The Thought of Rabbi Gedaliah Nadel – Genesis – Lesson 9

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If there were a second Adam, or if it weren’t, that would be something else—but this is from the Adam written here: Adam, Seth, Enosh; count ten generations there and that gets you to Abraham—uh, to Noah. That’s clear. Now here he writes—Rabbi Shilat, yes: “The writer said regarding what the Rabbi said, the note at the bottom of page 112, regarding what the Rabbi said, that Adam the father of Seth is not Adam the father of Cain and Abel, since in the meantime seven generations passed—and regarding what he found difficult, that the counting did not begin from those generations—in my humble opinion, the first line of Cain’s descendants was parallel in time to the second line of Seth’s descendants.” And that is the simple plain meaning, obviously. Right? That 130 years passed since Adam—he was 130 when he begot Seth—that was after Cain and Abel, but not after Cain’s whole dynasty; rather, it happened in parallel, simply. Each such dynasty is described on its own. And regarding what he found difficult—yes—“it was parallel in time to the second line of Seth’s descendants, and Adam the father of Seth was the father of Cain and Abel, as the simple meaning of the verse indicates: ‘For God has appointed me another offspring in place of Abel, for Cain killed him,’” as he noted earlier, like a mother consoling herself over a son who died with the birth of a new son. “And between the birth of Cain and the birth of Seth only a few years passed, not many generations. And Cain’s descendants were born more or less in parallel to Seth’s descendants.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now that’s interesting, because if it’s parallel, then the parallel in the names really also becomes a parallel in the dates. Meaning, the son of Cain and the son of Seth, who lived at more or less the same time, were also given the same names. Both were called by the same name, yes? Not after some grandfather here, but after some imaginary grandfather, I don’t know exactly what. Meaning, there is some generic process within the dynasty that takes place in the same way in both dynasties. “And we find that this is the Torah’s way—to finish first telling about the less important ones, and afterward begin with the important ones that it wants to continue with, as with the descendants of Esau by their generations at the end of Parashat Vayishlach, and after them, ‘These are the generations of Jacob.’ Although it is clear that the descendants of Esau and the descendants of Jacob are parallel.”

[Speaker B] And maybe that also explains why there he didn’t count the—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The years, because those are the less important ones. Yes, because they’re the less important ones, clearly. I’m saying, the descendants of Esau and the descendants of Jacob—it’s obvious they were brothers, brothers of the same age, so the descendants of Esau and the descendants of Jacob are certainly parallel, and even so they first describe all the descendants of Esau; when they’re done with that, they move on to describe all the descendants of Jacob. “And nevertheless, from the fact that the Torah noted the count among Seth’s descendants and not among Cain’s descendants, we can learn that it regards them as the Rabbi said.” Meaning, the years and all these matters. And overall, what he is basically saying—and here I think this is the standard explanation—is that our whole chronology begins from the first Adam, not from the second Adam.

[Speaker B] There is no second Adam.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, there is no second Adam. The numbers of years indicated in Seth’s line are what actually establish the chronology, while in parallel to that Cain’s line also proceeds—obviously—only the years aren’t noted. I go by one axis that defines the passage of time, so I do that through Seth’s line because that is the important, meaningful line, the one from which we also ultimately came. Okay, fine, I’ll continue. Here on page 112 it matters less to me right now, so I’m going back to our place, page 92. This is basically his thesis about chronology, more or less—when I say again, this invention of a second Adam isn’t all that important in terms of the comparison to ages of fifteen billion years. That’s not the point. The point is the days of creation. This matter is just an interesting interpretive suggestion, but it isn’t necessary in order to solve the problem of chronology.

[Speaker B] Not only is it unnecessary, it also doesn’t help. It also doesn’t help.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it gives another two thousand years or a thousand years—it doesn’t matter. “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide between waters and waters.’” As we said above, all space was filled with water vapor. The separation between the waters below the firmament and the waters above the firmament was the creation of an area empty of water between them. The firmament—literally, something beaten out, stretched. Right? “Like one who stretches a tent over”—and it is what appears to us as a kind of blue tent stretched over our heads. “And the beautiful appearance, the firmament beautiful and splendid”—okay, here he’s already, as usual, succeeding—“who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.” In short, the waters moved over there and the Torah doesn’t tell us about them because they do not concern us. End of paragraph.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Next paragraph. “At first glance, we do not expect that on each new day”—a “new” day in quotation marks—“there will be some essential change in creation.” Why would we expect that? Because that’s the definition of a day. After all, a day is not really defined as twenty-four hours—that’s his argument. So basically there is some continuous process here going on over billions of years. So what is a day? Fine, so it’s not twenty-four hours—then what is it? It is a stage in creation in which a new significant stage is now born—evolution, yes? The moment vegetation begins to arise from inanimate matter, that’s a day; the moment animals begin to arise, that’s a day; the moment a human being begins to arise, that’s a day. Meaning, something happens, something significant, and we call that the end of a day. So one has to give some alternative explanation for why it is called a day, even if—like the creation of light and like other substantial creations that will come in the following days. But clearing space and creating the firmament seemingly involve no essentially new thing, only a mechanical change. The waters moved aside. One must understand that the utterance, the command, ‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,’ means that naturally, according to the laws of mechanics, the firmament would not have been formed—or would not have been formed then. The material created on the first day would not on its own have rolled into that form of earth and heaven, so important for the appearance of man, were it not for the divine will that it happen at a certain stage.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here too there is some assumption that I don’t really understand why he needs it—that the claim is that according to the regular laws of physics, or the regular laws of nature, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Therefore God, as it were, moved the waters aside and created—distinguished between waters and waters. And when an active action of the Holy One, blessed be He, is described, the meaning is a deviation from natural conduct. That’s his assumption. And I don’t really understand why one has to say that. Why can’t formation through the laws of nature itself be an action of the Holy One, blessed be He? We describe it as: now the Holy One, blessed be He, separated between waters and waters. Meaning: some natural process happened here that caused a separation between waters and waters, but this process happened by the inspiration of the Holy One, blessed be He, who established the laws of nature, and so on. Meaning, I don’t really see why this wasn’t supposed to happen naturally according to the laws of mechanics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again he has some assumption—and we’ll see it in the next paragraph as well—that there had to be some direct intervention of the Holy One, blessed be He, that doesn’t fit the ordinary laws of nature. Meaning, there is something in the formation of the creatures—I don’t know, not the formation of the world, but the formation of the creatures upon it—the plants, the animals, human beings, I don’t know, luminaries, or whatever it may be, the separation between waters and firmament, between the earth and the firmament—each such step was some intervention of the Holy One, blessed be He, that is against or not in keeping with the laws of nature; it would not have happened through the laws of nature alone. That is his assumption. Meaning, if there is some natural explanation for the separation of the waters, from his point of view that’s no good—it doesn’t work—because it was supposed to be some intervention of the Holy One, blessed be He. Whereas I don’t see why. I don’t see why one needs to get there and not say that the laws themselves are the divine will that does things here in the world.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “The Torah does not tell of the formation of silver and gold.” There are things that were formed and the Torah does not tell us about them. “The Torah does not tell of the formation of silver and gold, but the creation of the firmament, even though it contains no essentially new thing, is an important and impressive stage in the formation of the world in which man lives, and therefore the Torah gives it a special utterance, in keeping with the moral tendency of the whole story, to show us what a beautiful world the Holy One, blessed be He, prepared for us.” Fine, we already saw that. But in his distinctions from one day to the next, he says it always has to be that something essential was created. Here he adds: not only was something essential created, but that essential thing was not created by a natural process. That is what “and there was evening and there was morning” means for him. He already said it: “and there was evening and there was morning” means it was mixed up and then became clarified—or scrutinized; something new was formed here. And what does that actually mean? There was another divine intervention, and that is called “and there was evening and there was morning.” Meaning, the natural process goes on constantly until suddenly there is some moment in which a divine intervention occurs and something new is formed. Then again it continues to proceed—another “day,” in quotation marks—and another divine intervention, and something new is formed.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And since the separation of the lower waters from the upper waters was something that required divine intervention—the laws of mechanics were not supposed to create this thing—therefore that too merited a day. Therefore that too is called a day, even though the result does not seem to us like some essentially new thing. Firmament, not firmament—what difference does it make? There’s nothing essentially new here. But he says that once there is divine intervention to produce something that does not proceed according to the laws of nature, that too is called a day, “and there was evening and there was morning.” And that is why he cuts up the days this way, because in terms of the essential things—say, inanimate, vegetation, living creatures, speaking beings. Fine—Jew, let’s leave aside the Kuzari—but at least the speaking human. So there are, I think, four stages here, and there are six days of creation. He says: because there were days in which there was an intervention of the Holy One, blessed be He, even though the result was not a different or essentially new result.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m skipping a bit on page 94. “And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, seed-bearing plants’”—here a new creation appears, essentially different from what had existed until now. Until now there was only inanimate matter. And behold, at God’s command, vegetation appears. Vegetation is something essentially new; therefore that means there must be some divine intervention here. There cannot be, in his view, some natural development of inanimate matter that becomes vegetation. And likewise later: vegetation becoming animal life, or animal life becoming man. Every such thing required some intervention—divine intervention—and therefore every such thing is a day.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine. Actually, regarding the scientific descriptions of the formation of all these things, the evolutionary account describes the process from the moment protein chains were first formed. Once there are protein chains, from there on the evolutionary process begins. But how was the first protein chain formed—which is basically more or less, say, the beginning of the formation of life, roughly? The first one was formed—I don’t know, something like that—but that’s the area that perhaps can be called the formation of life. Something happened here that is different, exceptional. And in fact, even in the scientific description, one has to understand that many times when people look at evolution as some competing explanation for the formation of life, they don’t notice that evolution too begins only at a very, very advanced stage of the process—there is already a protein chain.

[Speaker E] Right, but all the—if we say, regarding the creation account, that the creation of vegetation and the creation of animals and birds are separate, then all that is not—it’s not related to—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course not. That’s already within evolution. Yes, I’m saying there is a stage at which evolution begins, with a protein chain, and the question is how the first protein chain was formed. That’s really the question. Now, that certainly has no evolutionary explanation. He claims that probably there also cannot be one—it cannot have any scientific explanation at all, not just an evolutionary one. This is the formation of something new. There was inanimate matter and it became living, or vegetation, or something—yes, something that has life in it; vegetation is also called living for the purposes of this discussion—and therefore something new happened here, and it requires intervention.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You know that today there is a fairly large research effort around what is called abiogenesis, that is, to see how the first living cell or the first protein chains arose out of inanimate matter. And the claim is that there are already several mechanisms, some of which have even been observed—I’m not sufficiently expert in this area—but some of them, they say, have even been observed, and people claim that there is indeed plausibility for such a thing. Or in other words, this continuous process really is—the sharp distinction between inanimate matter and vegetation, living creatures, and speaking beings—in the end there is some kind of continuum there. We cut it up somewhat arbitrarily, but there is really some continuum. Yes, amoeba is always taught as something between vegetation and animal life, but there are such continua also between inanimate matter and vegetation. So his assumption that there cannot be a scientific explanation—not only not an evolutionary explanation, because an evolutionary explanation certainly there cannot be, meaning abiogenesis is not part of evolution—but that there cannot be a scientific explanation, I think that is… speculation, and I don’t know why one needs to get there. It is entirely possible that they will find such an explanation; right now people are working on it, and there are already declarations that it is plausible.

[Speaker E] But he’s talking about something else—he says that at every stage there is intervention.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m taking this example because it’s easy to talk about it in scientific language. He does the same thing for every transition, every transition.

[Speaker E] Yes, but it doesn’t seem related to me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it is related, because he is not speaking specifically about a protein chain but about the additional dimension that there is in man beyond an animal, or in an animal beyond vegetation. So for us it doesn’t matter; that too is abiogenesis. Meaning, that too is some initial stage that you cannot describe within physiology. Physiology does not describe the formation of life; it describes the conduct of life, okay? As for plants, yes, plants come earlier. So how do plants arise from inanimate matter? It is the same thing as how animal life arises from vegetation or how the speaking being arises from the animal. At every such stage there is some leap, and at that leap his assumption is that there cannot be a scientific explanation; it must be divine intervention, and therefore that is what is called a day in creation. Therefore each day—one day the plants were created, one day the animals were created—because that is exactly the stage at which we move from one level to another, and that transition is not a scientific transition, or cannot have a scientific explanation. That is his claim.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As I say, I don’t think this is certainly not necessary; and I very much doubt it is true. “Scientists have great difficulty defining the essence of vegetation, because they want to define everything by means of physics and chemistry. But it does not come out well.” And actually on this matter I am fairly inclined to agree with him, though again I feel a bit unsure on this ground because I don’t understand it well enough. But my impression is that these attempts to define life are attempts that are to a large degree somewhat artificial. And this determined war against vitalism, yes? The conception that says that in life there is something beyond inert matter. “It is impossible to explain biology by means of physics and chemistry.” That is basically the claim. It cannot be; one cannot explain biology by means of physics and chemistry alone. That is the approach called vitalism. Meaning, there has to be something—a vital substance, yes? “Vital” means life. Yes, there has to be something different from inert matter, without which life could not have come into existence—vegetation or animal life, it doesn’t matter, yes? Anything that is not inanimate.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If someone says that today, of course he loses his university job. It’s heresy to the creed to say there is vitalism. Now as far as I understand, there is no basis for that claim. Meaning, heresy—usually, by the way, when something is defined as heresy, that’s when you don’t have good arguments against it. That’s the rule. Also in the religious world.

[Speaker B] Huh? There isn’t a full chemical understanding of a cell? Today?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think there is. I don’t think there is full understanding. There is a chemical description, but not an understanding of how that creates the processes we call life. Isn’t cell division life? That’s exactly the question. Meaning, you can describe it as a chemical process, but if you reduce it only to chemistry, the question is whether you’re missing some dimension within what you call life. All the everyday abundance, or the scientific one, or road maps—

[Speaker D] —still doesn’t explain what a transportation system is. Something else is missing in addition. It’s not only a collection of asphalt grains and painted lines.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And more than that: even the laws of biology, even when you understand cell division and all these things, I’m almost sure—let’s say, I’m a little cautious here because I really don’t understand enough—but there is no continuous transition from physics and chemistry to biology. There is no such transition.

[Speaker B] From chemistry? E. coli is considered something that today is clearly known fully, at the chemical level, how it works. The E. coli bacterium. There are genetic engineering competitions on such a bacterium that can’t exist without full understanding.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No—why can’t they exist without full understanding? If you create the chemical infrastructure, then a bacterium will come out of it; or they say, let’s—

[Speaker B] —insert molecular chains inside so that it behaves differently. You can’t do that without understanding.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, we understand the chemical infrastructure, that’s clear. But the question is whether chemistry is the whole story. The question isn’t whether we understand its chemistry. The question is whether you are basically claiming that today one can present a full reductionist position—that biology can be reduced to physics and chemistry. Biology is altogether just a combination of many physical and chemical laws. That is a prevalent belief, but very much not agreed upon. Very much not agreed upon. It sustains a reductionist conception. At the level of the cell? That’s why I say: I don’t know enough exactly where the gaps are, but there are gaps, because reductionism is still an issue under debate. And that doesn’t stop people from claiming that vitalism is still illegitimate—which I don’t completely understand, why that is so. After all, if you really think biology cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry, then what you are basically saying is that there is something additional here, something else.

[Speaker B] And for that you have to point out what is missing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying: take Newton’s laws, yes? Or quantum theory if you want. If you knew exactly what is missing, then you would—take Newton’s laws, feed them into a supercomputer. Would biology emerge from that? It’s not known.

[Speaker B] But chemistry too is also a level of abstraction above physics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Also. The transition from physics to chemistry, it seems to me, today is considered closed. Meaning, at least as I understand it, people tend to see it as only a matter of complexity, but in principle there is nothing there, and I think that can be reasonably justified. I think that’s not the case between chemistry and biology. Again, I don’t know exactly where—whether in the cell or in the combination of—I have no idea. I don’t know exactly where the gap lies. There is such a gap. There is such a gap, because otherwise everyone today would be reductionists. Just as an indication—it’s not a proof—but that isn’t the case. Not everyone is a reductionist. There are many people who do not believe in reductionism. If you cannot reduce biology to physics and chemistry alone, then how can you come out so decisively against vitalism when you are not a reductionist? I don’t quite understand that combination.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the same way, you can also look one level higher, one degree higher, and talk about the human being—the mental phenomena. There are very many mental phenomena. There are experiments in neuroscience that can manipulate the brain and produce different mental phenomena for you; they can affect your mentality. Does that mean that mental phenomena are nothing but physics? Absolutely not. In no way. All that this says, at most—and we are still far from even that—but at most what it says is that physics is the infrastructure that creates the mental phenomena. But that does not mean that the mental phenomena are physics. Physics is a collection of electrons moving around, but mental phenomena are the thing we perceive or experience as emotions, significance, desires, experiences, whatever, all sorts of such things. Those things are not electrons. It may be that the electrons create them, if you are a reductionist. But even that is not certain. Still, let’s say it’s true—that’s what people believe today in neuroscience. But that still doesn’t mean it is physics. That is not reduction.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Therefore the approach closest to reductionism basically tries to claim—and this is sheer speculation, I show this in the book, and in my opinion it is sheer speculation—that what is called emergence, namely that mental phenomena emerge from the material whole. Now, first, there is no way to show this. There is also no principled way to show this, by the way.

[Speaker B] You can’t even refute it at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. It is not a scientific claim. That’s why I say: fine, you can remain with your position; I also have no ability to prove mine. I’m not claiming that what I say is scientific. But someone who makes a scientific claim is supposed to subject it to a test of refutation. There is no such refutation test. I show in the book that a priori there isn’t. Meaning, there cannot be. Why? Because what is the concept of emergence? The concept of emergence basically means that in the phenomenon of the whole there is something that cannot be described as the sum of the phenomena of the parts. Meaning, otherwise you wouldn’t need emergence. Emergence in the strong sense—as people call it today, as opposed to weak emergence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For example, John Searle, the American philosopher who wrote the book Mind, Brain and Science, writes there—he gives the example, I think I spoke about it once—of liquidity. Liquidity is a property of a collection of molecules, okay? But each molecule by itself is not liquid. So here, he shows, this is a property of the whole that does not appear at the level of the parts composing the whole. So he says: in the same way, mental properties or mental and psychic phenomena are properties of our material or physiological whole. So true, a cell—or not even a cell; certainly a single organic molecule—does not think, does not want, does not feel, nothing. But a collection of molecules can do so. Where is the bug in his comparison? This is very seductive to people; today it is, I think, the most common approach in neuroscience. It has no basis. No basis at all, for a very simple reason. The property of liquidity is emergence in the sense of emergence—yes, it is emergence. It is weak emergence. What does that mean? If I understand the field around each molecule, I can tell you exactly how the cluster will behave: whether it will be liquid, when, at what temperature. Meaning, I know everything. True, a single molecule is not liquid, because liquidity and solidity and so on are states of aggregation. A state of aggregation is a relation among molecules. It cannot be a property of a single molecule. But clearly, if you know the single molecule, then you know how molecules with bonds between them will behave, because the bond is just the field around the molecule. So if you understand that, you can derive from it by explicit calculation—explicit calculation—you can calculate in an explicit way the properties of liquidity from the properties of the single molecule, even though the single molecule itself is not liquid. That doesn’t matter. But the property of the collective can be calculated entirely from the molecule. You can calculate it—do the calculation, and out comes liquid.

[Speaker B] Okay? That does not exist in this case. I think this is more similar to—Nassim Stephen Taleb—not in the thick book, in the more advanced books, about solving mathematical problems with simpler processes. We have a solution to that riddle, that game show puzzle, where you need, by means of a sequence of numbers, to produce a target number using a sequence of arithmetic operations. So he shows an example of how, from parallel processes, each of which only knows how to take two numbers and do something with them in some kind of soup—and they even made a software simulation of it that works—and each such little process, which only knows how to take two numbers and do something with them, doesn’t know how to solve the problem, but all these processes together know how to solve the problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So there’s some kind of Taleb-style point about emergence. It’s like—I once saw in a newspaper that they wrote that birds are geniuses because they can solve differential equations of navigation or something like that. Right, so water is even more genius because it solves the Navier-Stokes equations, which are even more complicated than navigation equations. Okay, clearly not. We know that there are systems that do actions when we—like Woody Shapira’s biological computers at Weizmann—when all together—

[Speaker B] —they do something more than all the small pieces. For us, we give that significance as something. No, wait, but you can calculate explicitly what they do. It may be that this is weak emergence, but it may be that if you had all the complete knowledge of what is happening in the brain, you could do that too.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be. But then it would become weak emergence. No problem. But people argue the opposite. If it is weak emergence, then that would be a speculation that should be left for the future, and we’ll see what they discover. I have no problem with that. Maybe it is true, and when they find it, I’ll raise my hands.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But there they make another claim. They want to claim that there is such a thing as strong emergence. Strong emergence means that you cannot take the collection of parts, do a calculation, and get the final result—and that is not the same thing as molecules and liquidity. Okay? Because molecules and liquidity—true, a single molecule is not liquid, but with a collection of molecules you can do an explicit calculation and it will give you exactly the color of the water. There is no problem. And such a molecule is a collection of atoms, and atoms—there is a theory of atomic physics—so you can get from physics to chemistry. Meaning, you can get there. But here, in this transition, there is some claim that even if you don’t manage to do such a calculation, and even if it is essentially impossible to do such a calculation, still there is nothing beyond this. Because this is emergence in the strong sense.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now I say: first of all, emergence in the strong sense is by definition not measurable. Since the moment you show that here is a collection of things that produces something you cannot calculate, then that’s weak emergence. So I will say there is simply something extra here. Who said there isn’t? How will you measure that there isn’t something else here? You can never measure that. So at most you can say there is weak emergence. You will never succeed in proving the existence of strong emergence. Strong emergence, in other words, is a synonym for speculation. I want to put forward a speculation and I call it by scientific and impressive names. That is all it means. Meaning, the claim that there is weak emergence is, at the principled level, a scientific claim. It is not known today, it is not certain that it is true, but it is a claim that in principle is scientific. It can be tested, and if they get there, then they will find it. So no problem. The moment someone shows me how from neurons—there is no chance, in my opinion—but the moment someone shows me how from neurons a mental phenomenon comes out by calculation, meaning actually shows me that, then fine, that will be weak emergence.

[Speaker E] How—how would you show a mental phenomenon?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How do you calculate a mental phenomenon? Exactly.

[Speaker E] So what would?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A computer of some company is trying to build a computer like the human brain. The human brain, yes. A computer that has consciousness.

[Speaker B] If in another few decades they manage to reach consciousness, that won’t prove anything. Why? Because you don’t know that it has consciousness. All you know is how—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —it behaves, or what it does. So what?

[Speaker B] You don’t know that it has consciousness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How do you know that I have consciousness? My own, I know I do. That is the most certain thing you can know. Clearly. Yes, so that’s what I’m saying. If you are a human being like me, then I assume that you also have consciousness. That is an assumption. But with a computer, all I know is how it behaves. Why assume it has consciousness? I can tell you how it operates even without assuming it has consciousness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So this is a nice example—don’t remember if I sent you the copy—I’ve been having a strong debate now with Tsur Polivinsky. Did I send it to you? There is some collection of researchers who place animals in front of a mirror and check whether they have awareness, these animals. How? The animal sees its own image in the mirror, and they put, say, a spot of paint here or something like that. Then it uses its hand—the monkey uses its hand—to remove the paint. Now all it sees is only in the mirror, so it understands that what it sees in the mirror is itself. Meaning, it has self-awareness. Okay? That’s the claim there.

[Speaker B] I asked Tsur Polivinsky, who is a materialist—I asked him—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —whether in his opinion this proves that the monkey has awareness or consciousness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t get an answer, of course, and I won’t get an answer. But clearly it does not. Why not? Because after all, the whole claim of these emergentists basically says this: the mental phenomenon does not affect physical behavior; the influence goes only in one direction. Physics affects the mental, and not the mental the physical. Okay? So what actually happens? Let’s say, just as an example, how they describe action and reaction in a human being. Say someone hit me and I decide to hit him back. Fine? How do they describe this at the level of neuroscience? He hit me, that blow passed to the brain, a signal passed to the brain, the brain processed it, there is some center there that gives an electrical instruction to the hand to get up and send him a punch back. Okay? Now alongside this process I experience mental processes—being angry, enraged, deciding to take revenge, to raise my hand. But that’s nonsense; that’s not really what moves my hand. This whole business is an electrical process, okay? A physical process. That is basically the—what is it then? What? The— But according to the advocates of emergence, this whole process is a physical process. The psychic processes are what are called epiphenomena, meaning accompanying phenomena. Meaning, they accompany the physical process but do not affect it. Because if they did affect it, then there would be some electron moving not according to Newton’s laws. And that cannot be. After all, an electron moving in a physical process moves with acceleration equal to force divided by mass. Nothing will help; if there is no force, it will not move. So it is impossible that the mental moves electrons. Therefore the influence must be only in one direction and not in the other. That is basically what is called epiphenomenalism. Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now if that is really so, then let’s return to the monkey standing in front of the mirror. The monkey standing in front of the mirror basically receives a signal from the mirror in which there is a spot, right? That signal passes to its brain, gets processed there, the brain gives the hand an instruction to move there and wipe off the spot, and that is what the hand does, and that is all. Now the question whether consciousness or some mental process accompanies this is a question that in any case has no effect on what you see. So on what basis do you assume that it exists at all? After all, even if it exists, according to this it is not what produces the behavior—quite the opposite, the behavior produces it. So if that is really the case, then all you saw was that it has such behavior. Fine. So what does that say about consciousness? Consciousness accompanies this thing—by definition, according to this view, consciousness is not measurable. Because for something to be measurable it must have an effect on something physical, right? To be measurable with respect to something physical. But in order to measure consciousness, consciousness would have to have an effect on something physical. But they claim that such a thing cannot be, because the system is affected only by physical forces. Consciousness cannot affect physics, right? So if that’s the case, by definition you will never succeed in measuring consciousness. By definition. Never mind now. This is an a priori argument. It is not even an argument—I’m not even referring to monkeys and mirrors.

[Speaker B] So that’s why he says there is no such thing as consciousness. What? That’s why he says there is no such thing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I told him that this is—

[Speaker C] —the same counter-argument. He asks him what his opinion is about these experiments—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —these experiments—

[Speaker C] —and whether these experiments—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —indicate that there is consciousness or not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In the end he said there is consciousness—and not consciousness in the sense, never mind. He said no, but afterward—afterward—he said no, I never said that. Yes. What do they do when someone decides not to clench a fist? What? When someone can—so his brain processed it and the result was not to clench a fist but rather to run away; that was what happened.

[Speaker B] The brain of the one who runs away? Yes. Everything, everything is a physical process. The whole thing is a process—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Physically. The moment—once everything is a physical process, then I’m bringing this only as an example of what you said earlier, that I can do all the manipulations on the brain and it will work. Meaning, it will produce mental phenomena just as I expect it to produce, and that still doesn’t mean that you can identify the mental with a collection of neurons. You’re not able to identify a person who behaves like a feeling person but has no consciousness. Exactly. Right, fine. So that’s basically the Turing test. Yes, right. Or the meaning of the Turing test is whether the sophisticated computer is really a person—but not because it is a person, rather because a person is also a computer, meaning the only question is how sophisticated it all is. Okay. So where are we. Ah, okay. When the plants were created—we’re on page 94. No, yes, on 94, but higher up. Until here there was only inert matter, and now by God’s command the plant world appears. Scientists have a very hard time defining the essence of plant life, because they want to define everything by means of physics and chemistry, but that doesn’t work out well. In plants there is life, life with… and this is basically the vitalist thesis, as if it has a soul. It should be emphasized, as it were. And this is a new essence that does not exist in inanimate matter. The characteristic trait of plants is “yielding seed,” that is, that it reproduces, multiplies itself. It is possible that two grains of inert matter join together into a bigger grain, but the trait of reproducing itself, of giving birth to something like itself, does not exist in inert matter. The life that exists in plants creates a special relationship between a person and them. A person cultivates a plant, and when it is destroyed he feels sorrow, which is not the case with inert matter. Yes. When the plants were created on the third day, there is no reason to think they were all created at once. There is a chain of species; there are genetic changes, mutations, that create new species, and this is a process that takes a very long time. Just as the process of the crystallization of the elements and compounds from primordial matter was presumably also a very lengthy process. Fine. So basically what he wants to say is that the day on which the formation of plant life from inert matter was described is not twenty-four hours. On the third day a new reality was created in an essential sense. The transition from inert matter to plant life cannot be interpreted as random development. Again, the same claim he made earlier. This thing cannot have a scientific explanation. Basically, when he says random he doesn’t mean random; he means something without a directing hand. Something that happens on its own, yes, even in a deterministic process. Scientists trying to describe the formation of the world as we know it often use the concept of “development,” in quotation marks. But this is a mistaken and empty concept. Matter by itself is not active. Matter by itself is not active; it is passive. Not only were plant life and animal life not created from inert matter on their own, but even the elements were not created from primordial matter without the intervention of an agent outside the matter. “Development,” in quotation marks, is heresy at the core and an evasion of the problem. Here he takes a very conservative position, and anti-scientific in that sense as well. Earlier he said that if we believe science about everything else, then why not believe it here too—and here, for some reason, he has some kind of terribly strong antagonism toward the scientific approach. I’m not entirely sure why. The claim is, of course, according to his view all along, that something essentially new always requires some intervention from outside. And the assumption is that something that seems to me essentially new really is essentially new. Because scientists say, listen, that’s how it seems to you, but really it’s a continuum and one thing can emerge from another. And he says no, there is something else here, and there has to be some intervention here; it cannot happen on its own. Therefore when people say “development,” it is misleading. By the way, people in evolution also say that “development” is a misleading term. Because development actually expresses Lamarckism more than Darwinism. Lamarckism is some kind of view that things strive from within themselves to become more complete; they improve over time. Darwin says exactly the opposite, of course. Darwin says nothing improves over time; things happen in an arbitrary and random way in all directions, only what is unsuccessful dies out. So what remains is what is improved. A thing has no inner tendency to improve; there is no such thing in inert matter. So for that reason too, the concept of development—people in evolution also say that it’s really a confusing term. Reality as a whole develops, but not an individual object; an individual object never develops. Everyone challenged Darwin: how did it happen that the mutations were always in the positive direction, toward the more sophisticated? After all, change could also go in the opposite direction. That’s a bit of a misunderstanding in my opinion. Mutations definitely happen in all directions, not only in the direction of improvement; it’s just that what is not improved dies out, that’s all. Meaning, first he rejects the concept of development because it is mistaken, and afterwards he says that Darwin speaks about development—but Darwin himself also said that development is a mistake, that what happens here is not development; that’s not correct. Meaning, he attributes to Darwin the mistake that Darwin himself did not make, okay. We say that the form of matter becomes more perfected and advances from level to level by the will of God. Meaning, there has to be some kind of—now here I’m prepared to agree with that statement, only the will of God can bring this about through natural mechanisms. Maimonides explains that natural forms are given by an angel, a separate intellect acting upon matter by the will of God. Instead of speaking about development, we will speak about the progress of creation from stage to stage, from form to form, by the will of God acting through the angels. The angels can also be the laws of nature. We once talked, I think, about the demon Sha’aya, where the Talmud in Bava Kamma says, “Sha’aya will smash the gate,” and it seemed to him lacking—that if there is a desolate house, then some demon dwells there and crumbles it, and it’s called Sha’aya: “Sha’aya will smash the gate.” So basically, in modern language, that demon is the second law of thermodynamics, okay, that things fall apart. Now actually, once I played around a bit in arguments with people who think around this issue, and I claimed: who says there is no demon? There really is a demon. The fact that we describe the second law of thermodynamics in the form of some formula or another—that’s only a description of how the demon works, that’s all. Who says there isn’t a demon there? A demon is that same object which generates the processes we call the second law of thermodynamics. Call it whatever you like—some creature you don’t see, we’ll call it a demon, what difference does it make? So the Sages called it Sha’aya, and they also didn’t know how to describe it mathematically—so what? Fine. So in that sense I’m saying the same thing here too with regard to angels: the fact that something happens by the will of God does not mean that it has to be some intervention against the laws and against the ordinary mechanisms. It means that the ordinary mechanisms themselves can carry out what the Holy One, blessed be He, decides. Although progress is not a prolonged process, every change in nature takes a very long time in tiny little steps; that is how the Holy One, blessed be He, acts. In short, that seems to me more or less to be the course of creation up to man. Next time we’ll already touch on chapter 17, on the creation of man.