Another Look at Free Will (Column 703)

Meir is my good friend on Facebook, and I value him greatly. Which doesn’t stop him from raising utterly absurd arguments. Including what you brought here in his name. Hope that’s ad hominem enough.

If even his friendship with you doesn’t prevent that, then the situation is serious. 🙂

It says “in factsheet” and a few lines later “error” instead of “arguments.”

Thanks. Fixed.

Those were a lot of words to describe the problem that the definition of the term free choice goes beyond the framework of logic and physics.
From a logical standpoint there is only necessity. Randomness cannot be defined, only pseudo-randomness can be defined (not to be confused with the axiom of choice).
Then physicists came along and invented a new term with no logical model, called "true randomness."
Then philosophers came along and they too invented a new term, and called it "free choice." According to them, free choice is neither necessitated nor random. What they were really claiming was that if one agrees that there exists a non-physical term called "consciousness," then one can dress it up with additional concepts. And here, of course, lies the error. The term consciousness, though it is not physical (that is, it cannot be adequately defined in terms of space and motion), is nevertheless logically defined insofar as it can be pointed to, unlike the concept of free choice in the definition above.
The corrected definition should be that choice stems from the internal laws of consciousness. From that standpoint it is completely necessary, but not because of physical necessity, rather because of extra-physical necessity, and thus the redeemer comes to Zion.

Meir Segal’s response on his Facebook page

I was fortunate, and my post reached Rabbi Michael Abraham. Not sarcastically—I’m talking about an overall talented fellow, whose books I have read in the past. It’s gratifying that the post affected people, to the point that they felt a need to send it to their teacher and master, namely Rabbi Mikyab. Link to Rabbi Mikyab’s post in the first comment.

More power to the rabbi, who quoted large portions of my post and did not try to lie or smear things over. My position is presented as it is.

Where is the catch? As always: the later Wittgenstein. Very few people (outside a very particular analytic faculty) deal with him and understand him—and that is why it is so important to me to write about him. People mistakenly attribute to him incorrect approaches (for example logical positivism, something Rabbi Mikyab himself seems to have done in the course of the post), and that is where the problem comes from. Rabbi Mikyab’s mistake is the mistake of all the early interpreters of Wittgenstein (at least three stations: logical positivism, Kripke, the traditionalists), all of whom understood Wittgenstein in the spirit of the old philosophy and did not grasp the magnitude of the revolution he wrought.

As to the substance, I will write a proper post on the matter (I just came out of court), in which I will explain where the point of disagreement with Rabbi Mikyab’s words lies.

In short: Rabbi Mikyab assumes that I deny the meaning of the concept of "necessity" by means of some positive statement; as though I discovered a fact in the world proving that the concept of "necessity" doesn’t work. If that were the case, he would be right: the concept of "necessity" serves us very successfully with respect to the laws of nature, and therefore we should continue to use it (after all, the later Wittgenstein is in favor of everyday language). But that is not what I said. All I said is that the concept of necessity *in its metaphysical sense* is an empty concept. That is, the special use made of it in philosophy (and specifically in the philosophy of free choice) is an empty use, a use invented ad hoc in order to contradict choice. With respect to that use, I maintain, there is no meaning whatsoever—that is, no use—for the expression necessity. Its only use is in the argument against free choice, and that is already begging the question: namely, assuming that there is a "problem" here. In the same way, the concept of "free choice," in the sense that negates the regularity of science, is also useless, since its only use is to feed the "dilemma of free choice." The solution to this pseudo-dilemma is to stop producing ad hoc usages in order to generate problems…

Hello.
1. It does not seem to me that so very few understood the later Wittgenstein. The general meaning of his doctrine is quite clear and simple, aside from details and nuances. It is pragmatism, and when I wrote that this is positivism, I did not mean logical positivism, which characterizes his early doctrine (in the Tractatus), but rather the rejection of metaphysics that also characterizes his later pragmatist doctrine (in his Investigations). When you see language as part of a language game and cancel the need for verification, you replace verification with a model. The condition for using a concept is the existence of a model within the language game. But in my view this is positivism, since it rejects language as an expression of factual meaning in the world. When I say there is choice, I am not engaging in a language game but reporting facts (metaphysical ones). Just as when I say there is now a chair next to me, I am not playing a language game but reporting a fact. Where is the difference? When I say there is free choice, I mean to point to some state of affairs in the world and not to play language games. Such pointing is tested through the question whether it has a pointer—something in the world that it points to, a correlate—even if there is no model or language game within which it is done.
2. I can argue here with Wittgenstein and show that he uses many concepts for which he has no model. And if he does have a model for them, then there is nothing at all for which we have no model. But this argument is unnecessary, because we are not dealing with an interpretation of Wittgenstein but with a metaphysical issue.
3. Interpretive disputes about Wittgenstein are not important for our matter. Whatever Wittgenstein may have intended, what Segal wrote is a baseless argument (whether it is Wittgenstein’s argument or his own). I claim that the concept of free choice definitely does point to a state of affairs in the world, and therefore it has meaning.
4. Contrary to what Segal wrote here, there is no difference whatsoever between necessity in its scientific sense and necessity in its philosophical sense. When people speak about free choice, they come to deny scientific necessity, and nothing else.
5. Despite all of the above, as I noted in my remarks, the use of the term free choice also satisfies Wittgenstein’s condition (superfluous and unnecessary though it is). There is a language model for it, and Segal even supplied it in his own words.
6. As I explained in the column, Segal’s claims regarding quantum theory are mistaken, and their connection to the Wittgensteinian argument does not exist. The physicists did not invent a concept with no model (true randomness), for they themselves use it in a very coherent way and in a broad and varied context; and if that is not a model, I do not know what a model is. Moreover, these claims are backed by empirical findings, so this even satisfies the demands of logical positivism, let alone the pragmatic demands of the later Wittgenstein. Once hidden variables are ruled out (Bell’s inequality and the discussion around it), what remains is true randomness. It may be that Segal is applying the early Wittgenstein here, who demands silence about what cannot be spoken of, but the findings in physics lead us into the territory of randomness. We talk about it and even draw conclusions from it that are empirically testable in the laboratory. To call this an invention and an error in a language game is to ignore reality. This is the accepted approach in interpreting quantum theory, and to call it an incorrect use of language is bizarre. If there is any place where precision in language use exists, it is in mathematics and physics—far more than in any other field (including most philosophy, and even analytic philosophy).
7. So much for randomness and necessity. As for causality, as I explained, again there is a mistake in his words. Hume’s emptying-out of this concept does not touch our discussion. The puzzlement in the face of quantum theory does not stem from causality but from correlation (this is causality in the Humean sense, and that is how physics sees it. Contemporary physics does not speak of efficient cause but of correlations, precisely because of Hume’s claims). Likewise, freedom in the context of choice does not come to contradict the existence of a cause but of a necessary correlation. In my book The Science of Freedom I devoted a chapter to defining causality, that is, the claim that A is the cause of B, and I explained that it has three components: the logical (if A then B), the temporal (A precedes B), and the physical (A brings about B). The physical component, which is the only one Hume challenged, is not needed at all for the discussion. As stated in section 4, the necessity under discussion in debates about free choice is physical-scientific necessity. There is no other concept of necessity, or at least there is no need at all to invoke any other concept.

The author wrote elsewhere, "The physicists did not invent a concept with no model (true randomness), for they themselves use it in a very coherent way and in a broad and varied context; and if that is not a model, I do not know what a model is." Really?
The confusion stems from the difference between a defined probability function, which says nothing (and cannot say anything) about how the distribution came into being, and the physical claim about the existence of a mechanism that produces true randomness. The nature of such a mechanism cannot be defined logically, because randomness is a primitive concept. Any attempt to claim that it is defined by means of simpler primitive concepts will remain in the realm of describing the properties of the distribution, but it will not be able to move over to the manner of formation, because by doing so it would contradict the intention that in true randomness there is no mechanism of formation.
In mathematics it is customary to add the "axiom of choice," which allows us to choose an element from a set without specifying the mechanism by which we chose. Many mathematical theories depend on this mechanism. However, we know that one cannot choose an element "randomly" with a uniform distribution (that is, with equal probability) from every set. For example, there is no uniform probability function on the set of rationals. Here we have a set for which not only has no mechanism of randomness been defined, but it can be shown that no such mechanism can be built. That is, positing randomness ad hoc can sometimes lead to a logical contradiction. If we remain in the world of logic and mathematics, all we have are probability functions that describe the distribution of random variables. If we want to create such a function, we will be forced to use a pseudo-random algorithm. True randomness exists only among physicists, who claim that the particle’s properties are distributed randomly without a generating function.

This is Meir Segal’s scroll
Copied from his Facebook
★Free Choice from a Wittgensteinian Perspective – my post on Rabbi Michael Abraham’s article about the previous post I wrote on the subject (links in the first comment)★

Warning: this will be longer than usual, and also not really suitable for the Facebook platform, but it is what it is.

TL;DR:

Rabbi Michael Abraham missed Wittgenstein’s point. He continues to read him as a traditional philosopher making metaphysical claims about the world (even if negative ones), whereas Wittgenstein denies the very legitimacy of engaging in metaphysical questions (back to the everyday world, the self-evident, uncomplicated one). Wittgenstein emphasized again and again that the philosopher has no authority to produce theses about the world, because that task belongs to the scientist, whereas if the philosopher had any theses, they would be theses agreed upon and obvious to every ordinary householder.

This mistake runs like a scarlet thread through Abraham’s entire article, and is in fact the driving spirit of his article. Because of it he takes me to be a Humean (a disciple of David Hume), and because of it he presses me with irrelevant difficulties, among other things regarding what I wrote about quantum mechanics and the laws of logic.

By the way, I raised a similar claim in another post against Ze’ev Bechler and his excellent book Three Copernican Revolutions (link in the second comment)

To their credit, it should be said that this mistake in understanding Wittgenstein (the later Wittgenstein) is shared by most students, including the greatest analytic philosophers who preceded the latest and more aware interpretations. It took time for the philosophical world, even the analytic one, to internalize the revolutionary message: all philosophical discourse since Plato is one great piece of nonsense, a conceptual fly trapped in a bottle.

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My current post will be divided into three parts:

The first, an explanation of the Wittgensteinian (later) perspective on the issue of choice and determinism. Here I will elaborate far beyond the previous post (this is necessary, in light of Abraham’s and others’ mistaken reading of Wittgenstein). This part will be the longest.

The second, an analysis of various quotations from Abraham’s article in light of the said mistake.

The third, clarification of several points in my previous post, including quantum mechanics and the laws of logic, as well as comments on a number of Abraham’s quotations.

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★Part One – Choice and Determinism in the Spirit of the Later Wittgenstein★

If an omniscient supercomputer existed

I’ll begin at the end. If there were a supercomputer capable of predicting exactly what will happen in the next moment, we would be shaken. The very knowledge that every action and reaction of ours could be predicted would arouse in us deep anxiety. We are used to feeling that we are free, that each choice is our own autonomous one, and in a situation where a supercomputer projects on the screen before us what will happen to us in the next moment, our sense of autonomy would evaporate. We might feel subject to a fate fixed in advance.

And yet, it is doubtful whether such a computer could exist in reality. The moment we became aware of its predictions, we would change our behavior accordingly. The computer would be forced to update the data quickly, and we in turn would again change our reactions. Thus an endless circle of prediction and change would be created, and it is doubtful whether it could be closed. This process shows that there is, ostensibly, an unbridgeable gap between prior knowledge and the ability to predict the future absolutely.

But let us assume for a moment that we overcame this gap, and that such a supercomputer really did exist. In such a state, everything that will happen is known in advance and displayed before us on a big screen. In such a case, our practice would change. We would conduct ourselves differently and feel differently. It is likely that the word "choice" would no longer be used as it is used today—perhaps it would even leave the dictionary—since the lack of knowledge of what will happen at every future moment is part of the criteria for the concept of choice. Our form of life would become something completely different from what we know today, and we would adopt entirely different words.

But we are still not there. Far from it. There is no computer that can tell you what you will do in the next moment, or even what the exact weather will be in a week. Therefore the word "choice" serves us very well. There is no difficulty in it at all. We know science, the laws of nature, the fact that the human brain is affected by various drugs, and still in a normal state the word "choice" serves us flawlessly.

So what is the philosopher claiming? That because nature is built in a "deterministic" way (which hypothetically allows such a supercomputer), already now we have no choice. Basically, something in the world, in nature, is of a kind that does not allow choice.

But why? After all, we have exactly that thing we always had, the thing for which the word "choice" was invented.

But no—the philosopher (the determinist) has something deep to say. He claims that we live in an illusion of choice. We are not in a state of choice, but in an illusion of choice. Why? Because "deterministic" nature simply "forces" us to behave as we do, and therefore this is not really choice.

So the philosopher makes a double move in order to deny choice. First, he claims that the world operates necessarily (all events since the Big Bang had to unfold as they did in light of the state of affairs at the starting point). Second, he claims that choice must be "free of necessity" (that is, not derived from the state of affairs of the Big Bang) in order to count as choice. And since man is part of nature, all his acts are necessary (derived from the state of affairs that prevailed at the Big Bang), and therefore humanity in fact never chose, but was compelled to act as it acts.

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To deny choice you have to use the word "choice"

And here the son asks: if humanity never really chose, what is the meaning of the word "choice" in the philosopher’s argument? After all, in order to claim that "we do not really have choice," the philosopher must by that very token use the word "choice" (to deny X one must use "X"). But if there never was choice, if no state of affairs in the past, present, or future ever amounted to choice, what exactly does the concept "choice" represent, which the philosopher is making such an effort to deny?

This is a critical point, and it is important to clarify it already now. The philosopher tries to deny the existence of choice (that is, to claim that the world does not include it), but this very attempt nullifies, as he speaks, the meaning of the word "choice." This nullification invalidates the philosopher’s claim, because you cannot deny the existence of X if the expression "X" has no meaning whatsoever—just as you cannot deny the existence of T$%2#5. In other words, if it is true that there never was choice, that means that the word "choice" has no meaning, and therefore the sentence "there never was choice" collapses itself (this recalls what happens with the claim "this sentence is false," which, if true, is false, and if false, is true. In both cases the sentence collapses itself and becomes meaningless).

Now then, philosophers throughout the years thought one could use words as one pleased so long as they evoked some picture or feeling in us. Accordingly, the determinist philosopher thought that his argument against choice was valid because it evoked in him a picture and a feeling (a picture of anti-autonomy and coercion). But now the claim arises—still in a rough form—that the philosopher cannot say at all what he says, because to deny choice he must by that very token use a valid concept of "choice."

In this connection, it is important to distinguish between a criterion and a symptom. If you see a wet road, that is a symptom that it rained. But if you see rain falling, that is a criterion that it is raining. You cannot ask how one knows that it is raining when one sees it raining, because the expression "it is raining" was invented and instituted precisely in the situation in which you see the rain. The situation in which you see rain falling and say, "It is raining," is the standard for using the expression "it is raining." If you cast doubt on the rain in that situation, you do nothing except cancel the language game of "it is raining."

And so it is with choice. If you challenge every use ever made of the word "choice," and claim that none of them deserve the name, then you are challenging the criterion of the concept of choice. And challenging a criterion of a concept is not a claim; it is simply the cancellation of a certain language game, removing it from the circulation of language use. But what is the point? Why remove a word from use? In the name of what and for what purpose?

This is an extremely radical claim. According to it, the determinist philosopher is neither right nor wrong, but talking nonsense. He cannot utter what he says without the sentence collapsing into itself. Perhaps he feels something when he says what he says, but that feeling is no better than the dizzying feeling you have when you think about the sentence "this sentence is false."

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"Free choice" – a senseless expression

In an attempt to save the claim, the philosopher may say that he is not denying choice, but only claiming that it is "not free." In doing so he introduces a new word into the system: "free," attached to the good old word "choice," and now he claims the following: we have choice, but not free choice. According to him, this thing-that-we-have belongs to the unfree kind, not the free kind.

In so doing the philosopher "creates" two kinds of choice, the free and the unfree. And again we can ask him: why this creation? What is its meaning and what is its purpose? But worse still: where exactly have you ever encountered, dear philosopher, two kinds of choice, the free and the unfree? When you classify animals into felines and canines, it is because you met different species of animals. But have you ever met different species of choice? Not at all—you encountered only the situation we all know from everyday life, and nothing more. So where did these two kinds suddenly come from?

But the philosopher will insist. In my mind’s eye, he will say, I see two kinds of choice. In my imagination I soar and see an abstract, free choice, like a sparrow, disconnected from the "chains" of nature. That is the choice I want. And I claim that this choice, the sparrow-choice, does not exist in our lowly world. Our lowly world contains the inferior kind of choice, unfree choice, instead of the beautiful kind: free choice.

It is still not clear why the philosopher is striving for that. Why is he so desperate that there should be another choice, different from ours? What strange attraction does he have to this imaginary sparrow, so distant, by his own account, from what we experience in our lives? But be that as it may. So he wants, and so it shall be.

Except that this version of the philosopher ultimately falls into the same failure as the previous version. In fact, says Wittgenstein, there is no meaning at all to the philosopher’s division into two kinds of choice. We never knew two kinds of choice, and there is nothing that can lead us to speak meaningfully about those two kinds. Therefore, talk about the choice of the second kind (the free one, which does not exist in our world) is senseless, and therefore the complaint about the choice that does exist in our world (that it is not of the second kind) is also senseless. (I will return to explain why it makes no sense to speak of two kinds of choice; for the moment I am treating it as a given.)

So one can distinguish Wittgenstein clearly from traditional philosophers: traditional philosophers discussed a question of existence—whether free choice exists in our world or not. Wittgenstein, by contrast, refuses to accept the very question, since in his view the words embedded in it have no meaning at all. According to Wittgenstein, both the expression "free choice" and the expression "unfree choice" are nonsense, exactly like the expression T$%2#5, and therefore the question cannot even be raised.

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A necessary world – a meaningless expression

The same analysis we made of the concept of choice can be made of the concept of necessity.

For what does the determinist say? That the world as we know it must operate as it does (because it is derived from its initial conditions at the Big Bang). In so doing he divides possible ways the world might operate into two kinds: the necessary and the non-necessary. Of the two possibilities, the philosopher of free choice would very much like the non-necessary kind to obtain, while the philosopher of determinism claims that, regrettably, the necessary kind obtains.

But there is no meaning at all to this division into two kinds—necessary world-operation and non-necessary world-operation—because all we have is the world’s operation as we know it! (Just as it makes no sense to distinguish between free choice and unfree choice, because all we have is simply choice.) Therefore, you cannot discuss whether the world’s operation is necessary or not when the expression "necessary" (in its present use) is empty.

Let me explain. The world is known to us exactly as it is. The sun rises, and in all likelihood it will rise tomorrow too. Cars travel on the road, and will probably continue to travel tomorrow too. All these are basic facts constituting what we call "the world." There is neither need nor meaning in speaking of the world’s "lawfulness" as something separate from the world, because in order for us to know a world at all, in order for us to speak of "things" at all, the stability of the world is already implicit in that, the fact that it has a form. If the world had no form, we could not speak of a world. And now that there is a world—the one familiar to us—it makes no sense to say that it is necessary or non-necessary, because those expressions tell us nothing. The world is, well, simply a world.

In other words, the laws of nature are neither necessary nor non-necessary—they are simply the laws of nature. By adding the word "necessary" to the sentence or removing it, we have done nothing. There is no difference between the sentence "the sun will rise tomorrow" and the sentence "the sun will necessarily rise tomorrow"—both simply say the same thing: that the sun will rise tomorrow. And if the sign "necessity" does nothing, then it is a dead letter. The result is that there is no meaning at all to the division into two kinds of world-operation, necessary and non-necessary, and therefore all the talk on the subject is senseless.

Here it is important to note that the words "freedom" and "necessity" are not empty, because they have uses in everyday life in different contexts. But this specific pairing the philosopher makes—in the expressions "free choice" and "necessary world-operation"—creates senseless expressions. Just as "triangle" and "happy" are each useful on their own, but combining them into "happy triangle" creates a senseless expression. Thus the philosopher’s questions, "is choice free?" and "does the world operate necessarily?" are senseless.

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The ground in which meaning grows

After explaining the Wittgensteinian principle, it is time to dive a bit more deeply into the way Wittgenstein denies meaning. I cannot expand too much, because I would have to rewrite Wittgenstein’s whole thought, but I will nevertheless mention several main elements. Among them: meaning-as-use, practice, and form of life. I will address them briefly, but hopefully sufficiently to illuminate the point.

Wittgenstein shows that the meaning of a sentence is not the picture that arises in you when you say the sentence, but its use. Contrary to what was previously thought—that meaning is separate from use, that first we understand the sentence (in some kind of mental illumination) and only then use it—in fact there is no "gap" between meaning and use. The sentence is a raw tool with no life in it apart from actual use within a community. Were it not for the practice in which that sentence simply works, the sentence would be a meaningless sound. The sentence comes alive only within practice, and is therefore subject to it. Practice is formed in a state of pre-consciousness (for consciousness already requires language, and that does not exist before practice) within a form of life sustained by the community.

One proof of this is the rule-following paradox. Wittgenstein shows that every rule is open to countless interpretations, and there is nothing that decides among them. This is not merely a skeptical problem of guessing what the rule’s creator meant, but an essential problem—the rule was never formed at all. The creator of the rule never envisaged its infinite applications, and therefore no path of the rule was ever fixed. How, then, are there nevertheless rules? How do we all know how to orient ourselves according to a rule in a way that creates normativity of right and wrong? Well—practice. Only when there is a form of life constituting a practice in which certain ways work and others do not does the rule come alive. Rule and interpretation are two parts of the same system: practice. (What I wrote here very briefly is one of the most important arguments in twentieth-century philosophy—so says the philosopher Kripke.)

For this reason, a philosopher who tries to invent a new language that in essence only he can understand will accomplish nothing. The signs in the philosopher’s thought will be dead signs, which create no rules and therefore are not language. Without rules, which depend on human practice, there can be no normativity of right and wrong, and no "move" takes place. The philosopher may imagine that he is saying something (and indeed he imagines this), but imagining something does not mean that something takes place. This is, in very brief form, Wittgenstein’s famous "private language argument," which shows that an individual cannot create for himself a language that is not anchored in public practice.

Now let us return to the issue of choice. When the philosopher shuts his eyes and concentrates hard while saying "free choice" or "a necessary world," he is doing nothing if his words have no move in human practice. And these words have no move in practice, because according to the philosopher no state of affairs ever, at any time, constitutes free choice or a non-necessary world. Therefore these expressions are senseless, and accordingly all claims on the subject of choice and determinism—both affirmative and negative—are senseless.

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The dissolution of the philosophical question of choice and determinism

What does this leave us with? With what we started with: human behaviors and laws of nature. There is no contradiction between them and no difficulty in them. We know these pieces of reality well, and we know how to talk about them without difficulty. And indeed, if we were in a state where a supercomputer told us at every moment what would happen, our form of life would change, and practice with it, and probably there would no longer be room to speak of choice as we do today. But when there is no such computer, when we do not know what will happen in the next moment, there is no meaning in saying that we do not choose. On the contrary: we choose just as we have always chosen, and that is all there is to say, doctor.

This is, in a nutshell, Wittgenstein’s vision. He does not answer the traditional questions; rather, he shows how they dissolve. They are based on senseless combinations, and therefore there is nothing to answer in the first place. Incidentally, just as Wittgenstein dissolves the difference between free choice and unfree choice, and between necessary world-operation and non-necessary world-operation, so too he dissolves other "pairs" that frightened philosophy, including realism-idealism.

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★Part Two: Response to Abraham’s Claims★

After explaining all this, I will return to my previous post and respond to Abraham’s claims.

Generally speaking, as I prefaced, Abraham’s mistake stems from the fact that he reads Wittgenstein as an "ordinary" philosopher. Abraham expects a thesis from Wittgenstein about the world, and in accordance with that expectation also "finds" the thesis. But this is contrary to Wittgenstein’s words, who repeatedly says that the philosopher cannot introduce new theses.

As a result, Abraham reads Wittgenstein (and therefore me) as someone who says that the property of necessity does not exist in the world. But this is of course a critical mistake: Wittgenstein does not answer the question whether necessity exists in the world (positively or negatively), but denies the very meaning of the question. He does not claim that there is no X, but that there is no meaning to "X."

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Wittgenstein is not David Hume

Because of the aforementioned mistake, already at the beginning (in the fifth paragraph from the start) Abraham writes as follows:

"His first claim (meaning mine, M.H.) is that the concept of ‘necessity’ that we use in this discussion is empty of content. We can observe facts, but we have no way to ascertain their necessity. It is only our assumption that it could not have been otherwise."

Good heavens, Abraham. That is exactly the opposite of what I said. By saying that "we have no way to ascertain their necessity" and that "it is only our assumption that it could not be otherwise," you accept the meaning of "the existence of necessity," and merely claim that there is no proof of its existence. But that is exactly what I denied! I denied the very meaning of the expression "necessity" (in this use), and in light of that denial it makes no sense at all to speak of proof or conjecture regarding the existence of necessity, just as it makes no sense to speak of proof or conjecture regarding the existence of T$%2#5.

It is hard to exaggerate the gravity of this mistake, because it is the whole point of Wittgenstein.

Never mind—perhaps this is just a slip of the pen. But no. Later on Abraham quotes David Hume as though I stopped at David Hume. Thus he writes (in the paragraph after the heading "Leap to the quanta – God’s dice"):

"Beyond that, even if the concept of necessity is empty of content in the Humean sense, that is, that there is only regularity of phenomena and no causality, there is still necessity. The necessity is not because of causality but because of the correlation."

Here Abraham tries to show that regularity produces necessity even without causality. But in doing so he again misses the point. After all, no one denied the laws of nature, and no one thought for a moment that the world does not operate as it does. All that was said is that the fact that the world operates as it does does not include the added term "necessity" (because it is meaningless). And after all, the determinist’s whole aim is to add something to the facts, not merely repeat them. And in this he does not succeed. Beyond repeating the facts, there is no use—and therefore no meaning—to any of the words the philosopher adds, including the word "necessity."

Following from this, Abraham takes me to be a Humean. Thus he writes (ibid.):

"Now I will ask David Hume, Segal’s teacher and master… would not the Humean Segal stand astonished if something happened before his eyes that contradicted the laws of nature?"

Well, Abraham, this is a colossal failure in reading comprehension. Where in my post did it come up that I am a Humean? On the contrary, I repeatedly made clear that I am a later-Wittgensteinian, and I even wrote explicitly that David Hume discovered nothing revolutionary but rather a trivial truth (contrary to what he himself thought and what Kant thought in his wake). For that purpose I will quote word for word from my original post (end of part D):

"This discovery of Hume was a philosophical shock. Kant testified that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumber and caused him an entire Copernican revolution. But if we return for a moment to the analysis of the concept of necessity, we understand that Hume’s discovery is not dramatic at all, but natural and trivial. Why?

Because if every necessity is logical, and all logic is the withholding of meaning from signs, then the request that science be necessary is an empty request. Why? Because this model of ‘necessity’ that Hume sought to apply to science does not exist at all. We have no such model of necessity that we could ask to be present in science.

Let me clarify this point because it is super-important. When we complain that the laws of physics are not necessary, we are trying to say something. We supposedly expect the laws of physics to embody a certain property, necessity, and then are disappointed when that does not happen. But what turns out? That this property is empty; it has no meaning at all. Therefore our statement is empty and our disappointment unnecessary."

End quote.

I think the matter is self-evident. I am not a Humean but a Wittgensteinian. Hume thought he was discovering something about the world, namely that necessity and certainty are somehow missing from it. That is a thesis (even if a skeptical one) about the world. But I am shouting myself hoarse all the while that there is no meaning at all to the expression "necessity" in its determinist use, and therefore I neither want nor can put forward a thesis on the subject.

Apparently Abraham so completely missed the Wittgensteinian essence that he was forced, with no alternative, to read me as a Humean. Abraham, it seems, is entirely "deaf" to the sounds of Wittgensteinian "meaninglessness," so that he hears it only in the only sounds he knows: Humean ones. This is a deep and regrettable misunderstanding.

Accordingly, Abraham also misunderstands the induction part. Thus he writes (ibid.):

"Why are you so sure that the second thesis is preferable? After all, you yourself claimed that induction is only our mode of thought and has no validity in itself."

Oh no. I did not claim that induction has no validity in itself; rather, I claimed that the expression "validity in itself" in the context of induction is a senseless expression. The failure is the same failure: Abraham thinks there is meaning to the expression "induction validated by its own power," and that I am presenting a thesis denying that validation. But no! All I am saying is that there is no meaning whatsoever to the expression "induction validated by its own power," and therefore both affirming it and denying it are pure nonsense. It is hard to exaggerate this basic misunderstanding, which goes to the very heart of the Wittgensteinian matter.

To Abraham’s credit I can grant two points. First, perhaps I dwelt too long on David Hume’s arguments (it was as a temporary "scaffold" for the sake of clarification, but perhaps it confused matters). Second, many good people have erred in understanding Wittgenstein in just this way, right up until recent generations.
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Later, Abraham is half-aware of Wittgenstein’s attempt to show the lack of meaning in concepts, but claims not to agree with him. Thus he writes (in the third paragraph under the heading "Wittgenstein’s criterion"):

"Wittgenstein decided, with no reason whatsoever, that we must have a model in order to use a concept, and he also decided what counts as a sufficient model for that purpose. Again, Wittgenstein is entitled to hold whatever position he wants, but when attacking something one has to raise arguments and not make do with invoking Wittgenstein’s name. Ad hominem or ad populum are not arguments."

Well, Wittgenstein did not decide; he showed and proved how language works, on what it depends (normativity and rules), and why without practice there is no language. I elaborated on this a bit above, but of course that is only a drop in the ocean, and I cannot write out all of Wittgenstein’s thought. I will only say this: the original post did not purport to present Wittgenstein’s whole doctrine, but only to apply it to the issue of free choice.

Following from this (in the third paragraph under the heading "Reservation"), Abraham continues:

"All of Wittgenstein’s demands (although in themselves I think they are unnecessary) are satisfied in the fullest way. So what is the problem? That we use it outside the model? Why is this outside the model? A model always gives meaning to our concepts, and now we use them also in other contexts, no? Does the demand for a model require us not to go beyond it? That is, is no use of concepts possible beyond the contexts in which we learned them? Thus the world of thought is supposed to get stuck in the places we were born with."

Heaven forbid. We can continue to develop and expand the concepts we know, but always in subordination to and in dialogue with something that has an application in practice. If we discover a new island in the ocean or a new animal, we can apply familiar concepts to it or consider introducing a new sign. If we discover a new feeling or a new taste, we can apply old concepts to it or consider introducing a new sign. But here we have discovered nothing! The determinist discovers nothing new when he redescribes the familiar pieces of reality with the pejorative labels "determinism" or "unfree choice." Therefore the determinist says nothing. And producing sounds with one’s throat does not constitute meaning.

It seems to me that Abraham, although he sometimes says the right words, does not understand/internalize Wittgenstein’s radicality. Wittgenstein is not a regular philosopher making claims about the world, but one who empties of content almost every philosophical statement ever made. No less.

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★Part Three – A Few Additional Notes on Abraham’s Article★

I have many comments on Abraham’s article, but so as not to weary the reader, and so that the message remain clear, I will not expand further (for sometimes whoever adds detracts, and one cannot see the forest for the trees). Still, a brief comment on a few points.

1. David Hume: as I explained above, I am not a Humean but a Wittgensteinian. I used Hume’s arguments differently from the way he himself used them. Hume himself was still under the impression that there is meaning to "necessity" and "certainty" (in the Cartesian use), and only thought he had found their negation (or the possibility of doubting them). By contrast, I used Hume’s arguments only to show that there is no meaning to the split between necessary world-operation and non-necessary world-operation. I tried to show that since we never encountered causality-itself as a separate piece of reality, the expression "causality-itself" is an empty and senseless expression. And since we have no concept of a justification for induction because induction is the ground of justifications, the expression "justification for induction" is a senseless expression.

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2. The laws of logic: the discussion of them was brief, not exhaustive, and also not critical to the core of the argument. The goal was to show that the necessity familiar to us from logic is not some deep metaphysical thing (which, as stated, is senseless), but the simple fact that no use has been found in our practice for certain combinations of signs. To this I added that some philosophers thought quantum mechanics makes it possible to give meaning to the signs found in the law of excluded middle, and thereby remove it from the list of the laws of logic. This point is not critical, and in fact I largely agree with Abraham: nothing special has been discovered in quantum mechanics that justifies revising the law of excluded middle. But all that is secondary to the main point: the claim that logic is not the discovery of something in the world or in the meta-world (metaphysics), but a grouping of unusable signs (of a certain kind) in our practice.

Following from this, Abraham attributes utter nonsense to me, as though I claimed that quantum mechanics proves that logic collapses or something of the sort. Thus he writes (in the second paragraph under the heading "Formal necessity = empty of content"):

"How many times in the past have I already explained that there is no way to measure laws of logic in the laboratory? Logic is the framework within which scientific discussion takes place, and therefore it is not subject to scientific findings. Even the measuring instruments by means of which we gathered the findings of quantum theory were built on the basis of binary logic."

It sounds as though he understood me as claiming that quantum mechanics "collapsed" the law of excluded middle. Well, not at all. Logic cannot be collapsed, because logic only says that certain signs have no meaning in our practice. The only thing one can take from quantum mechanics (and some philosophers indeed tried to do so) is that some use was found, however strange, for a word-combination resembling the law of excluded middle. What is that use? Well: scientific use as it is, no more and no less. In any event, there is no discovery here, but the trivial statement that if you have given meaning to signs, then they have meaning. That is all.

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3. Quantum mechanics. It was smuggled into the post through two "windows": the discussion of the law of excluded middle, and the discussion of "necessary world-operation." The link to quantum mechanics is also not critical to the core of the argument. Still, a word on Einstein and the quanta. First, see what Abraham himself writes on the subject (end of the second paragraph under the heading "Leap to the quanta – God’s dice"):

"If so, the same applies to Einstein’s puzzlements regarding quantum theory. His astonishment is entirely understandable even if one adopts Hume’s theses. Would not the Humean Segal stand amazed if something happened before his eyes that contradicted the laws of nature? For example, a stone that remains standing in the air, or a person who lives despite never having eaten or drunk all his life. I very much doubt it."

Well, this is a radical mistake. Quantum mechanics does not contradict everyday regularity and cannot contradict it. On the contrary, it fit the observed regularities better than any other theory (and therefore, I think, it is considered the most empirically confirmed scientific theory). So what is nevertheless the problem with this theory? That it supposedly does not accord with "common sense." And what is this common sense? That same imagined picture of the metaphysician, in whose thought the concept of "necessity" has taken up residence. The metaphysician draws in his consciousness a kind of picture of a machine in which every part is connected to the other and supposedly "drags it by force" like a train car and trailer. Well, quantum mechanics does indeed contradict that picture, for the simple reason that this picture contributes nothing to summarizing and predicting the new facts. But why draw that picture at all? Where did the initial idea come from of forcing that imagined picture onto the world?

So it is not the discoveries of the quanta that are the problem, but our conceptualization of the world. It is the conceptualization of old metaphysics that collapses in quantum theory, and in that respect Einstein was entirely an old-style metaphysician. But according to Wittgenstein there is no problem in this: the conceptualization, that is, the picture, was never the story to begin with, but an auxiliary tool (and sometimes just a side effect) of our form of life. And once our form of life continues as it was, along with the language games of laws of nature and choice, there is no difficulty at all. On the contrary, quantum mechanics will prove that new and more efficient pictures are possible for everyday usefulness, and we will welcome them gladly. All this on condition, and subject to the condition, that we do not treat the new pictures ("a soup of possibilities"; "a superposition state") in a way that goes beyond usefulness—that is, beyond the practical and everyday application of quantum mechanics.

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4. Two kinds of necessity: in the second paragraph under the heading "Two kinds of necessity," Abraham writes as follows:

"From what he says below it clearly appears that he did not notice that on its face this distinction is equivalent to the distinction he made above between logical necessity and physical necessity… the second formulation does not deal with logical necessity but with physical necessity. It says that if X happened then it happened necessarily. But even that is not true. The second claim is not only not necessary; it is not true on the logical level. The very occurrence of X does not mean that it was necessary…"

It is not clear what Abraham is trying to do here. He claims I did not notice that the distinction is equivalent, only to say afterward that the distinction is actually mistaken—since "occurrence" is not "necessary occurrence." But if the distinction is mistaken, why complain that I did not notice it?

As to the substance, what Abraham says in the latter part is exactly what I wrote. Here is a quotation from my words (part B):

"The difference is immense. In the first sentence we are merely repeating the meaning above, namely that if X then X. By contrast, in the second sentence we add information about what was—that it was in a necessary way, meaning it could not have failed to be."

That is exactly—precisely—what Abraham said in the latter part of the quoted passage.

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To sum up, Abraham’s cascading mistake is this: he reads me as though I deny necessity in a positive sense. As though I surveyed the world and discovered that necessity is not found in it. But not so. I [and the philosopher] have no "say" in the facts of the world, and we do not know what is in it and what is not. Only the scientist can discover things about the world. But after the scientist discovers what he discovers, the philosopher’s role arrives: to analyze concepts and see which of them are useful in practice [and therefore have meaning], and which are not useful in practice [and therefore are meaningless].

The final claim is that concepts such as "free choice" [and therefore "unfree choice"], as well as "determinism" [and therefore "indeterminism"], are concepts that are not useful in any practice, and therefore are meaningless.

Meir’s bottom line (summarized in the last paragraph of his scroll): there is no meaning at all to talking about "necessity" in the relations between world, person, and language. And that is absolutely necessary. Mysticism?

In your opinion, does God have free will, or does He always do the good?
In essence the question is whether free will depends on the existence of weakness of will, or whether choosing the bad option is possible even when the information is given (it is clear what is good and what is bad) and there is no urge to choose evil. In principle, there could also be a situation in which several options are equal in value, but even in that case it is not clear that it is right to speak of choice rather than an arbitrary decision mechanism (as in the example of elections in Switzerland that you spoke about, or in Libet’s experiment as opposed to Mudrik’s experiment).

I didn’t understand the question. I think He has free will and He wants the good. But this is somewhat a matter of definition.

What do you mean by saying that it is a matter of definition?

I mean that you can call it free will or not. It depends on how you define the concept of free will.

Could you elaborate, please?