Choice, Lesson 2

Table of Contents

• [0:00] Introduction to the series on choice and freedom
• [1:16] The paradox of the demand for repentance
• [3:10] Converting values: from Litvak culture to Hasidism
• [9:46] The conflict between taste and health in repentance
• [12:26] Determinism versus freedom: van Inwagen’s argument
• [15:41] Are we born with basic values?
• [20:22] Descartes’ cogito: thought and existence
• [26:19] Spirit and matter: do two entities exist?
• [27:49] The connection between determinism and materialism
• [29:55] Brain research and the current scientific consensus
• [31:50] Libet’s experiments and their connection to free choice
• [33:50] Legal implications of neuroscience
• [36:12] The bias of scientists and philosophers in interpreting science
• [40:45] The story of Professor Yosef Neumann and atheism
• [42:36] The discussion about the color green and whether it exists in consciousness
• [53:32] Life as chemistry and death
• [54:42] The debate over determinism and quantum theory
• [56:18] Compatibilism versus determinism
• [58:30] Ethics in religious and non-religious society

Summary

General overview

The speaker continues a series on free choice through the paradox involved in the demand to repent: repentance is understood as a demand to change one’s value system, but if a person already believes in the new values then he is already “there,” and if he does not believe in them, then he has no reason to initiate the change. He connects this difficulty to the very concept of choice itself and explains why Maimonides places the discussion of choice in the laws of repentance, because repentance means “returning to being one who chooses.” He distinguishes between materialism and determinism as independent questions, but explains how in practice brain research and physicalism create an affinity with determinism and produce an apparently scientific consensus that seeps into law, morality, and the religious-secular discourse, often by mixing up facts and interpretation and raising confused arguments even by very smart people.

Repentance as the paradox of changing values

The speaker opens with the command “And you shall choose life” and asks why it is not counted among the commandments, comparing this to the puzzling status of the commandment of repentance in Maimonides, where “there is no commandment to repent, but there is an obligation to repent.” He formulates a philosophical absurdity: demanding that a person repent is demanding that he change the value system that caused him to sin, yet such a change is not intelligible as a self-initiated mechanism. He presents a dilemma about the identity of the agent: if the Holy One, blessed be He, changes the person, then “He repented, not me”; and if the person himself repents, then who is this “I” that changes itself, and on the basis of what value standard does it decide?

Weakness of will, hierarchy of desires, and the diet example

The speaker addresses the claim that repentance is just a matter of weakness of will, and emphasizes that even when a person “falls,” he acts according to the total set of his actual desires, not against his values. He defines “wanting” as an overall balance that weighs value considerations, interests, and hedonism, and gives the example of a diet, where a person who eats whipped-cream cake did not “want the diet” more than he wanted to eat. He argues that the call “repent” means turning the hierarchy of the value scale upside down, but then the same problem returns: if the person already believes that health comes first, there is no need for repentance, and if he does not believe that, there is no reason for him to change.

A ba’al teshuvah in contemporary jargon versus a ba’al teshuvah in the Sages

The speaker distinguishes between “someone returning in repentance” in the contemporary sense of moving from secularity to religiosity, which requires persuasion, and a “ba’al teshuvah” in the literature of the Sages, which means a person who “believed from the outset,” sinned, and needs to return to his original values. He argues that the paradox he wants to analyze especially concerns the second case: a person who already accepts the religious values and still does not obey, so the question becomes how the inner transition takes place that makes obedience into the central value. He connects this to the claim that repentance means returning to being a chooser, and therefore the tangle within repentance is an expression of the basic difficulty in the concept of choice.

Van Inwagen’s argument against choice and the distinction between choice and indeterminism

The speaker presents Peter van Inwagen’s determinist argument: if there is a sufficient cause for an act, then there is no choice, because the cause compels it; and if there is no cause, then it is random, and so again there is no choice. He argues that the mistake is identifying “no compelling cause” with indeterminism, and suggests that choice and indeterminism are two different mechanisms that are not governed by a compelling cause. He connects this to the earlier paradox in order to argue that the failure comes from a conception that begins with a value system as an axiom and ignores “something prior” that adopts the system.

The self and the map: a category mistake in looking for an agent inside the structure

The speaker brings an analogy from a psychology article at Bar-Ilan that looked for “where the self is located” on the psychoanalytic map, and argues that this is a mistaken search, because “the self is the very thing the map describes,” not a component inside the map. He applies this to values: adopting a basic value system cannot be carried out according to some prior value standard, because then that standard would already belong to the adopted system. He raises a parallel question about the source of values themselves: if they are inborn, then there is no decision here; and if they are chosen, the question arises according to what they were chosen. All these questions converge on the problem of “the something prior” connected to the self.

Materialism and determinism: two independent questions

The speaker organizes the discussion around two questions that people often mix together: materialism as an ontological question about what exists in the world, and determinism as a question about compulsion and freedom in decisions. He argues that there is no necessary conceptual link between the two, and illustrates possibilities such as a deterministic dualist and a non-deterministic materialist, including mention of non-deterministic interpretations of quantum theory. He mentions Leibowitz’s book The Psycho-Physical Problem as a book that deals with materialism and body-soul relations, not the question of determinism.

Descartes, the cogito, and the priority of the mental

The speaker explains Descartes’ cogito ergo sum as the discovery of a necessary assumption that cannot be denied, “I think,” unlike claims such as “I walk,” which already presuppose existence. He emphasizes that the cogito does not prove that there is a body, but that there is “a thinking being,” and therefore presents an intuitive reversal: what is clear is the existence of spirit, or the mental, and only afterward does the question of matter arise. He adds that the inference to the existence of matter is also made by means of thought, that is, by a mental process, and clarifies that his use of the terms mental and spiritual is not always identical in every conception.

Why people nevertheless connect physicalism to determinism

The speaker says that the practical connection comes from the claim that the laws of physics of “everyday life” are deterministic, and that according to accepted views there are no quantum effects relevant to mechanisms like neurons. He defines “physicalism” as an expansion of materialism that includes fields and all of physics, and argues that if one accepts physicalism, then one is usually drawn toward determinism as a factual claim about the world, not as a conceptual conclusion. He emphasizes that dualism too can coexist with determinism, for example if “spirit is a function of matter” and dictated by its processes.

The consensus in brain research, Libet’s experiments, and the displacement of philosophy

The speaker describes a broad consensus among brain researchers in favor of a materialist and determinist view, and the feeling that determinism is presented to students as a scientific fact rather than as a philosophical question. He mentions Libet’s experiments from the late 1970s and the fact that Libet himself believed in free choice but interpreted his findings as a blow that forced him to grapple with determinism. He argues that moving the question into the laboratory creates the impression that the issue has been “closed,” while in practice many people confuse findings with worldview because scientists often lack philosophical skill and philosophers often lack scientific skill.

Legal implications: responsibility, brain scans, and the slippery slope

The speaker describes a trend, especially in the United States, of bringing neuroscience into the legal world in order to determine criminal responsibility through brain scans and not only through psychological or psychiatric evaluations. He presents an extreme possibility that arises from determinism: if behavior can be predicted, then “why wait until he sins,” and that could justify punishment or imprisonment in advance. He argues that judges cannot really critique experts’ claims, and the determinist interpretation sneaks in as objective science, while the caution that is offered is only against temporary lack of knowledge, not against principled limits of scientific explanation.

Religious and secular people, humanism, and Yuval Noah Harari

The speaker argues that a cultural correlation has been created between religiosity and dualism/libertarianism, and between secularity and materialism/determinism, and that this turns the discussion into an identity conflict that makes clarification difficult. He criticizes what he sees as an internal contradiction in secular humanist thought, which glorifies the human being but adopts determinism that reduces the human being to a “grasshopper” or a “sophisticated worm.” He gives an example from Yuval Noah Harari, who writes that human beings have rights in the same sense that grasshoppers have rights, and presents this as a conceptual problem in a world that constructs the human being as a materialist machine.

The Yosef Neumann anecdote and the denial of the mental

The speaker recounts a conversation with Professor Yosef Neumann, an atheist, materialist, and determinist, who argued that one cannot deny the existence of mental processes like emotions, thoughts, and fears even if one explains them as a function of matter. He presents Neumann’s position as consistent: the mental exists, but it does not require an additional spiritual substance; and in contrast he criticizes others who deny the mental because it is hard to explain within a materialist framework. He argues that saying “it’s an illusion” does not escape the problem, because an “illusion” itself is a mental thing, and he connects this back to the principle “I think, therefore I am.”

The perception of the color green and the distinction between a physical process and an experience

The speaker explains that there is no “green color” in the external world, only a wavelength of an electromagnetic field, and the experience of “green light” exists only in consciousness as a result of translation by the sensory and cognitive system. He argues that identifying the electromagnetic wave with the experience of green is a conceptual mistake, and distinguishes between the claim that one can explain experience without positing anything beyond physics and the mistaken claim that there is no experience at all. He cites Moore’s argument “Here is one hand” as an analogy for insisting on the obviousness of experience.

Compatibilism and defining freedom as “no external interference”

The speaker presents compatibilism as the view that one can hold both determinism and still speak of free will, so long as the person does what he decided and no external factor prevents him from carrying it out. He presents the criticism that compatibilists define “decides” as an electrical process in the brain, and comments that one could just as well call that “cock-a-doodle-doo,” meaning a semantic change that does not solve the question of what a decision actually means. He notes that this is a common view among philosophers today, and mentions Eliezer Malkiel’s book as an excellent defense of it, even though he himself “doesn’t agree with a word” within his own framework of thought.

Ciechanover, brain plasticity, and confusion over the concept of determinism

The speaker quotes Aharon Ciechanover, who says “everything is chemistry” and describes death as the disappearance of spirit, emotions, and intelligence, while continuity is entrusted to the “chemical reactions” of life. He presents Ciechanover’s claim that brain plasticity is “great news for opponents of determinism” because the environment shapes us, and calls this a mistake that confuses philosophical determinism with determinism in the research-biological sense of “innateness determines.” He argues that environmental influence can be no less deterministic, and that in such a case the deterministic unit is the overall world-person system.

A basic definition of free choice and its conditions of possibility

The speaker defines free choice as the view that, contrary to deterministic laws of physics, there is in a person an element that is not subject to them. He sets out three conditions: the existence of several possibilities, a real ability to choose any one of them, and the ability to carry out the decision without external coercion. He ends with this as a transition from the preliminaries to a systematic clarification of the concept, after having clarified the motivations, implications, and central confusions in contemporary discourse.

Last time I started the series on choice, free will, choice, and I said by way of introduction that parts of this topic wouldn’t, at first glance, look like a Torah discussion, and I said that afterward I’d put out a written edition with Rashi, and then everything would be fine. And today, today we’re here, and maybe we’ll start getting into, really, the more general aspects. Let me remind you: last time I basically gave a general introduction. I started with the commandment in the Torah, “and choose life,” and with the question of why it isn’t counted among the commandments. In that context I brought a similar question about repentance—the commandment of repentance—where in Maimonides it seems that there is no commandment to repent, but there is an obligation to repent. I explained the difference between a commandment and an obligation, but I asked: why? Meaning, there is an obligation—one must do it—but there is no commandment, because there is nothing to command regarding such a thing. I explained why there is nothing to command regarding such a thing within that explanation, and I tried to illustrate the absurdity; that’s where we ended last time. I tried to illustrate the absurdity in demanding that a person repent, because demanding that a person repent is basically demanding that a person change his value system. If until now he had a certain value system that led him to sin, then he is supposed to fix that so he won’t ever again come to that sin—or at least to get into a state such that, if you’re in it, then you won’t sin. I said that this doesn’t necessarily have to be realized later on in practice. And the question is: what is the meaning of such a demand? What does it mean to tell me to change my value system? I hold by value system X, and then they tell me no, no, turn it into Y. So I say: that’s what I think; that’s my value system. So if the conclusion Y follows from value system X, then I understand: I have value system X, from it I infer some conclusion, and okay, that’s what I need to do. But if it doesn’t follow from there, then from the outset everything was actually fine. Rather, we’re talking about a system that doesn’t follow from X, some other alternative system, and then I’m called upon to change that thing deliberately. I said that one of two things must be true: either the Holy One, blessed be He, changes it in me, and then of course He repented, not me. Meaning, He did repentance on me, as it were—He transformed me, turned me around in repentance—which doesn’t seem to be what is being demanded of a person, to repent on his own initiative. But on the other hand, when I repent, who is this one who is doing the repenting, and upon whom is it being done? Meaning, if I believe in value system Y and therefore I want to change myself from X to Y, then I already believe in Y, so I don’t need to change—I’ve already crossed over. And if I don’t believe in Y, then why would I change my worldview from X to Y? Meaning, convince me that Y is right—why on earth would I do such a thing? I don’t really understand. For example, there were people who were Lithuanians and became Hasidim. And it took time. Not everyone is perfect, right. Not everyone is perfect, I’m saying. It’s just an example. Or some became Zionists or something. What’s the question? Over time they learned and so on and went through a process until they changed. No, again—you’re saying that a person changes his position and his values. Obviously. That’s exactly why I’m saying there is a kind of paradox here. Meaning, if I thought a person can’t change his position and his values, then we can close up shop and go home. But the problem is that we can’t understand how it happens. Meaning, on the one hand it happens, but when you look at the mechanism—how does this thing work—you basically get stuck; you just don’t know how. It’s like, I think I once mentioned the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, right? Meaning, Achilles never catches the tortoise. You all know that idea, I’m sure: he gives the tortoise a head start, when he reaches where the tortoise was, the tortoise has already gone a little farther; when he reaches there, the tortoise has gone a little farther still; and therefore, even though Achilles can run many times faster than the tortoise, he’ll never catch it. So a lot of times I hear what you’re saying—okay, sure, but we see that Achilles catches the tortoise. Obviously. That’s why it’s a paradox. Meaning, if the conclusion were that Achilles won’t catch the tortoise, then what’s the problem? Fine, Achilles doesn’t catch the tortoise—what’s so difficult? The paradox is that it’s obvious to us that that’s not true; the only question is how—where can we put our finger on what’s wrong in the argument? Meaning, what’s the problem? A paradox is a kind of riddle. We know the answer; we just ask what the reasoning is for the answer—how does it happen? So here too, I agree entirely that a person changes his worldview and outlook and values. The only question is how this thing happens—what is the mechanism? And apparently this mechanism doesn’t work. We can’t understand it. Right, to reconsider his values. Reconsider in light of what? What’s the standard? There is some other force. In the Torah? But if you—in the Torah there are certain values. Those are words. My previous standard was also the Torah? No. No. So now why should I accept the Torah as the standard? If he is persuaded—if he’s persuaded, that’s something else. So I said, I prefaced this last time: if you want to bring me back in repentance in the contemporary sense, meaning to turn a secular person into a religious one, fine, then you have to convince him. But if you want him to repent—to be a penitent in the original sense—that’s not what today we call someone who “becomes religious.” No, but there are people who really are faithful to much of the Torah, and they sin; they don’t manage. Exactly! That’s who I’m talking about! Right! He knows he has to do a certain thing, but he doesn’t live up to it, so he tries. So we discussed that last time. I said that this argument is an argument from weakness of will, and I explained why the argument from weakness of will doesn’t solve the problem, because in the end you always do what you do. Yes. I apologize if I’m repeating something you said last time because I wasn’t here, but just as in a state there are laws that can be changed and there are basic laws that can’t be changed, maybe there are foundational values that I don’t change because of the mechanism you mentioned, and with their help I can change lower-level values. So that would mean inconsistency. And then all the values that can be changed are values that change. But values are always something at the foundation—that’s the definition of a value. No, there can be a hierarchy. No, I explained this last time. Weakness of will, in the end—again, what do you mean no? I’m saying that in the description I gave here, no. The question whether yes or no is a question connected to the paradox, but in the description I gave here, no. Because in the end, when a person does something, he always does something according to his values. Always—the whole hierarchy, with all the complexity. Because if those weren’t his values, why did he do it? So either he’s coerced or he isn’t; I talked about that last time regarding weakness of will. There’s also the question whether a person is even aware of what you call his values. There are values I’m aware of, but not all their implications, because I haven’t analyzed them. So that’s just a mistake, a cognitive mistake. That isn’t called being a penitent. A penitent is not someone who discovers a cognitive mistake in himself. That’s exactly what I said—that may relate to a penitent in today’s contemporary sense. Today people speak about someone “becoming religious,” someone who was secular and became religious. Okay? In the common jargon that’s what’s called “becoming religious.” A penitent in the literature of the Sages, in Torah literature, is not that. It’s someone who believed from the outset; he was always religious, he just sinned. Now he has to repent, return to his original values, not adopt a new value system. Okay? So a penitent in today’s sense—even though there too I can ask the same question—but you’re talking about a penitent in today’s sense, which means convincing him. Meaning, he thought X and I convinced him that Y is right. Okay, even there I could ask on the basis of what assumptions I convinced him, but let’s leave that. I’m talking about someone who from the outset already believed in this system—so what’s the problem? Where was the miss? Why didn’t he do it before, and what will happen now that he will do it? No, repentance means that basically he is returning to something he was already in. Okay, even better—that’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’re not expected to understand; we’re expected to obey. When a person loves, he recognizes that there is something here. But that’s the same question. But that’s the same question—why didn’t he obey before? The claim is that no matter what the reason, once he recognizes that he didn’t obey, then he can. But I’m asking: how will that happen? How will that happen? How will that happen? Why didn’t he obey before? Because apparently obedience wasn’t his highest value. Right—so now what happens? He suddenly becomes someone with a different hierarchy of values, in which obedience is now the central value. And again I ask: how does that happen? If he does this, after all he doesn’t believe that obedience is the highest value, so why would he change it? If he does believe that, then he has already changed, so he doesn’t need to repent, because he already believes it. Same question. Repentance—and I’m quoting someone you know—does chocolate taste good or is it fattening? Okay, so two things are true, and he can’t give more weight to one side than to the other? No, I talked about this last time. I explained last time that obviously when I speak about a person doing what he wants, “wants” doesn’t mean what is most moral. “Wants” means the totality of his desires. Meaning, there are value considerations, there are interests, there’s hedonism, there’s the desire to enjoy, lots of things—everything. The aggregate of all that together is what I call his value system. Say I gave the example of dieting: a person ate something fattening even though he decided he was going on a diet. So I claim that he acted according to his values, except that afterward he always regrets it—“Oh, what a mistake, I missed it, I fell, I wanted to diet and I slipped.” No, no—don’t fool yourself. You didn’t want to diet. You wanted to diet, but you wanted even more to eat the whipped-cream cake. So you wanted—that’s what I’m saying. Chocolate is also tasty and healthy, so you want both to eat tasty things and to be healthy. Now the question is what the hierarchy is. If the hierarchy is in favor of the tasty—meaning, tastiness ranks above health for you—then that’s your hierarchy of values. Now they tell you to repent. What does that mean, repent? Turn the hierarchy upside down. Why? Because I think the correct hierarchy is such-and-such. Well then I already think so; I don’t need to repent, I’m already there. Same question. Okay. So repentance isn’t enough; he has to stop, not eat the chocolate next time… As a result of his thinking that health is better, right? No, then you’re going back to weakness of will. If he thought health was better, he wouldn’t eat—he shouldn’t fool himself or me. Rather, he wanted to eat something tasty. Right, he also wants a diet, he wants everything. Well, no free lunch. This time literally: no free lunch. Meaning, you ate, you got fat. There’s no… yes. Rabbi, you yourself said that in order for a person to change himself he has to change a lot of things. He has to change his name, and he will be… No, that’s to help himself in the process. But I’m asking: how do you get there at all—how is the process defined? Maimonides is speaking on the psychological plane. I’m not talking about the psychological plane; I’m talking about the philosophical plane. Meaning, how does a person arrive at the conclusion that he now needs to move from value system X to value system Y? If he already says, “I want to move to value system Y,” then he’s already there. He already believes Y is the correct one, so he doesn’t need to move. So I’m asking how a person, deliberately, makes such a decision and moves. It’s something we can’t understand. And that thing is really an expression of the difficulty at the root of the concept of choice in general. And I spoke about how repentance and choice are really cousins, or siblings, and therefore Maimonides places his discussion of choice in the Laws of Repentance, because repentance really means returning to being a chooser. That’s repentance. You were conducting yourself in a way in which you were not a choosing person, and you return to being… I’ll explain that more, but that’s what I said at the end of last time. Basically repentance means returning to being a chooser. So in fact this tangle, or this paradox, that I described, really touches the concept of choice in general. I’ll illustrate this by way of maybe an opposite argument in favor of determinism. There is—I think the one who presented it most clearly, at least he’s always quoted—is some philosopher named Peter van Inwagen. Dutch, I think, who lives in the United States. And he said the following: say a person did X. Now there are two possibilities. Either there was some reason why he did X, but then there is no free choice. There was a reason that dictated X. A reason is a sufficient condition. Meaning, once the reason was there, the result is that the person does X. That’s what it means to say there is a reason, okay? So therefore, if there was a reason for what he did, then there is no free choice, because he was compelled by the reason to do that thing. If there is no reason, then that also is not free choice. It’s just a random action. An arbitrary action, a chance action, he does something for no reason. Fine—that isn’t choice. At least, what is presented as choice is some action that isn’t just some lottery but something a person does with judgment. So he says: if there is a reason, then determinism is true; if there is no reason, then something happens—indeterminism. Meaning, it’s just some chaotic, arbitrary sort of thing, and that’s it. What else could there be—either there is a reason or there isn’t? And therefore there cannot be free choice. Now here too I think the mistake is a cousin of the previous paradox. Meaning, van Inwagen assumes that once you prove there is no reason—reason in the coercive sense, reason in the sense that dictates the outcome—then automatically we arrive at indeterminism. But that isn’t true. Meaning, once you say there is no reason, that still doesn’t mean you’re in indeterminism. There are two shades here: choice and indeterminism. These are two mechanisms, both of which operate without a coercive cause, without a cause that dictates. And here too the point is, I think, based on the same mistake that I pointed to briefly last time and I’ll expand on later. I talked about the question of the map; I mentioned some article I once read by some psychologist from Bar-Ilan who looked in a person’s psychoanalytic map for who the “I” is or where the “I” is located. And I said that I think this search is categorically or conceptually mistaken, because the “I” is the one whom the map describes. It isn’t one of the components on the map. The “I” is this map—it’s his map—but there’s no point looking for him inside the map. If I connect this to the paradox I described earlier: when I choose certain values, I’m not doing it in light of other values. Meaning, there is something… something prior to this. I adopt a value system—but regarding the adoption of the value system itself, I asked according to what standard this is done. It isn’t done according to any value standard, because if it were done according to some value standard, then I have already adopted that standard and that is my value system. Rather, there is something there that precedes this matter. It’s like the relationship between the “I” and my psychic structure or my values. There is something prior to this matter; I’ll define it a bit more later. There is something prior to this matter, and here too I think it’s the same thing. That prior something—I can even ask: how do I adopt my basic value system? Leave aside how I change a value system. How do I adopt any value system at all? Am I born with it? If I’m born with it, then it isn’t really a value system that I decided on and adopted for myself; I was just born that way. And if not—if it isn’t innate, but rather I somehow decide about it—then according to what do I decide? Is there some value standard according to which I determine whether this is my value system or not? You understand? All these questions are really just cousins of one another. Basically they all revolve around this issue: the, let’s call it, axiomatic description of human action—there is a value system, from it I derive conclusions, and that’s what I do—assumes something. It assumes that the beginning starts with my value system, and from there onward one can begin to discuss. But apparently there is something prior. There is something prior that decides to adopt a value system, perhaps to change a value system, and that is connected to the “I” I spoke about earlier. But that’s the framework of the discussion. Now I want to return and begin a bit more systematically. There are two questions that are often mixed together. They overlap, but they are not the same question: the question of materialism and the question of determinism. The question of materialism deals with ontology—that is, what exists in the world. Is there in the world only matter, or is there another type of substance, another type of entity that is not material? Souls, psyches, I don’t know, spiritual matters. That is the question of materialism. So regarding materialism, you can be a materialist, you can be a dualist. A dualist believes there are both things, matter and spirit; a materialist thinks there is only matter. I’m putting this very schematically, but only to clarify the point. That’s the question of materialism. There is another question, and that is the question of determinism. The question of determinism means: is a person compelled to do what he does? Meaning, is every step a person takes, or every decision a person makes, dictated in advance, or does he have some freedom to decide which direction he chooses to go? That is the question of determinism. Very often the two questions are linked, but conceptually these are two independent questions. Completely independent in every direction. There is no connection between the two questions on the conceptual level. Later I’ll explain why there is a connection, but certainly not identity. A person can be a determinist and a dualist. He believes that there is matter and spirit, but the whole business proceeds deterministically—both the matter and the spirit. Meaning, there is some system of laws or mechanisms, one way or another, such that the whole thing proceeds deterministically. Therefore, the fact that you are a dualist doesn’t necessarily mean you are not a determinist. There could be a person who says—and I’m saying there are examples in both directions. Meaning, there can be, there are such people or such schools of thought or such philosophers. There can be a person who says: I’m a materialist, there is only matter in the world, but I think its conduct is not deterministic. Some bring quantum theory into this context—that quantum theory is a theory that deals only with matter, it is part of physics, it deals with matter, and that theory is not deterministic, at least in its accepted interpretations. And therefore there can be a person who is a materialist but not a determinist. There can be a person who is a dualist but a determinist. In short, there is complete independence between the two questions even though they are often treated together. For example, Leibowitz’s book, the well-known book called The Psycho-Physical Problem. That book actually doesn’t deal with free choice at all; it deals with materialism, even though it touches there as well on aspects related to our decisions. But in the end the book does not deal with determinism at all; it deals with materialism. The question of body and soul. Yes, the question is what the interaction is between the body and the soul. That interaction can be mechanistic—that’s unrelated, that’s a different question. It can also not be, but these are two independent questions. Maybe I’ll give you an illustration of this point. You know that Descartes—I mentioned this once before when we talked about rationalism and empiricism. I said that what drove Descartes, basically on the philosophical level, was some attempt to reach truths about the world by thinking alone, without observation. So by a necessary, a priori route, yes, without resorting to observation. The result of these efforts of his, brought out at least in two books, is what is called the cogito principle: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” How is this argument of cogito ergo sum constructed? He says: first of all, it is given that I think. Now, if I think, then there is someone who thinks, right? So if there is someone who thinks, that means that I exist. That’s the simplistic formulation. But in that formulation I could also say: I walk, therefore I exist. Right? If I walk, there is someone who walks, therefore I exist. So what’s the big deal? What great discovery did he make when he arrived at his principle? You think that you walk. What? You think that you think. Exactly—that’s the difference. Meaning, the point is this: if I arrived—after all, every argument is built on premises, right? So if I assume that I walk, clearly I can infer from that that I exist. Why doesn’t that help? Begging the question. The moment I think that I walk, clearly in the subtext I am also assuming that I exist, right? Fine, so I proved, on the basis of that assumption, the conclusion that I exist. So that’s no great feat. I sit, therefore I exist; I walk, therefore I exist; I eat, therefore I exist. All of those are correct arguments, they just don’t help us at all—like with the hot-air balloon. But the argument “I think, therefore I exist” is much stronger. Because there the premise itself is necessary. Descartes’ innovation is not in deriving the conclusion from the premise. Descartes’ argument—Descartes’ innovation—is that he found a premise that is necessary: “I think.” From that point onward, of course, if I think then I also exist, just as if I walk then I exist. But who says that I walk? Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I’m just living under the illusion that I walk. Right? Regarding thinking you can’t say that. Because if I think that I think, then I am again thinking, right? Meaning, in the end you can’t escape from “I think.” So Descartes’ innovation wasn’t in deriving “I exist” from “I think”; Descartes’ innovation was that “I think,” the claim from which I derive the conclusion, is a necessary premise. His innovation is “I think,” not “I exist.” “I exist” is already a result. And therefore his claim is that I cannot deny the claim that I think. Of course there too the argument is not really correct—anyway—but that’s what he says. And then, consequently, one can also derive the conclusion that I exist. Meaning, he found some premise that doesn’t need to be based on other premises. It stands by itself. In conceptual analysis it must be true. After he found that, he could already derive from it that he exists and whatever else he wanted. When you look at this cogito argument, you have to notice well: Descartes did not prove that I have a body. Descartes did not prove that I exist in the biological, physiological, or bodily sense. Because my thinking is a mental action. Meaning, the logic of the cogito really proved the existence of a thinking being, not the existence of a material being, a massive thing, right? Meaning, Descartes’ starting point was to prove the existence of the mental, not the existence of the material. And even if his argument may not be a necessary argument, it is a correct one. Meaning, again, it may not be a valid argument, but it is a true one. Those are two different things. Clearly every one of us knows that he exists. But we often think that matter is the simple thing, and now let’s argue about spirit. Right? Like the debate between materialism and dualism. Right? Almost nobody—except for a few wild dreamers—really argues for spiritual monism, that only spirit exists. There are those who say matter exists, there are those who say both matter and spirit exist. Those who say that only spirit exists are called idealists or nominalists and all kinds of such people who say there is no world—or whatever, views that aren’t really… What’s the difference between matter and spirit, for example? Say all the electrical connections in the brain? That’s matter; it’s all matter. Certainly. Everything connected to physics is matter. Physics deals with matter. It’s not something you can’t touch—go touch light. Right? Light is material; light is part of physics. You can even translate its energy into motions of material objects. Meaning, all this—again, maybe I should have said a word about this matter: electrons and interactions, and we know how to describe them—that’s physics. When we speak about spirit, we mean something that is not physics, not something that is not matter in the sense of lacking mass. Okay? There are things that belong to physics but are massless—photons. But from my perspective that’s matter. Something that we still don’t know how to describe? Still, or maybe we’ll never know—I don’t know. That’s a question for the future. But at the moment we don’t know what to do with it scientifically. Okay? When you say that there is no… is that that there is no free choice, or that in… Yes, in determinism there is no free choice. No free choice. Meaning—because we talked once that even one who thinks he has free choice, there are always factors determining… Right, right. I’ll get to that in a moment, we’ll sort that out. But in this specific view, there is no free choice in determinism. Yes. So the point is that somehow it is accepted in the world—say, in the debate about materialism—you always see that scientists usually argue in favor of materialism, and various philosophers, writers, and poets try to persuade them that there is also spirit. As if matter is the simple thing, and now let’s see whether there is also spirit or not. And some even bring in Occam’s razor: why assume there are two entities or two kinds of entities if you can assume only one and explain everything with it? Okay, fine—you can assume only one. So let’s assume only spirit. Why only matter? No, there is some assumption that matter is the simple thing. The question whether there is also spirit is a good one; one can debate it. But as Descartes presents things, it works the other way around. Meaning, what is clearly existent is spirit. Now we need to see whether matter also exists. The simple, intuitive tendency is that there is matter—that when I pinch something, there’s something there, yes—there’s less after I went on a diet, but there’s still something there. It isn’t an illusion. So okay, that’s an intuition that says there is matter too. But the basic thing that I think I don’t need to justify is the existence of spirit. More than that: when I infer that matter exists, I achieve that conclusion through my thought. Thought is a spiritual process. Mental, spiritual. So it seems to me that even the conclusion that matter exists depends on spirit inferring it, or understanding it. Now of course I’ll still get to this—the question is what exactly spirit is—and here I switched between “mental” and “spiritual,” and they aren’t always the same thing, at least not in every view. But that’s the broad introduction. Now I want to say what exactly the discussion is about. Our discussion is about determinism, not about materialism. But why is there nevertheless an overlap between these two things? The overlap exists because, at least according to what we understand today, the laws of physics are deterministic. So maybe in quantum theory there are non-deterministic elements; as I’ll explain later, I don’t think that touches free will. But in the physics of everyday life, of large bodies—and a neuron is a large body in this regard, it seems to me according to accepted views—there are no quantum effects. Meaning, physics is deterministic. Therefore, if I accept the physicalist conception—what used to be called materialism, I call it physicalism because I include fields and abstract things too; it doesn’t matter to me, all of physics—then basically that means that if I am a physicalist, then I am also a determinist. If I think there is only physics in the world, then the conclusion is determinism. But again, that is not a conceptual conclusion. Conceptually the two questions are independent. It is a conclusion because we know from research, we know that physics, to the extent that we know it, is deterministic. And therefore these two questions are linked, at least in one direction: if you are a physicalist, then you need to be a determinist. That does not mean that if you are a dualist you won’t be a determinist. That is another discussion. There are many people who say there is matter and spirit, but still the whole business is conducted deterministically. For example, some claim that spirit is a function of matter. So matter, through its deterministic processes, also dictates what will happen in spirit. Okay? So they can be dualists in one way or another and still believe in determinism. So even if there is dependence, first of all on the conceptual level there is no dependence between the two sides. Two independent questions. But on the factual level there is dependence between the questions: if you are a physicalist, generally you will be a determinist—but not in the other direction. Meaning, even on the conceptual level the dependence is only one-way. Now it turns out that in recent years, as brain research has been developing very rapidly—and it really is a relatively new field, at least in its current form—a very broad consensus has arisen among brain researchers, not total but very broad. By the way, I have the feeling that somehow in recent years this has begun to wobble a little, but when I wrote the book on this subject, the feeling really was one of siege. Meaning, almost all the brain researchers I knew held a materialist and deterministic position. And one of the reasons, one of the reasons I wrote the book, was that really many students I spoke with in various places, who study neuroscience, told me: listen, they present us with a deterministic picture as if it’s a scientific fact. Meaning, it’s not that we are here after philosophical questions. And that is really what has been renewed in recent years, perhaps in the last few decades: that the questions of materialism and determinism, these two questions that were traditionally assigned to philosophy, have ostensibly passed into the domain of science. Now this is no longer philosophy; now you can supposedly test it in the laboratory and reach conclusions. The feeling is that in philosophy you can say this, you can say that, there are opinions one way and opinions another way—you won’t really be able to decide a question in the philosophical realm. By the way, I don’t agree with that either, but that’s the feeling. But now in recent years it passes into the domain of science. We can make measurements and see that the world is materialist or that the world is deterministic, and when it is a scientific finding, then the problem is closed. Meaning, then it’s already—what? What? An example? How do you test that? What’s an example? What exactly has become a scientific question? I said: the question of materialism and determinism. If you research situations and you respond like this… Yes, no—those simple things are still weak. There are the Libet experiments; I’ll talk about them. There are all kinds of experiments that try to show scientifically that human beings have no free choice. This already started in the late 1970s. Benjamin Libet was an American neurologist who himself was a libertarian—meaning, he believed in free choice. He did experiments and got slapped in the face. Meaning, it turned out to him that man is deterministic, and then he suddenly tried to offer excuses, but that’s what happened. Exactly. At least he was an honest man. So repentance was forced upon him. In any event, the motivation for holding this discussion—even though the discussion is already thousands of years old and philosophers were already writing about it in Greece—is that in the present day it turns from a philosophical question into, ostensibly, a scientific question. Then there are new findings, and one has to examine whether one can still consistently be a dualist and a libertarian. Libertarian is the opposite of determinism—meaning not political libertarianism or anything, but libertarian in the metaphysical sense: that I have free choice, that I have liberty, that there is freedom. So the question is whether one can do this in the scientific context. And just now I wrote some article for a book coming out at the law faculty at Bar-Ilan on neuroscience and the law. And in the legal world too, in the United States much more than here—here it’s only really the very first buds—but all kinds of considerations from neuroscience are beginning to enter in order to determine a person’s responsibility for his actions. Not an assessment by a psychologist or psychiatrist, but by a neuroscientist. You scan his brain and say: this person is not responsible for his actions, yes responsible for his actions. I’m simplifying what I’m saying a bit, but in principle that’s where things are headed. And the question is whether one can really accept such an argument. Why wait until he sins? Let’s do a brain scan and put the person in prison. That’s the necessary conclusion, if we… I talk about that there. So the claim is that—I’m saying a kind of consensus has formed, and I show at the end of the article some paper by five very well-known brain researchers in the United States who wrote an article intended for lawyers and judges, explaining to them how to approach the issue. Ostensibly it should be some kind of objective introduction—not to enter into this or that position. And in this supposedly objective introduction, even though they say we don’t know and it’s terribly complicated and beware of neuroscience—that’s what they write there—all of their arguments are deterministic arguments. Beware of neuroscience because we still don’t know everything. Not beware of neuroscience because it doesn’t describe everything. Those are two different things. Fine—and then, as we progress, we progress. Now think about a judge before whom, I don’t know, some famous neuroscientist appears, with all the impressive credentials of a brain researcher. And he tells the judge: listen, our findings are such-and-such, that’s all. Now decide what you decide. The judge has no way to critique what he is hearing. The judge isn’t now going to spend several years studying this subject and figuring out what it means, and then how much of it is the person’s worldview and how much of it is fact. And since these things are presented on the scientific level and not on the philosophical level, in my opinion that has a very problematic impact, both in the legal world and in the world of thought, of course—in all kinds of contexts that can also touch life itself. This stops being a question that interests only people who like philosophy. It begins to touch life itself, and somehow it passes underground, as if nobody is addressing the matter. It slowly slips in there; everything is cooking away inside brain research institutes; nobody understands because it’s such a scientific field, and people outside the field somehow feel: okay, let’s ask the experts what they say. The problem is that, in my opinion at least, the experts are biased—biased in favor of a materialist and deterministic worldview—and they fail to distinguish between facts and their assumptions and worldview, because very often they are not skilled in philosophy because they are scientists. And the philosophers aren’t skilled in science, so they don’t know how to critique this matter. So there is something here that falls between the cracks. Those who are skilled in philosophy can’t critique the science; those who are skilled in science are not always skilled in philosophy; and somehow this creates a pushing aside of the philosophers. The lawyers still resist a little for now, but most of them resist only because of lack of knowledge. Meaning, they themselves say—and the brain researchers say too—not lack of knowledge in the sense that they don’t understand neuroscience, but that neuroscience has not yet discovered everything. So we don’t yet have sufficient knowledge to make decisions, but the model standing before their eyes is: okay, we’ll wait a few more years and the judge will be a computer. Give him the brain scan; he’ll tell you whether the person did it, didn’t do it, whether he should be killed while still young, as you said—meaning even before he did it, because in any case he will do it, everything is deterministic, so why wait until he does it? Yes, the question is how we will make the decision whether to kill him or not, and that too is deterministic. But in the end the worldview—if not in the text, then in the subtext—is a materialist and deterministic worldview. Right, everything is deterministic; the concept “decides” isn’t relevant. Yes, right. So that is basically the motivation for having this discussion. And one more introductory remark: very often there is a correlation between a religious and a secular worldview, or believing and non-believing, and these questions of materialism and determinism versus dualism and libertarianism. Again, it isn’t a connection that has to exist, but it has arisen. Meaning, in all the atheist websites I know there is a central issue concerning materialism and determinism. Central, not peripheral. Meaning, it’s part of the agenda, and it is perceived as a point around which the religious-secular confrontation is conducted. As if religious people are benighted and primitive and stuck in the past; they think there is a soul and not just a body, and that a person has choice and is not some deterministic machine or something—but we enlightened people, we understand, we already know what science says. Determinism is the thing. Determinism has already decided. Yes, we submit to determinism, we are aware of the determinism that compels us, and therefore one must bring them the light, so to speak. And once the question becomes some debate between religious and secular people, everyone entrenches himself in his position and you can’t have a discussion. And to tell the truth, that’s what I wrote in the introduction to the book: in my view it is very surprising and strange that the people who are supposed to advance the idea of humanism—yes, as distinct from speaking in the name of humanism, man as the crown of creation, as the summit of reality, against the conception of self-nullification before the Holy One, blessed be He, before God, and so on—basically somehow, through the back door, come back to present man like a locust, a somewhat more sophisticated locust, nothing more. Not that I said that for nothing—Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book that human beings have rights just as locusts have rights. What do “rights” mean? We are a mechanistic, materialist machine—what does “rights” even mean? That concept is not defined at all in his world. And by the way, he is someone who fights for morality and he’s vegan and all that; the man lives in two worlds, he’s living in a movie. In any event, once you connect this conception to the religious-secular debate, people don’t notice that they’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Meaning, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. In the end you speak in the name of the image of man, or humanism—as if seeing man as some value in himself, on the side of Kant’s disciples and so on—while through the back door you are really saying that there is nothing there. Man is a worm, a sophisticated worm. A table. Okay. Yes, if you are a reductionist from physics to biology, then even a table. You don’t have to be a reductionist. In any event, “man has no advantage over beast.” Right. Yes. And therefore I think this discussion is also a challenge—specifically a challenge to secular thought. I’ll give you an anecdote. There was a professor at Tel Aviv University named Yosef Neuman. He died about two years ago, I think. And he was a militant atheist activist, writing about these things, very active in this area. After I wrote the book on evolution, he called me—this was before I wrote the book on choice—and said let’s sit and talk a bit. He had read the book and we talked a little. By the way, he really was an honest and very smart man, rational, and you could talk with him. That is quite rare in the atheist church. Rare in both churches, but in both. In any event, he said to me—so we talked a bit, and we got onto the subject of free choice, even though the book wasn’t about that. He said to me: listen, I have all my atheist friends and all that, and I can’t crack this phenomenon. He said, they claim there is no such thing as mental phenomena. It’s all chemistry—chemistry, electricity, neurons in the brain, physiology. Now I try to explain to them that you can’t say such a thing. You can say that mental phenomena are the result of chemical or physiological processes, but you can’t deny their very existence. What are you denying—that a person feels, thinks, wants, fears, is sad, is proud? I don’t know what. You can’t deny the fact that there are mental processes within us. You can say that those mental processes are a function of matter, that there is no spiritual dimension within which they take place, but rather it’s all a function of matter. We’ll still talk about this. And that’s fine—that’s a consistent position, and one can discuss whether it’s true or not. You can’t say it doesn’t exist, to say it’s all chemistry and it doesn’t exist. So he said to me, listen—he said honestly—he was a materialist, a materialist and a determinist and also an atheist and every other -ism, but he was an honest man. He said: I can’t understand intelligent people; I can’t penetrate their unwillingness to admit this point. So I told him to notice that he lives in a church. I told him I too had noticed a long time ago that I live in a church, so he should notice that he does too. Meaning, it is very hard to break through obligatory dogmas. There are certain dogmas, and arguments just won’t help; you can’t break through them. And as for himself? What? Could he explain it to himself? No, for himself he could explain it. He actually held a consistent position. He said: I’m a materialist; I don’t deny the existence of mental processes. I only claim that mental processes do not point to the existence of another substance, of spirit; rather, it somehow comes out of matter. You can argue, agree, disagree, but that’s a consistent view. Meaning, there’s no problem. But he says the others—because it is indeed hard to explain, and he too was aware of that—but that is the only way out if you want to be a materialist. So what do they say? The moment it’s hard to explain, they deny the existence of the thing. Meaning, it can’t be explained, therefore it doesn’t exist. Are the atheists and the determinists and the materialists mostly like that? What is that? Not all determinists are materialists, but there are quite a few who say yes, it’s all—when he pushes the machine, it’s an illusion. An illusion of whom? An illusion is also a mental thing. That’s “I think, therefore I am”; you can’t escape that. And now—you won’t believe it—intelligent people, people with PhDs in the natural sciences, all kinds of philosophers, whatever you want, say nonsense, and you can’t break through it. You can’t break through it. Now this is really nonsense on its face. It’s not that I caught them with some sophisticated argument they hadn’t thought of. It’s just something completely basic. Clearly the motivation—and here I’m entering psychological explanation a bit—is that because you understand that if there are mental processes, it’s pretty hard to argue that they are born from our material aggregate. Because that—and I’ll talk about it later—although this is a common view today, it’s still pretty hard to argue that. So the only way out is: okay, then there is no such thing. Because we are materialists and nothing else comes out of our matter, our material stuff. So apparently there is nothing else. And thus they deny what needed to be proved. Isn’t that a bit semantic, in the sense that when I see a green sweater, I know this is a physical phenomenon of light absorption, wavelengths, and so on, and I experience it as a green sweater? You understand that when you say “I experience,” you are already talking about a mental thing. But that is—that is the physical phenomenon that I experience; it’s not two things where one causes the other. No, it’s two things where one causes the other. We talked about this: in the world itself there isn’t even a green color, first of all. In the world itself there is a wavelength of a certain length—that is, an electromagnetic field of a certain wavelength, right? It strikes my retina, it is translated throughout my cognitive and perceptive system, and in the end I experience the phenomenon of green light. That green light is not the thing; it is the result of the thing. The thing strikes my eye and creates in me an experience of green light. You can’t identify the green light in my head with the electromagnetic wave. The electromagnetic wave exists in the world. The green light exists only in my consciousness. It’s the effect on the receptor. No, it’s not even the effect on the receptor; it is the result of the effect on the receptor. No, this is important—this is exactly the point—because the effect on the receptor is also a physical process; it happens in the world. The green light does not exist in the world. Green light is my awareness. That awareness is created by the physical process of striking the receptor with a certain wavelength. Therefore, identifying those two things is a conceptual mistake. You can say that one need not posit anything beyond physics in order to explain that there is green light. Fine—that is a claim one has to deal with; it’s a consistent claim, one can discuss it. But you can’t say there is no such thing as green light, there are only electromagnetic waves. That is basically what they are saying. There is green light—I know, I saw it. There is Moore, a British philosopher in the early twentieth century, I think. He wanted to bring arguments against the idealists, those who say there is no external world. He said: you see? Here is my hand. Fine—you’re talking nonsense, things we all understand. So I saw green light; you want to tell me there is no green light? There is. We all saw it. Unless you’re color-blind, in which case you saw it as pink, I don’t know what. In any event, this consensus that has emerged, together with its dogmatic implications as a worldview, brings worldviews—sometimes even religious or metaphysical ones—into our lives. In the end these worldviews move into materialism-determinism; in the next stage they move into the world of law, and then of course they will move into the world of values, and basically our lives, in principle, if this really continues this way, will be conducted completely differently without anyone noticing. It just slips in there, and no one says: one second, my physicist friends, tell me what the facts are and what your interpretation is, because I want to check. I don’t argue with facts; let’s see that you did it properly, and then fine. Interpretation can be debated. Regarding interpretation, you don’t have authority simply because it is interpretation. And somehow, because interpretation also requires some understanding of the scientific material, this happens only rarely. It happens rarely, and people who are lawyers certainly, but even philosophers who deal with this don’t always really understand the scientific framework, and therefore it is hard for them to argue with the physicists. They can offer this or that alternative proposal, which is usually very far-fetched, because the problem is in the physicists’ interpretation; there is no need to offer other proposals. I’ll talk about that too later. What about psychiatric medications? How do they affect things? Fine, we’ll get to that too. That is the psycho-physical problem. It doesn’t belong to determinism; it belongs to materialism. Fine, I’ll talk about it. Look, there are basically—I’ll now start first of all to clarify a bit the concept of free choice. Up to this point I’ve given the motivation for why we need to deal with this, what the significance is, including in the current practical sense, and how the debate is conducted. Now let’s begin. What is free choice? Free choice, the conception of free will, is the conception that contrary to the regular laws of physics that compel every material object—and all in all a human being is also a material object—there is in a person some element that is not subject to this physical determinism. First of all I need to assume that a person has several possibilities before him, because if I don’t have several possibilities then there is no free choice. I need to assume that I have the ability to go in any of those possibilities, because if I don’t have the ability to go—even if there are several possibilities, but I am forced to go in one of them—then there is no free choice. Say there is a class in history and a class in physics, and now I can decide whether to go to history or to physics, and from my perspective that is a decision of free will. In order to define that as a free-will decision, first of all I need to assume there are two classes. That two classes are being offered, that there are two—two paths. The second thing I have to assume is that if I decide, I can go here and I can go there. Both of those are in my hands. And the third thing I have to assume—and this is almost really the translation of the second—is that if I decide, then I can also carry it out. Meaning, that there are no external forces that will force me to do A or B. Basically the possibilities are open and my powers are free. That is the only way we can understand our free choice. Now that is the meaning of free choice. This idea of free choice is attacked from two directions, and they are opposite directions. One direction is compatibilism. “Compatible” means compatible—that is, we usually assume that determinism means there is no free will. And if you think there is free will, then you are not a determinist. The compatibilists say that’s not true. You can be a determinist and believe in free will. What does that mean? Really, just very briefly, the claim is that so long as I do what I decided to do, and there is no external thing preventing me from doing it, then I am free. I do what I want. So what if one can predict in advance what I will want and what I will do? It is still what I want, nobody is interfering with me, I am free. Nobody is interfering with me in carrying out what I decided. So in that sense, even though the world can be deterministic, that does not rule out saying that I am free, that I make decisions myself and nothing interferes with me. But “decided”? What is the meaning of the word “decides”? They claim that “decides” means this electrical process of decision in the brain. You can call it cock-a-doodle-doo. Fine, okay, we’ll talk in a moment. So that’s one attack. By the way, this view today is, in my opinion, perhaps the most widespread among philosophers. Philosophers who deal with this field—many are compatibilists. It’s the new fashion; not so new anymore, but fairly new. And the claim is that there is no contradiction—that’s why it’s “compatible”—there is no contradiction between determinism and free will. Now, the best book I know on this is by Eliezer Malkiel—I don’t remember exactly what it’s called, but look it up, something about free choice, cause and necessity—I already don’t remember exactly—which is an excellent book, really an excellent book. I wrote an admiring review of it. I don’t agree with a word of what it says there, really. But you won’t catch him in any error in the course of the argument. The mistake is in the conceptual framework, in my opinion. But the argument is truly precise and detailed, and every time I thought I had caught him, a page later he answers it. Meaning, to me it’s a model book, and it defends this thesis—compatibilism. It also brings a few sources, but it’s mainly a substantive discussion, and there he really presents the view accepted today as compatibilism. This is the view that says that if there is no external factor interfering with me, then that means I am free, no matter that what I do is dictated in advance—I am free. Okay? There is an opposite view. But what does “dictated in advance” mean? My nature causes me to want to decide and do certain things, so it’s dictated in advance. But it causes me—it’s not… My nature is me. You see that this comes back again to the question: who is “I”? Okay, exactly. But I said it would keep coming back to us. I’ll bring you an opposite example, a passage from Ciechanover. Aaron Ciechanover is a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. It’s unbelievable how many smart people talk nonsense in this area. He says: “As a scientist, I tend to believe that everything is chemistry, and when I leave this world I won’t be here anymore. In the cemetery I’ll be food for worms and everything I carry with me will disappear. Of course the things I wrote and recorded will remain, the films that remain, the ideas I taught, but I myself won’t be here anymore even to interpret them. My spirit will vanish, my creativity will fade, my loves, my emotions, and my intelligence will disappear. Everything that makes up the human being will no longer be. This is perhaps testimony that everything is chemistry.” The “testimony” is, of course, a begged premise. A begged premise: the moment he says that nothing remains, so everything is chemistry—okay. “Once the cells and molecules become food for worms, only the past remains, and that metaphorically. The capacity for creativity freezes at the moment of death. The task of continuing to develop ideas on the basis of the existing ones is entrusted from that moment to those who are alive—that is, to the chemical reactions taking place in them.” He assigns tasks to future chemical reactions. Then he says: “One of the long-standing debates in philosophy and science”—that’s the interviewer—“deals with the question of determinism, that is, to what extent all things are determined in advance. The assumption is that if the world is deterministic there is no free will, and once we identify the principles we will be able to know every future action in advance. For example, when we understand how genes operate, we will understand”—and predict all our traits and actions. So that’s the question. Then Shachor answers: “The debate over determinism is ancient and long-standing, and the greatest philosophers and thinkers dealt with it, from Kohelet who said, ‘What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,’ through Greek Aristotelian philosophy and down to our own day. The uncertainty principle in quantum theory was supposed to remove determinism from the world, at least in its physical sense, but that did not happen. So who am I to express an opinion on the matter? I will only note that one”—and this is the important point—“that one of the fascinating phenomena discovered in recent decades is the plasticity of the brain, the changes that take place in it in the course of its operation. We are not born as we die. Our brain changes and is influenced by the environment.” There used to be this view that the brain is some internal process, not influenced from outside. How we were born, plus internal growth processes—but the brain is just something we grew up with. And in recent years more and more phenomena are being discovered of external influences that change the brain; this is called the plasticity of the brain. “And its ability to change according to what we undergo and experience. This is great news for the opponents of determinism. The environment in which we grow up has a great influence on shaping us as people.” Now I could go on reading more, but what is he really saying here? If we are subject to external influence, then there is no determinism. This is an argument opposite to compatibilism. Compatibilism says: if there is external influence, then that’s determinism; but if it is only internal, the internal thing in me that dictates my behavior, then that’s freedom. What does he say? He says the opposite. He says: if the brain is not plastic, and we conduct ourselves only according to our internal traits, then that’s determinism. But if the outside can influence our brain and change it, then that is freedom. This is simply nonsense, of course. Here it’s not even—well, the first conception is tricky; one can begin to ask why exactly it isn’t, although there too it isn’t. But what does that mean? If the external environment influences my brain in a completely deterministic way—that too is a physical process and one can describe it biologically, one can describe it—what isn’t deterministic here? Now this means that the unit operating deterministically is not the isolated person, but the entire world with the person as part of it. That’s all. He doesn’t understand the concept of determinism. Now I think what causes this is that in his scientific context, when you talk about brain research, the expression “determinism” in the scientific sense is used with that meaning. Determinism means that what I was born with dictates what will happen—in the scientific context, unrelated to philosophy. Then he says the plasticity of the brain shows you that this isn’t true, so determinism in that sense isn’t true. Now he takes that scientific terminology into the philosophical field. He says: ah, this is great news for the opponents of determinism—the plasticity of the brain. He simply doesn’t understand what he is talking about. And he’s a Nobel Prize laureate, so I assume he is not a stupid person. Meaning, I’m showing you here not only the arguments you hear from both sides, but how absurd they are, and how this discussion really is a discussion that at times seems bizarre. These are undoubtedly smart people, not stupid people. Smart people raise arguments—like what I once mentioned Dawkins saying: in every society there can be good people who do good deeds and bad people who do bad deeds. But only in a religious society can there be good people who do bad deeds, because they think the religious commandment obligates them. That’s what he claims. I don’t agree with him, but that’s what he claims. I say in this context: in every society there can be smart people who say smart things and stupid people who say stupid things. But only among atheists can there be smart people who say stupid things. Meaning, the atheist dogma—or the materialist dogma—causes people to think, causes people to raise strange arguments. He has the face of a smart person. Yes. Okay, so that is only—that basically finishes the introduction more or less.