohibit, like R. Akiva Eger (apparently he rules like him):
“Even though this is considered a doubtful p’sik reisha regarding the past, which is not deemed aino mitkaven, as explained by R. Akiva Eger, Yoreh De’ah §87:6,”
Nevertheless, he rejects this and writes:
“All the same, it appears that if clarification is possible only with very great effort—so that it is considered bedi’avad—then in our case it is indeed considered as having been effected later, at the time of eating, by way of met’asek and aino mitkaven, and it is permitted; for dragging a bed and the like could also be known in advance by a great expert, and even so it is permitted. And since it is permitted to the restaurant owner, so too it is permitted to others, as is known.”
His claim is that when checking whether there is a worm in the fruit is difficult and entails considerable effort, this is not considered a p’sik reisha regarding the past but a p’sik reisha going forward. His proof is from dragging a bench: even though a great expert could in principle determine whether a groove would be carved (as described above), the case is nevertheless considered a doubtful p’sik reisha (which exists only with respect to the past). If the Gemara views this as a case that is not a p’sik reisha, despite the fact that it is a doubt regarding the past, that proves that when the examination is difficult (requires expertise—as with soil; or disassembling the fruit—as in the case of worms) it is considered a doubt about the future, and therefore not a p’sik reisha.
On the face of it, his words are very puzzling. What does the effort of examination have to do with whether the doubt concerns the past or the future? Why should a test that entails effort transform the doubt into one about the future? I remind you of what I explained at the beginning of the previous column: the exemption of aino mitkaven is not about lack of culpability but about the absence of a violation. Therefore, the fact that the examination entails effort does not seem relevant. We are not reproaching a person for not having checked; the question is whether there is a need to check or not. It thus seems clear that his intention is to distinguish not between a doubt about the past versus the future, but between an epistemic doubt (which he labels a doubt about the past) and an ontic doubt (what he calls a doubt about the future). If the examination entails effort, then the doubt is not considered the person’s subjective (epistemic) doubt but rather a doubt in reality itself (ontic), precisely as we saw regarding the ground and the bench.
This is exactly the category I defined above as pseudo-ontic doubt. Moreover, R. Shlomo Zalman himself makes the criterion depend on the difference between expert and layperson. If the examination entails great effort—and certainly if it is not possible at all—we view the doubt as one in reality itself and not in a person’s mind. But the point is not the effort per se; it is how people relate to it. When the examination requires expertise or effort, the layperson perceives it as a doubt in reality itself.
Still, there is a difference between the phrasing I proposed and what emerges from his words. In my view, where the examination entails great effort but every layperson nevertheless understands that this is an epistemic doubt, it will be a p’sik reisha. Think, for example, of the question of flies in a box. Let us assume for the sake of discussion that determining whether there are flies in the box is very difficult and entails great effort (e.g., it is very hard to see the flies in the dark). In my opinion, this remains an epistemic doubt, because every layperson will say that the reality is determinate (only unknown). Here there is no distinction between expert and layperson; everyone understands that either there are flies in the box or there are not. Therefore, in my view, this would be a doubtful p’sik reisha and forbidden. By contrast, according to R. Shlomo Zalman, because the examination is onerous, it seems that even in such a case this would be considered an ontic doubt and it would be permitted to close the box.
Additional examples of pseudo-ontic treatment
Treating an epistemic doubt as pseudo-ontic exists in other domains as well, even among experts in various sciences—despite the fact that there it does not really hinge on the layperson/expert divide (except perhaps indirectly, as we shall see). Let us begin with examples from everyday life.
If you ask someone on the street about a dice throw, he will tell you it is a random event, even though there is nothing random about it. Throwing dice or a coin are the canonical examples for people of obtaining a random result; that is how we all run lotteries. But as we saw in the first column of the series, a dice throw is the quintessential case of doubt due to lack of information, not ontic ambiguity. If I possessed all the relevant data (the die’s weight and shape, the manner of the throw, air density, winds, etc.), I could tell you in advance what the result will be. In that first column I brought the die or coin as examples of epistemic doubts with computational difficulty (as in chaos). There we are dealing with a lack of information, not ambiguity in reality itself—yet when we ask people, we get answers that this is a random event, i.e., an ontic doubt (reality is ambiguous and not fixed in itself). This is pseudo-ontic treatment outside the halakhic context.
The same holds for the outcome of a battle or war, and even for a judge’s decision in a case before him. These are cases where the calculation is complex and it is very hard to know the outcome with certainty; hence people treat them as if there were ambiguity in reality itself. But of course, in practice, this is not so. These are decisions or processes grounded in fixed and unambiguous deterministic mechanisms, and reality itself is not ambiguous in any sense.
Dragging a bench is similar to throwing dice or the outcome of a war: what laypeople see as an ambiguous reality, although experts know that in the physics of everyday life there cannot be ambiguity that is truly ontic. All of these are pseudo-ontic treatments, and we can now see that they appear not only in halakha. It is quite plausible that a legal domain meant to regulate our lives and social relations will be based on a lay, common-sense perspective rather than that of an expert, scientist, or philosopher; and I claim the same occurs in halakha. But now we shall see that pseudo-ontic treatment appears among scientists as well.
Pseudo-ontic doubt in scientific contexts
We have already encountered chaos. I gave the example of a piece of paper dropped from a second floor to the ground. We tend to see its final position as the result of a random process, even though it is wholly deterministic. Many physicists will also tell you, casually, that this is a random process. Sometimes they are not aware of this (as with Doyne Farmer, cited in the first column), and even when they are aware, they sometimes prefer to view it that way for the sake of mathematical convenience. In the context of chaos it is useful and correct to view the situation as if it were random, and to speak the language of probability and statistics (distributions and likelihoods). These are the right tools to handle this domain. Farmer’s error was not scientific: as a methodological assumption, saying that there is randomness within the physics is acceptable. His error occurred when he transplanted this assumption from its status as a methodological premise and turned it into a claim about the world. The randomness of this situation is caused chiefly by the wind that deflects the paper—and wind is a physical (climatic) phenomenon. So too with climatic phenomena in general: because of their complexity we tend to speak of them as though they were random, even though they are classical mechanics with nothing inherently random. In such cases even experts tend to treat these situations as if they involved ontic ambiguity and randomness, though they are entirely deterministic.
Consider another example from evolution. Evolutionary biologists explain the development of life and living creatures as follows: in the genetic structure (protein chain) of a given organism, various changes occur that generate slightly different versions of its genetic makeup. Each version is a different organism; all of them struggle with each other and with external constraints, and ultimately the fittest version survives and passes its traits to its offspring in the next generation. Biologists and evolutionary researchers assume that the evolutionary process includes random components (without which evolution would not be seen as an alternative to the creation hypothesis—see below). These lie mainly in the occurrence of mutations and in the external constraints that drive natural selection. Changes in a protein chain’s structure are not predictable in advance, since they depend on numerous variables thought of as random (temperature, forces, chemistry, and more). But through physical lenses this is not quite accurate: we are dealing with scales likely irrelevant to quantum theory (organisms—and even protein chains—are much larger than the scale at which quantum ambiguity should appear). It is therefore more plausible that there are complex deterministic mechanisms (as in chaos) rather than true randomness. And yet the accepted view among scientists is to treat it as random. This stance makes the mathematical and scientific treatment easier, which is why these phenomena are commonly handled as random processes. Again: this is a correct and fruitful methodological assumption, and that is how the evolutionary process ought to be treated. When we have no effective way to compute the outcome, probability is the right tool. But of course that does not mean the process is genuinely random. Again, it is a methodological assumption, not a claim about the world.
The ontological fallacy: scientific and everyday examples
What is the theological debate around evolution about?[4] It is rooted in what Kant called the “physico-theological proof.” Many believers ground faith in God on the argument that our world is complex/teleological and such a thing cannot come about by chance (without a guiding hand). The guiding hand is God’s. Atheists counter that evolution presents a random mechanism—one that operates without a guiding hand—that succeeds in producing complex beings. This argument ostensibly obviates the need for a guiding hand to explain the complexity of life.
This argument assumes that the evolutionary process is fundamentally random (does not require a guiding hand). But as we explained above,[5] that is probably not the case. The scales are too large for quantum theory; hence true randomness is unlikely. The evolutionary process is entirely deterministic. Why, then, do we employ probabilistic and statistical tools in studying evolution? Why are the explanations given within it always statistical in nature? Because it is a complex process (as with a dice throw or dropping a piece of paper from a height). I already noted that probabilistic tools are meant for cases of missing information. Ontic ambiguity employs many-valued logic, not necessarily probability.
The use of probabilistic tools proceeds as if there were ontic ambiguity (randomness), even though that is not the true situation. This is an example of the power, utility, and usability of the pseudo-ontic assumption. On the other hand, here too we must be careful not to forget that this is, in fact, epistemology. The fact that a lion happened upon a place and devoured a monkey—thereby wiping out an entire population and producing natural selection—contains nothing genuinely random. The lion arrived for some reason that caused it, and so too its devouring of the unfortunate monkey. The emergence of that monkey and of other species is likewise a deterministic process. Our deployment of probabilistic tools stems from the incompleteness of our information about reality. It is very useful for us to handle it with probabilistic tools.
But the alleged refutation from evolution of the physico-theological proof presumes genuine randomness and ignores the fact that it is merely a useful assumption of pseudo-ambiguity. This is exactly what we saw in Doyne Farmer’s claim that chaos can explain our free will. They too reflect a view that randomness is not merely a fruitful methodological assumption but a claim about the world. These are two examples of what might be called the ontological fallacy. When we ask whether there is genuine randomness (ontic ambiguity), we must not carelessly use methodological assumptions from various sciences. We must not forget that this is not truly ontology but epistemology in disguise—that is, pseudo-ontology. Treating pseudo-ontic situations as genuinely ontic ones is a fallacy. In scientific contexts it is merely a methodological assumption; those who carry it beyond methodology fall into the ontological fallacy.
In everyday life as well, people often say that so-and-so’s winning a lottery (the national lottery, or a coin toss, or dice) shows he has “luck,” or that someone’s victory in war is the result of luck. These statements are imprecise (again, the ontological fallacy). There is nothing random in these situations, and therefore it is not a matter of luck. The physical situation caused that outcome to occur. The probabilistic-random perspective is merely a useful way of saying the situation is complex; it is not an accurate description of reality as such.
[1] All this is of course quite true physically as well. Given the manner in which the person drags and holds the bench, the formation of the groove is predetermined—but people are unaware of this.
[2] It is entirely possible that sages in earlier generations (and even today) themselves thought that reality is not fixed. That is, we should not conclude from this that halakha is determined by the layman’s view; rather, the sages simply erred. I have written more than once that the sages conceived of gaps in the natural order—i.e., that divine involvement is possible without a miracle. The understanding that there is no such thing is modern. It follows that one might even abolish the exemption of aino mitkaven (or the rule of p’sik reisha) altogether. I will not enter that possibility here.
[3] There is some confusion in his words between met’asek and aino mitkaven. This is common, as we also saw in the previous column. The two categories are very similar, so it is no wonder the terms are used loosely. But from his resort to p’sik reisha it is clear he means aino mitkaven, not met’asek.
[4] See on this in my book, God Plays Dice.
[5] See there, p. 114.
Discussion
And best of all to combine them:
Take an ontic doubt and an epistemic doubt, slice them up and season with oil, salt, and sharp pilpul, mix and bake in the oven until you get a soft texture and a browned color. Finger-licking good, without a doubt 🙂
Best regards, Leona Negro
With God's help, Tu Be-Av 5780
One of the reasons mentioned in the Gemara for the joy of the fifteenth of Av is that on this day the decree that the generation of the wilderness would die came to an end. In truth, the decree had already ended on the Ninth of Av of that year, but they feared that perhaps they had erred in intercalating the month, and on the fifteenth of Av, when the moon was full, it became clear to them that the decree had ended. Tu Be-Av, then, is the day on which the 'epistemic doubt' was removed and the 'ontic good' that had occurred six days earlier was revealed to Israel.
This element of conscious clarification of the reality of the good also finds expression in the permission for the tribes to intermarry with one another, when the fear of 'outsiders' mixing into the tribe was removed, and the people of Israel came to recognize that openness to connection between the tribes is the true good, while the prohibition on marriage was clarified as a 'temporary ruling' that stemmed only from the initial reluctance.
On Tu Be-Av as well, the sons and daughters of Israel clarify for themselves the good in marital union and find the soul that completes them, and in this way there comes to conscious clarification the fixed reality from the six days of Creation of 'male and female He created them.' The ontic good becomes epistemic, and great is the joy in the dispelling of doubts.
With the blessing, 'And you shall rejoice in all the good,' Shatz
See Netanel Ellinson's article, 'The Festival of the New Wine in the Vineyards of Shiloh' (on the 'Shabbat Supplement – Makor Rishon' website), that the joy of the daughters of Israel in the vineyards on Tu Be-Av is connected to this time being the beginning of the grape harvest season.
Through rejoicing in the vineyards over the goodness of the land, they rectify the sin of the spies over which we mourn on the Ninth of Av. In contrast to the aversion to the Land of Israel that was on the Ninth of Av—they proclaim on Tu Be-Av: 'The land is very, very good.'
Best regards, Shatz
You are not clear either. The genetic structure is a chain of nucleic acids (the chain is DNA or RNA). A nucleic acid is built from what you said. This chain is translated (outside the cell nucleus, in the ribosomes) into a chain of amino acids. A chain of amino acids with more than 50 acids is a protein. And that is what the rabbi means by a protein chain.
With God's help, Tu Be-Av 5780
R. Akiva Eiger's distinction between closing a box that may contain flies and dragging a bench across the ground seems clear to me. In closing the box, there is already right now an answer to the question whether there are currently flies there or not; the person simply does not know it.
By contrast, dragging a bench across the ground is an ongoing scenario, liable to change with every slight and unintended movement of the one dragging it, or with any ordinary breeze that may or may not arise. Even an experienced porter would not be able to say clearly whether the process will develop into making a furrow or not, and therefore it is clear that this is a 'matter not intended' for which R. Shimon exempts.
And similarly with throwing dice—even an experienced gambler will not be able to determine with certainty on which side the die will fall, and therefore in practice we are dealing with 'ontic ambiguity' (though perhaps in the case of someone equipped with a personal 'Laplace's demon' 🙂 there would be room to discuss whether it should count as a psik reisha, and this requires further investigation 🙂
Best regards, Shatzon Laplesinger
And in this connection it is interesting how you would analyze the question of opening a refrigerator on Shabbat when it is unknown whether a light may turn on in it or not. Is there necessarily no ontic ambiguity here…
Clearly that is epistemic.
Throughout several examples (a bench, a die, war) you treat doubt arising from human activity as pseudo-ontic.
Assuming there is free choice, then there ought to be a situation in which future human activity creates ontic doubt,
especially according to your view, in which human choice creates a doubt that is unclear even from Heaven's perspective.
Whereas in banal actions one can discuss whether free choice is really expressed, precisely in extreme situations like war it seems at first glance that there are quite a few events of free choice. If so, why is the question of who will win a war only a pseudo-ontic doubt?
The doubt is about what will happen in the future. What will happen in the future is one of two things, and there is nothing ambiguous there. Therefore in its essence this is epistemic doubt. Indeed, here it seems that the criterion of 'revealed before Heaven' does not obtain, and still it is epistemic doubt.
And in connection with the last question—if one completely denies ontic ambiguity in the context of free choice—what is the explanation for situations of prayer: 'Do Moses' hands wage war?' or 'Were it not for My covenant day and night, I would not have established the laws of heaven and earth,' and likewise for the conception that a person can, by his deeds, remove his fate from subordination to the laws of nature (Kuzari, Guide for the Perplexed, I believe, and others).
Of course one can always say that this too is known in advance. And even so… (the question is not in the context of halakhic ruling)
I don't see any question here. Please explain.
Hello, the question in brief is this: can one say that there may be physical ontic ambiguity as a result of free choice?
I will try to explain. If there are two religious assumptions:
1. A person's choices (his consciousness, awareness, fulfillment of mitzvot, etc.) may affect the laws of nature or how they operate.
2. In certain matters, even the Holy One, blessed be He, so to speak, does not know what a person will choose until he chooses.
– then it follows that an 'ontic gap' in physics may be created.
This may somewhat resemble the issue of the detector—until it is put in place, there will be no collapse of the superposition. If we treat the detector as an example, or as a metaphor—the world is in superposition in many respects—many 'beings,' many possible realities. A person's choices, his consciousness, or his awareness produce the 'collapse' one way or the other accordingly.
Or perhaps I have not understood…
(The question is not on the level of halakhic considerations, such as psik reisha and the like.)
I answered this to the questioner above you. In my opinion this is not an ontic gap. The question of what you will choose in the future has one clear answer out of two, except that right now it is unknown. The criterion of 'revealed before Heaven' indeed does not obtain here (at least in my opinion that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance what we will choose), but that is not a state of ambiguity. A state of ambiguity is a state in which the world is now in a combination of two states. In the case of choice, I do not know what will happen, but in the world itself there is no ambiguity.
Incidentally, with respect to retroactive selection, the Ramban in Gittin argues that in human action there is no retroactive clarification, and apparently his intention is because there is freedom there. But in my opinion this is still not ontic ambiguity.
In your opinion, is the action of the detector epistemic or ontological?
I did not understand the question.
Does the presence of the detector (in the electron experiment) bring about a physical change in reality, or only in our perception of reality?
(Or is it impossible to separate reality from our perception of reality?)
I wrote in the first post that the detector apparently changes reality itself (that is the accepted interpretation).
This perhaps feels like proof that human perception changes reality. Or at least that it is an inseparable part of reality.
Thank you for your patience.
It is customary to tie the view that forbids doubtful psik reisha to the reasoning that the prohibition of psik reisha is because of the relation of the act to the person, and not because he is considered to have intended it [for if it depends on his intention, what difference does it make why he is uncertain?]. According to the rabbi's words, that there is no difference between past and future, and as R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach said, that even regarding something done in the past one can still say that it is not psik reisha, it may be that in something known to laymen to be possibly a psik reisha, they are considered to intend the act.
See at the beginning of the post (and also later on) that I addressed these reasonings. This is not necessary, because when the result is inevitable it is possible that halakhically this is considered as though he intended it (it is drawn after the result that he did intend).
The claim that where there is free choice there is no ontic ambiguity but only epistemic ambiguity does not fit what you wrote in part 1 of the series, where you defined the concepts:
'To understand Farmer's mistake, we must remember that a libertarian conception that advocates the existence of free will
(as opposed to determinism) holds that reality itself is not univocal. Even given a certain set of circumstances
and complete information about it, a person can still freely choose whether to do X or Y. If so, we are not dealing here
with a lack of information on our part (an inability to predict), but with a reality that is itself not univocal. In the Talmudic terminology
mentioned above, even the Holy One, blessed be He, does not really know what a person will do, and certainly a supercomputer with infinite computational power will not help
us here. In such a situation, the point is not that we lack the correct answer, but that there simply is no one answer.
We shall call such a state here ontic doubt (ontology is the doctrine of being, part of metaphysics), that is, something
that is not univocal in reality itself, as opposed to epistemic doubt, which concerns our cognition of reality and not reality
itself. To sharpen the distinction further, I will not refer to such a situation as doubt but as ambiguity. Henceforth, doubt
describes for us a state of lack of information on the part of the person, whereas ambiguity is a description of the indeterminacy of
reality itself in such situations.'
Therefore I do not understand why in your answers to me and to the commenter after me you treat free choice (which by definition has no deterministic result in reality) as a state of epistemic ambiguity—where only the information is missing but reality is given.
I will try again to join the last question—as I understand it, from the last answers it perhaps emerges that the concept of 'ontic ambiguity' is narrowed to the definition of specific situations that are indeed ontic, but legal and technical, such as a man who betroths one nonspecific woman out of several women. From this it follows that perhaps a definition is lacking that would contain ontic (physical) ambiguity as a result of free choice, as described.
There is no ontic ambiguity at all in a situation of choice. Before I chose, there is a well-defined state in me and in the world. The assumption that we have free will only says that in the next moment I can do X or Y. So at this moment everything is well-defined. And when I choose, that too will be well-defined. There is no moment at which there prevails a state of reality that is not univocal. What is not univocal is what will be in the next moment, in the sense that it is not derived univocally from the current moment (rather, it is not derived from it at all).
Sorry for flooding an old post.
I thought a lot about this answer. And my question is whether your words imply that the contradiction, so to speak, between free choice and determinism stems from our human perception of the dimension of time. Theoretically, if we could separate one moment from another, or any smallest unit of time from the one before it and the one after it—there is no contradiction—or the concepts become irrelevant, or in fact converge with each other?
Is that what you mean?
I hope the question is understandable.
Have you written about this anywhere and could you point me to it?
Not clear. But see the posts on foreknowledge and free choice, from post 299 onward.
Following post 689, I 'learned' this entire series of posts. And they are absolutely wonderful. (Although regarding retroactive selection there is much to elaborate on and to probe in what you wrote.)
Just to note: from the Biur Halakha in sec. 316 it is clear as you understand it, and not as R. Shlomo Zalman, of blessed memory, understood it, regarding the difference between 'one may drag a bench' etc. and doubtful psik reisha. See there: at the end of his remarks he proves like the Taz from the Ramban that a hot metal vessel that was removed from the fire, where hardening it is not considered psik reisha, because 'perhaps it did not reach the point of hardening even though it became very hot,' etc. See there. And according to R. Shlomo Zalman, what proof did he bring from there? After all, it is obvious that one needs an 'expert' to determine whether it will reach hardening or not, and everyone agrees in that case. It is clear from his words that anything regarding the past, even if difficult to determine, since in people's eyes it is perceived as epistemic doubt, is not similar to 'one may drag a bench' etc., where people think it is ontic doubt. Simple enough.
The genetic structure is not a chain of proteins. It is made of a nitrogenous base, a phosphate group, and a sugar.