Learning from Experience – Lesson 3

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I said: when I say there is gravity, that’s not really a claim about the world. Okay? It’s a claim about me. When I gather all the facts I’ve seen, that’s what I know. Let’s organize them in a way that’s efficient and convenient to use, so let’s talk as if there is a law of gravity in the world. But not that I’m really claiming there is such a law. That’s what the strict empiricist would say, yes, the consistent one. We’ll get to that in another moment. So basically the point we’re at is some kind of intermediate state between rationalism and empiricism—or really, I don’t accept those two as a strict dichotomy. I want to sharpen a bit more what intuition means, why it’s necessary, and also try to persuade you why it’s so vital and where it plays a role. Look, we basically have two toolboxes—this, I think, is how I began the whole discussion—two fundamental toolboxes that we can use in this context of scientific thinking, of coming to know the world. One toolbox is observation. The second toolbox is thought. Okay? Thought and observation. Now let’s try for a moment to think about what thought is. Thought always means drawing conclusions from premises. Logic, okay, logic or philosophy, consists of arguments that derive a conclusion from premises. So when I talk about the way I justify or prove some claim through the intellect, through thought, not through observation, then usually it’s built—or maybe even always, if you want—in the form of arguments. I assume premises, and from them I derive conclusions. But that of course raises the question: where do I know the premises from? So if the premises themselves also have some proof based on other premises, okay, then let’s move to those other premises. In the end, there have to be some claims that serve as premises, or axioms if you like, that themselves have no proof. From them—on them—I can build everything else. Like geometry, say, right? We have four initial axioms; from them I derive conclusions, from those conclusions I derive more conclusions, and I build the whole tower of geometry on that basis. But at the foundation there are four axioms for which I have no proof.

Now of course you can always ask: fine, but then what is this whole move worth? Because if my axioms have no proof, then what does it help me that I prove the conclusions based on the axioms if the axioms themselves are not something I can really accept? So maybe you could say: okay, axioms come from observation. There are people who think that. That axioms come from observation, and from there on the intellect or logic derives conclusions from observed facts. But that’s obviously nonsense, because observations always give me particular facts. I saw this event, that event, with this object, that object. I never see general phenomena. I see specific phenomena. So it can’t be that from those I can logically derive the general law. It will always be something like a generalization, not something like moving from the general to the particular—from deduction. And therefore it can’t be a process in which I observe certain cases, certain situations, certain events, and from them derive the conclusion by means of logic. It can never work that way. And we’ll come back to that too in a bit.

So what does that mean? It means that the axioms themselves—if I want to base my conclusion on axioms—then the axioms themselves cannot have an empirical source. So what source do they have? Well, then that too would be an argument, and then the argument would be based on other axioms. In the end I’m talking about the last turtle in the chain of turtles, right? The axioms sitting at the beginning of the process. I think there’s no choice but to understand that we get those axioms from our intuition. We have no other tool that can ground such things. Think even about geometry. There are geometrical axioms. So take an axiom: between two points there passes one straight line, or parallels do not meet, and so on. Where does that come from? It can’t come from observation. Observation tells me that between these two points there passes a straight line. But how do I know there isn’t another straight line? The fact that I didn’t see one is no proof. Maybe there’s another straight line whose existence I just didn’t notice. Maybe there are two other points through which there will be three straight lines, even though through these two points there is only one. I haven’t seen all the pairs of points in the world. Same thing with parallel lines that don’t meet: nobody followed them all the way forever to make sure they never meet, right? That would take a while. So how do you know?

And yet it’s very clear to all of us that these axioms are true: that between two points there does not pass more than one straight line, and not fewer either, and that parallels never meet. Where do I know that from? I have no proof of it; it doesn’t come from observation. But on that I build all my geometry. So how do I know it? If you ask mathematicians, many of them will tell you: in truth, I don’t know it. I simply assume it, and it seems fruitful. If you assume those premises, you can derive all kinds of very interesting conclusions from them, and therefore it’s an interesting mathematical theory. Whether it’s true—that doesn’t interest the mathematician, whether it’s true or not. That’s the physicist’s mandate. A physicist has to know whether it’s true, whether it’s a true fact about the world. A mathematician builds castles in the air; he isn’t dealing with the world, at least in the standard view. And therefore mathematicians, if you ask them where they get their axioms or fundamental definitions from, will often answer: it’s arbitrary. I simply assume it, define certain concepts, and see whether it gives me interesting output. If it does, then it’s a mathematical field worth dealing with. If not, okay, we’ll invent something else. But they treat it as a kind of invention, a creation, which is judged not in terms of truth.

Wait, there’s a problem here. Yitzhak, is that you? Put yourself on mute. What? You’re not on mute. So these claims—mathematics is not measured in terms of truth or correctness, but in terms of consistency. Meaning: if these are the premises, then that is the conclusion. I’m not saying the premises are true, and I’m also not saying the conclusion is true. All I’m saying is that the conclusion follows from the premises. And if I find enough interesting conclusions that follow from those premises, then these are premises interesting enough to work with. It’s fruitful enough to be a field worth pursuing. And it’s not a question of true or false; it’s a question of fruitful or not fruitful. Physicists then discover that fruitful mathematical theories are also applicable to our world—but that’s physicists, that has nothing to do with mathematicians.

It reminds me of a seminar paper I once wrote as an undergraduate. I took a course in nonlinear control—it was a very mathematical course, a beautiful course. And I got some seminar paper there to do on the Volterra model. Volterra was an Italian mathematician from, I think, the 18th century or something like that. He built some equation. On the seashore near his city in Italy there were two fish populations, and population A ate population B. The big fish ate the small fish. The small fish fed on the surrounding vegetation. Okay, now if there are a lot of small fish, then the big fish have plenty of food, so they multiply. Once they multiply, they eat the small fish, so the small fish population shrinks. If that population shrinks, the big fish have nothing to eat, so their population shrinks—but then the small fish multiply, and the whole cycle starts over again. He built some model of coupled differential equations for this, and in the end he got what’s called a limit cycle. Meaning, some cyclical process, rises and falls in the fish populations. Okay, overall you can understand that pretty clearly on an intuitive level, and that’s what he got.

What did he do to test whether it works? He went to the market to check the prices of the two kinds of fish. Because the assumption is that when there are many fish, their price is low, because supply is high, right? If there are few fish, then the price is high. So basically you can test your thesis about the periodicity of the fish populations by checking fish prices over time. Fish prices should behave like a sine wave. When there are few fish, the price is high; when there are many fish, the price is low; and so on—it’s basically some cyclical process. And indeed he claimed that he really found a limit cycle in the prices. That’s interesting, because he built such a model out of his own reasoning, went to reality, and it turned out that this model really describes reality. It just came to mind. Of course all of physics is like this—it’s just an example. Well, not all of physics is like this. There are parts of physics that don’t deal with reality at all—various Hawkings and the like, and they’re dealing with who knows what, chatter. But physicists, in principle, are supposed to deal with the world, not with chatter. And there are many more examples of this.

In any case, the claim is that mathematics does not deal with the world but with ideas, with relations between ideas. And the question whether this is applicable to the world or not is a question scientists are supposed to answer—physicists, or people in other scientific fields. So if that’s the case, then where do I get it from if I want to claim, say, that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees? If I’m making that claim as a mathematical claim, then I don’t need to assume it’s true. All I’m saying is that it follows from the axioms of Euclidean geometry. If you assume those axioms, that is the result, that is the conclusion. And you’re not claiming either that the axioms are true or that the conclusion is true. But if a physicist says that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, then he is talking about the world, not about abstract Platonic ideas. He’s talking about the world. But if you say that in the world the sum of the angles is 180 degrees, that basically means you are assuming that the world obeys the axioms of Euclidean geometry. Okay, that’s already a claim in physics. Meaning, you are basically saying that these claims are true—not just that there’s an interesting move here or a fruitful move here, but that these are true claims, and therefore the axioms are true, and therefore the conclusions are also true.

Now how do you know the axioms are true—that our world is really Euclidean? That parallels do not meet, that between two points there passes one straight line, and so on. If you think about the surface of a sphere, for example, then between two points infinitely many straight lines pass—or at least can pass. So that’s a characteristic of flat space. There are curved spaces where this doesn’t hold. Now how do you know that our world is like this? It’s not the result of observation and not the result of rational consideration; it’s the result of intuition. My intuition tells me that between two points there passes one straight line, or that two parallels will never meet. Meaning, we derive our axioms from intuition, and then logic or philosophy—arguments—can derive various conclusions from those axioms. That’s how thought works. But if thought works that way, then at the foundation there has to be something that grounds the axioms. Observation can’t do it—I explained that—because observation gives only specific facts. So the general assumptions from which I proceed have to come from intuition. And if so, that means intuition really does give us claims about the world, even though intuition is supposedly a capacity of thought.

I think I mentioned the mathematical equation: someone works very hard to solve it, and then some genius comes along and says, no, here I immediately see that the solution is such-and-such. Because by intuition he immediately sees that this is the solution, even without doing the calculation. Now when you check the solution he proposes, you really do see that this solution solves that equation. Meaning, this intuition is not some subjective feeling, but an ability to grasp something in reality directly—not through rational calculation and premises and so on, but I simply see it. But what does “see” mean? I don’t see it with my eyes. I see it with the intellect. That’s what I’m talking about: seeing with the mind’s eye, or cognizing thought, if you like. And that basically means that at the foundation of every scientific-philosophical argument—not every philosophical argument, but many philosophical arguments—there sits an intuition, and intuition really is a tool that speaks about the world. And therefore intuition is, as I said before, some kind of gray area between thinking and cognition.

In philosophy this phenomenon is called the emptiness of the analytic. Logical arguments are basically empty, because all they say is consistency, or the derivation of a conclusion from premises. They don’t say the premises are true, and they don’t say the conclusion is true. You can adopt opposite premises and your conclusion will be different, and one of you is not more right or less right than the other from a logical standpoint. As long as you’re consistent, there’s no problem; from the standpoint of logic, you’ve got certification. I think it’s more accurate to say “emptiness” rather than “voidness,” but I don’t know. I was usually used to writing “the voidness of the analytic,” but it seems to me more correct to say “the emptiness of the analytic.” In any case.

In any case, what I’m saying is that logic, or thought, is basically empty. For it to begin containing facts, you have to put into it some input from beyond logic: intuition, observation, something that comes from contact with the world, from interaction with the world. Without that, you can’t get to claims about the world, because logic by itself alone is empty. So there must be some observational component—either sensory observation or observation by intuition.

Maybe to finish this introduction, I want to go back again—I once talked about this three-stage process, and I also wrote about it in books—the three-stage process that sharpens this point more, just another angle from which to look at the same issue. I divide the intellectual history of the world, or at least of the West, into three stages, and I also identify them as stages in the maturation of a private individual: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Childhood is basically a dogmatic state. It’s a state in which the child accepts things because the adult said so. It’s obvious: if he said it, then it’s probably true, right? That’s a dogmatic approach.

The adolescent rebellion comes when that child matures a bit and becomes a teenager. Then suddenly when the adults tell him something, he asks: “Who says? Prove it. I’m not willing to accept things without proof.” Right? That’s adolescent rebellion. I’m doing this briefly because I’ve already discussed it in the past. And then in the end of adolescence, the adolescent matures, and that’s the point where he moves from teenager to adult. There he runs into the second crisis of his life. This crisis—every such crisis, yes, is a stage transition—the second crisis of his life is when he discovers that there is nothing in the world that can be proved. Then he finds himself at a dead end. Because if nothing can be proved, and the adolescent said, “Who says? Prove it,” meaning that he accepts only things that have proof, and suddenly he discovers that nothing has proof—then what is he supposed to do with that?

I said there are three possible ways to mature, which sketch the map. It seems to me there are only three. How do I know? Because the logical, conceptual analysis basically yields that. What creates the tangle? What creates it is the combination of two assumptions. Assumption one: only something proven is acceptable; I accept only things that have proof. Assumption two: there is nothing that can be proved. What follows if I adopt both assumptions? That nothing is acceptable. If there is nothing that has proof, and only something with proof is acceptable, then nothing is acceptable. In short: skepticism. Right? If you take the adolescent’s two assumptions and carry them forward, you arrive at skepticism. That is the expected maturation.

But when you’re standing at such a crossroads, you can also adopt two other paths, and they are of course to give up assumption A or give up assumption B. If you continue with both assumptions, you arrive at skepticism. But if you understand that the two assumptions together lead you to absurdity, because you refuse to be a skeptic—you are not a skeptic—you say: “Okay, then if these two assumptions lead me to skepticism”—we spoke earlier about ad hoc moves, right?—“if these two assumptions lead me to skepticism, and I’m not willing to be a skeptic, I am not a skeptic, then let’s go back. Apparently at least one of these two assumptions is false.” Now let’s do the accounting.

Suppose the false assumption is that there is nothing one can be certain about, or that can be proved. That can’t be. There is nothing that can be proved in a way that is independent of foundational premises. There have been attempts like that throughout history—I mentioned them: Descartes’ cogito, Anselm’s ontological argument, yes, the ontological proof for the existence of God. All these examples, and a few others, are examples of attempts to prove claims about the world without premises—to reach certainty through logical means alone. Okay, but they failed, of course. There is no such thing. You have to assume premises, and once you’ve assumed premises you no longer have certainty, because who says… once you’ve assumed premises, you no longer have certainty, because who says the premises are true? You have no proof for the premises. And then, apparently, we don’t have the option of giving up the adolescent’s second assumption, the assumption that says there is nothing one can be certain about. But actually there is a way to give that up. How? By becoming, let’s call it, a mystic, or a fundamentalist, or something of that sort. What do I mean? I can arrive at certainty about things not by means of logic, but by something above the intellect. Yes, a phrase those people are very fond of. I can arrive at certainty not by means of logic, not by means of the intellect, but by something above the intellect.

Then I give up the second assumption, which says there is no certainty in anything. No—that’s true, with logic you can’t arrive at certainty about anything, but there are other tools beyond logic that can give me certainty. And then what? Then there’s no problem. I can remain with the first assumption, that only something proven, only something certain, is acceptable, and not end up in skepticism, right? Because my second assumption is that there are proven things, or certain things, by means that are supra-rational, supra-logical, yes, above the intellect. Let’s call that, for the purpose of our discussion, fundamentalism. Fundamentalism means adopting claims without exposing them to critical thought. Meaning, I’m not willing to hear objections to them or to examine them critically. As far as I’m concerned, it is true, period. There is some supreme source that brought these conclusions to my knowledge, and they are not subject to the test of critical thought. That’s what I call fundamentalism—of course, that’s the philosophical definition of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism in the sociological-anthropological sense, in the practical world, is usually associated for us with cruelty, with terribly rigid, terribly cruel behavior—ISIS and groups like that. But in my view that’s only a symptom of philosophical fundamentalism. Because these people are basically operating according to certain principles they are convinced are true, and they have full certainty about them—even though of course there is no proof—but through mystical tools or I don’t know exactly what. Caliph al-Baghdadi told them that this is what Allah demands of them, and for them that is not open to discussion; meaning, it is simply obvious that it’s true. And even if it demands fanatical, extreme, cruel acts from them, it doesn’t matter—they go all the way with it, because it is certain.

So yes, cruelty can emerge from fundamentalism, but fundamentalism does not mean cruelty. There can also be fundamentalism in a positive direction. A person who is unwilling to subject his moral principles to critical examination, for example. And he is a very moral person, he pursues justice and morality—he just isn’t willing to subject the principles of morality to the test of critical thought. He too is a fundamentalist. It’s just that in this case he is a fundamentalist it isn’t dangerous to live next to, unlike the fundamentalists of ISIS. Okay, but philosophically he too is a fundamentalist.

So let’s return to our point. Fundamentalism means adopting certain claims as true even though I have no rational support for them, or logical proof, or things of that sort, but rather something—I don’t know—supra-rational, supernatural, a divine factor, a prophet, a sage, I don’t know exactly who. Someone told me, and I’m convinced it’s true. So that is the second option for maturing. The first option is skepticism; the second option is fundamentalism. The skeptic keeps both of the adolescent’s assumptions: only something proven is acceptable, and nothing is proven. Those are the adolescent’s two assumptions. So the skeptic keeps both assumptions, and therefore his conclusion is skepticism. The fundamentalist gives up the second assumption: it is not true that there is no certainty in anything; there are things about which I can have certainty. Then he becomes a fundamentalist, but he agrees that only something proven—or only something certain—is acceptable.

And the third form of maturation, what I call synthetic maturity, is basically giving up the first assumption. The first assumption says that only something certain is acceptable. No—something that is not certain, but still makes sense, is also acceptable to me. My threshold for acceptability is not the threshold of certainty. So I give up the adolescent’s first assumption, and that is another option for maturing. In short: either I adopt both assumptions, or I give up the first assumption, or I give up the second assumption. So either you’re a skeptic, or a fundamentalist, or what I called a synthetic adult—someone who basically says: I’m willing to rely on my common sense, even though I have no proof for it, and even though it isn’t clear and isn’t certain to me. I do not require certainty in order for a claim to be acceptable. In principle you can also give up both assumptions—there is such an option too—but fine, it isn’t interesting. The option exists on the map, but it’s not interesting.

Now, this picture I’ve described here—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, with three kinds of adulthood—describes the maturation of an individual person. But I think it also describes, in very broad strokes, the maturation of thought in the West at least. In the East it’s a slightly different opera, but in the West I think this is how it went. In the earliest period, the period of childhood, there was dogmatism. There were all sorts of principles that seemed self-evident to people. If the sorcerer said they had to dance around the fire to bring rain, then they danced around the fire to bring rain. It never even occurred to any of them to check whether it worked or not, or how the sorcerer knew. Critical thought—they didn’t have it. They were dogmatic like a child. They accepted things because the elders said so, the wise men said so.

Then comes the adolescent rebellion. You can connect it to ancient Greece; the polemics with the Jews also connect somewhat to this issue. But in Greece critical thought and logic began to develop, and then people suddenly started asking: wait a second, who told you that all these ancient dogmas are true? Who says? Did you test it? Do you have proof? Did you check it empirically? Meaning, they began applying critical thought to such things. In fact, in Greece there is some kind of transition, almost a metamorphosis, from mythology—which seemingly represents the childish period—to philosophy and the beginnings of science. By the end of the Greek period it had already detached itself from mythology, because it was criticizing mythical thought.

Then begins the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment not in the personal sense but in the historical sense, and I think it ends somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. From Greece to the middle of the twentieth century is the period of Enlightenment. What happens in the middle of the twentieth century? In the middle of the twentieth century modernism—which is really the peak of the adolescent’s optimism: we will prove everything, define everything, we are no longer mystics, we don’t believe in religions, we don’t believe in anything that is not proven, rational, scientific, logical, whatever—logical positivism. Then of course comes the great fracture of the mid-twentieth century. Sociologically people also connect it to World War II, to the Holocaust, but of course it is a broader philosophical process; it’s not one historical event that causes the whole thing. And suddenly they understand that you can’t accept only proven things, because there is nothing in the world that is proven, nothing that is certain. And if you want to be naïve and still believe with certainty, then at most you can arrive at specific facts that are certain in your eyes. And even that is some kind of assumption—that what my eyes show me is certain. And of course even that can be debated. But even if you accept this naïve empiricism, all you will get is certainty about specific facts, not about any general statement or law, a law of nature.

So a very deep fracture was created, because people realized that science and philosophy and logic do not really lead us in the direction of certainty. And the reaction to this crisis, or the result of it, was basically what was later called, in retrospect, postmodernity, postmodernism. Which basically means a narrative approach: everyone has his own truth, only consistency matters, but there is no truth, no one who is more right or less right. Again, this is a very schematic description, but in broad strokes I think it’s correct. And that really parallels the skeptical maturity I described earlier. Because postmodernity basically assumes that only something proven is acceptable, but, in the wake of the mid-twentieth century, it already understands that there is nothing in life, nothing in the world, that can be proved. Therefore nothing is acceptable. So what is there? All kinds of narratives, kinds of discourse. I adopt these premises and my conclusion is such-and-such; I adopt different premises and my conclusion is such-and-such. No one is more right or less right than anyone else. There is a collection of bubbles, monads in Leibniz’s language, that don’t really speak to one another, and each is consistent within itself, and each group or each individual is trapped within his own narrative. And you can’t really create discourse, and certainly not decide who is right.

It’s no wonder that the concept of narrative penetrated political discourse so powerfully, because in political discourse it is easiest to say that the Palestinians have their narrative, we have our narrative, everyone is right or no one is right, and therefore there is no point arguing until we discover who is right. Instead, we need compromises. A practical compromise. That is why it so strongly characterizes left-wing thinking. By contrast, the right says: what do you mean? We’re right and they’re wrong. There is right and wrong here. They’re unwilling to accept this narrativization of discourse. So this analysis really does connect directly to political reality, but right now I’m focusing on philosophy.

So the first kind of maturity is skeptical maturity. The second kind is fundamentalist maturity, right? Fundamentalism too raised its head over the course of the twentieth century, even though people thought it was nearing its end. If you had asked someone in the middle of the twentieth century—or even a bit before or after—he would have said: religious faith, religious fundamentalism or other kinds of fundamentalism are gradually fading, disappearing from the world. Give it another ten, twenty, fifty years, and there won’t be a trace left of it. I still remember myself as a teenager being convinced that the religious thing was just a matter of time—it was going to disappear in a few years; there wouldn’t be any religious people left in a few years. I said this as a pessimistic prediction, because I did believe, but it was obvious to me that in the world this was fading away. It turns out history is more complicated than all kinds of wise guys think—even not only in the Enlightenment era; wise guys who are supposedly mature too. Yes, the whole business is more complicated.

In any case, all sorts of fundamentalist movements and groups suddenly popped up. What are they claiming? Because of this breakdown in science and philosophical thought, which no longer manages to lead us anywhere, they return to fundamentalist, mystical, supra-rational, religious sources—call it what you like—and draw their certainty from there. So it is no wonder that this too is a kind of reaction to the breakdown of the early-to-mid twentieth century.

And notice, according to the earlier analysis, what fundamentalism and postmodern skeptical thinking have in common. There is something they share. I’ll remind you: skepticism adopts both of the adolescent’s assumptions. Fundamentalism adopts assumption A but not assumption B. Which means that on assumption A they agree. What is assumption A? That only something certain is acceptable. The conclusion that follows is different for the two groups, even opposite. For the skeptics it means nothing is acceptable, nobody is more right than anybody else. For the fundamentalists it means there definitely are acceptable things, because there are things that are certain, even if I have no proof for them, because they are above the intellect or things like that. Okay? But both start from the same point of departure: that only the certain is acceptable. On that they agree.

And therefore I argue—again, only hinting at current events—that this is why the skeptical postmodern West cannot cope with fundamentalism. In my view the problem is not the weapons or the terrorism; the problem is philosophy, conceptual analysis. Simply because these two worldviews sit on the same platform. Therefore there is no chance of dealing with them. The West, in its crisis, searching for certainty and unable really to hold onto its own ideas, then explains to us all kinds of notions of Orientalism and things like that, and not being condescending to the fundamentalists, and they are as right as we are, and everyone has his own narrative—and by doing that they basically make it impossible to defeat fundamentalism, because you can’t fight against it. And the reason is that there is no truth, because only certainty is truth. The West agrees with that, and fundamentalism agrees with that too. That is what they share: only something certain is acceptable.

The only real way to deal with fundamentalism—incidentally, also in the Jewish world—is this: once people gave up on proofs for the existence of God… I’m still the last dinosaur dealing with these things. People laugh at me: why are you busying yourself with this nonsense that interests no one and convinces no one? That’s the claim. I don’t think that’s true. But that is the prevailing spirit in the world: there is no relevance at all to rational arguments in matters of religious faith. It’s not interesting. It doesn’t belong to the rational world; it belongs to entirely different worlds, fundamentalist worlds. Even liberal religious people—they don’t behave with cruel fundamentalism, but they are fundamentalists in the sense that their religiosity is not exposed to critical thought. It does not derive from reason, from rational considerations; it is not based on reason and is not exposed to rational criticism. And therefore it is very easy for them to be religious while with their other foot they are completely planted in philosophy and science, and they supposedly understand that the two really don’t fit together at all. They are different narratives. I live in both narratives and everything is wonderful. Yes, Rabbi Shagar’s “circle of difference.” That’s the height of the dreams of postmodern religious people. A contradiction in terms, of course—postmodern religious people.

So my claim is that you cannot cope with a worldview that sits on the same platform you yourself are sitting on. In what sense are they less right than you? What do you want? You yourself are basically saying there is no right and wrong, so they are as right as you are—or as not right as you are. So what can you do against them? You can’t cope with them. The only way to cope with them is to attack this point: the point that says only something proven is acceptable. And if you don’t accept that—if you are willing to accept things that are not proven—then you don’t have to end up in fundamentalism. There is common sense, intuition, what I called earlier. And if that says something, then I accept it as acceptable. You have to examine it; it isn’t certain that it’s true. But it is something I can adopt. I have no problem with that, even though I’m not sure about it and it isn’t certain.

So the path of synthetic maturity is basically the only way to attack this shared foundation of fundamentalism and skepticism. Except—and here is the point that brings us back to our subject—that in the end, what is happening here? I’m basically saying: I stand at the shattered trough at the end of the Enlightenment, and then I reach the conclusion: fine, then I am willing to accept things that are reasonable, even if they are not certain. But then the adolescent comes and asks me: wait a second, but if you have no proof for that, on what basis do you accept it? That’s just a hallucination. The fact that you are willing to accept things because your common sense says so—“common sense” is just a sanitized term. You have a completely subjective feeling and you call it common sense, and now suddenly everything is fine, you’ve legitimized it. You’re just as dogmatic as I was when I was a child, says the adolescent.

Yes, the adolescent says: who says the sun will rise tomorrow? Or who says there is a God? The adolescent asks his father. When he was small, he said: of course there is a God. They told him stories and he bought it all. When he becomes a teenager, he suddenly says: wait, who says? Prove it. Then his father says to him: listen, I don’t have proof, but common sense says there is. The world didn’t just come into being for no reason. The world is complex and this sounds very reasonable to me. The adolescent says: I don’t know. Without proof I accept nothing. I’m done being a child. And you, my father, have gone back to being a child—you accept things just because someone said so, just because some sages said so. You have no proof for it, so why do you accept it?

Now the adult tries to answer the adolescent: look, no—even things that aren’t proven, common sense is also a tool. The adolescent doesn’t accept that because he doesn’t recognize that tool—or doesn’t acknowledge that tool. For him only something proven is acceptable. But the adolescent’s question is a good question. Who says this really isn’t just a subjective hallucination? What is this thing called common sense? Did you just give it a name and solve the problem? I argue that the only real way to answer the adolescent’s questions, to answer them seriously, is this: supposedly the adolescent says either observation or proof, right? But you have neither observation nor proof for your general claims, so basically you should abandon them. And I say, no. I accept them because my intuition tells me they are true. And intuition is cognizing thought, as I said earlier. And that is basically the only way to ground synthetic maturity, the alternative to fundamentalism and skepticism. If you do not accept the validity of intuition, then you must map yourself either onto fundamentalism or onto skepticism. There is no way not to be a fundamentalist and not to be a skeptic without recognizing the validity of intuition.

Not certainty—intuition does not provide certainty. But it does give me a pretty good tool for knowing the truth, with some degree of certainty, but not absolute certainty. And this maturity I’m talking about is the willingness to accept common sense—yes, common sense. I have no proofs and I haven’t seen these things with my eyes, but they make sense. And if they make sense, then for me they are acceptable. You attack me: wait, so what does “make sense” mean? It makes sense because your head is built that way, but what does that have to do with anything? No—from my perspective, “makes sense” means I see it in the world, not that that’s just how I’m internally wired in my head. It is a certain cognition of the world, and that is why I accept it. That is what “makes sense” means. It is cognition, and cognition is a tool that even you, the adolescent, accept as a legitimate tool. I only claim that there is cognition not only through the senses, but also through the mind’s eye. Intuition is another kind of cognition beyond the senses.

So that is another way to understand the importance—I would say the necessity—of trust in intuition. If you have no trust in intuition, then you are doomed to be either a fundamentalist or a skeptic; there is no other option. Incidentally, a fundamentalist is also someone who trusts intuition—but trusts it absolutely, without being willing to treat it critically. And in my view that too is wrong. I do have trust in intuition, and I’ve written a lot about that, but not with the claim that intuition is certain. Intuition can make mistakes and can mislead, as people have often argued against me. They were pushing on an open door. Of course intuition can make mistakes. I am not certain about my intuition, but I also do not dismiss it. I do not say that intuition is just some subjective hallucination. I say intuition is a good tool. You still need to criticize it, cross-check information, see how the whole thing works, and then move forward. So I treat it with respect but caution. There is an instrument here that I do not dismiss. It is not a subjective hallucination—that’s the claim. Not that it gives me full certainty.

[Speaker G] Now, Rabbi, I didn’t understand something. Yes. I didn’t understand the last few sentences, your move from rejecting the assumption that you can accept non-certain things. Not rejecting—adopting the assumption. Adopting the assumption that you can accept non-certain things, not rejecting it. The claim that you can accept only certain things is incorrect. You can also accept things that are not certain. I’m asking: on what basis? If you have a logical proof, then it’s certain. But then the assumptions—the foundational assumptions—you don’t know. If you saw it through observation, that gives you only particular facts. How do you know general laws? Okay, that I understood.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Only intuition. There’s no other way to know things non-certainly. Okay? Intuition is also the basis for logical arguments; it provides the axioms. Meaning, it’s…

[Speaker E] So what’s the difference? The fundamentalist simply accepts it as a finished fact and doesn’t…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. A fundamentalist, when he says, for example, faith in God, or whatever the Torah says—or among Muslims, whatever the sharia says—as far as he’s concerned, that’s certain and above logical criticism. Now what does that mean? Where does that certainty of his come from? Apparently from some kind of intuition. But he isn’t willing to put it to a critical test, because he’s sure that this intuition is correct. Meaning, he treats intuition as though it’s an instrument that cannot be criticized, that is, as though it’s certain.

[Speaker E] Is that the difference? Whether you subject it to the test of reason or not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Whether it is subject to critical thinking or not. A great many Jewish believers are like this too. Maybe even most of them. Most Jewish believers, when you ask them logical questions and they don’t have an answer, will say, okay, it’s above reason. Or, it’s just clear to me that it’s true even though I have no justification—but he will never retract it because of some argument against it. Because he has full trust; he doesn’t put it to a critical test. Faith is above reason; where philosophy ends, faith begins; and all kinds of strange slogans like that. Which is basically a kind of fundamentalism. It’s less violent than the fundamentalism of ISIS, but on the philosophical level it’s the same thing. Meaning, this is a person who holds theses in an uncritical way. That is, he didn’t adopt them because they seem logical to him, and he also won’t give them up even if they don’t seem logical to him. They’re not supposed to stand the test of critical thought in the crucible of reason. They’re not supposed to be examined in the crucible of reason. Okay? That is basically what’s called fundamentalism.

Now I’m getting to the next stage. At the next stage we need to understand: okay, so now I understand that this isn’t just a euphemistic statement, and that I have some way of accumulating information by means of intuition. Meaning, it’s possible to advance with science, observational science, that brings me to general laws. True, observation cannot bring me to the general laws—but observation plus intuitions can do it. Now how does that work? I’m now trying to define—notice, I keep circling around the question of how we accumulate information about the world. So I’m moving back and forth between empiricism and rationalism, and now I’m arriving at the point that we’re somewhere in the middle. But let’s try to define better how this middle works. That is, how do we accumulate information about the world? After all, we all agree that our ordinary observations are observations of particular facts. Specific facts. The scientific conclusion is a general law. How exactly do we get from here to there?

On the one hand, it’s not just that I see the general law, period. After all, we make use of the particular facts we observed. There are laboratories in science. Science is not sitting in a closed room and thinking about what seems logical to me. Right? We make scientific observations, we reject theories if they don’t stand an empirical test, we adopt other theories if they do stand the test, and so on. Meaning, we use facts—but the facts don’t give me the result. So what does?

Look, in the 16th century and into the 17th century, a naïve picture developed that for some reason many people still hold today, including scientists: that accumulating information about the world is done in the following way. I make observations of various cases, facts, events, objects, entities. After I’ve collected the facts, I generalize them and explain them by means of a theory, and that’s how I arrive at the scientific law, at the scientific theory. So I begin with observation, and observation brings me to the scientific law.

Francis Bacon built an entire logic that tries to describe how this business works. It’s mainly a logic of elimination and induction. You generalize on the basis of particular cases, and elimination means that if the generalization doesn’t stand the test of a certain fact, then you have to clean it up—then it’s not correct, so you need to improve it. This is sometimes called inductive logic, the logic of Francis Bacon. It’s not logic in the sense we usually know—the mathematical logic, ordinary logic—but rather the logic that underlies scientific thinking, the forms of thought that stand at the basis of drawing scientific conclusions, of accumulating our scientific knowledge.

And this logic, basically, its role was to try to show how one accumulates knowledge systematically even though it isn’t certain. Meaning, how to use intuition intelligently. Because otherwise, if we don’t subject intuition to a critical test, then either we’re fundamentalists or we’ve gone back to being children—which is the same thing. Children who accept things because grown-ups said so, without thinking whether it’s true or not and trying to check it. Okay? If I claim that maturity brings me to a different state than childhood, then I haven’t gone back to being a child; I’ve advanced to a third state. So does that mean I adopt things without having proof? In that sense, the child also did that. Right? He’s dogmatic; he adopts things just because someone said so, without proof. So what’s the difference between the child and the adult—the synthetic adult? The difference is this: for the fundamentalist there really is no difference. The fundamentalist is like a child; he just knows how to use a rifle, unlike the child. But fundamentally the fundamentalist is a kind of child.

And the synthetic adult differs from the child in this: true, he assumes, as if dogmatically, that what his intuition tells him is true. But for him it’s not certain, and he will try to cross-check it against facts, test it, see whether it fits with other assumptions, and reject certain intuitions that don’t work out for him. Intuition is not the end of the road; it’s the beginning of the road. Once I have the intuition, I have some basic assumptions—let’s see, by means of logic, what conclusions follow from them, and let’s see whether the conclusions make sense and whether they fit together. In other words, intuition is only the beginning of the move, not the end of the move, as it is for the child or for the fundamentalist.

And sometimes, sometimes I’ll also reject my intuitions because they don’t fit with other intuitions, or because there’s some internal contradiction and I’ll need to find a solution—and I’ll also find that solution with intuition, but never mind. So this is advancing intelligently while making use of intuition. That’s called synthetic maturity.

Now what is meant by the intelligent use of intuition? Francis Bacon proposed scientific logic. We gather facts, and from those facts we essentially extract the theory. Now this, of course, does not stand up to any real test. It sounds terribly reasonable. Anyone you ask how science works will tell you exactly this: the scientist gathers facts, and after he has enough facts he explains them with a theory, and that’s how he arrives at the theory. And that’s how this positivist nonsense could really develop, seeing things as though science is entirely empirical. At a later stage, the positivists were already more aware of the nonsense in what they were saying, and then they shifted the approach into a conception that says that the general laws are laws about us, not about the world—as I said earlier. But at first there was this naïve positivism that said: no, obviously, everything comes out of observation; even the law of gravity comes out of observation. And they don’t notice that the law of gravity does not come out of observation. Observation showed us that certain bodies are drawn or fall to the ground, but it did not say that there is a general law that every two masses attract each other.

So the claim is that there is still some problem here—this is exactly the problem of empiricism and rationalism—there is still a problem of how I understand the transition from facts to theory. So as I said earlier, in the naïve approach—which to this day is what most people would tell you, and Francis Bacon bequeathed it—one gathers facts, from them one creates a theory, and the movement is linear, from the facts to the theory. If there are more facts, then one tests a better theory, and so on, and it always goes from the facts to the theory. But this of course cannot be right, and it cannot be right for several reasons. I’ll start perhaps with two examples.

There is—I think I spoke about this once too—a British historian named Carr at the beginning of the 20th century, who wrote a book called What Is History?, I think it was translated into Hebrew. In that book he attacks this conception as applied to history. He says: in history too, the naïve Baconian approach basically says that we gather facts, explain them by means of a theory, and that’s how we arrive at general historical knowledge. Not private information—what happened in such-and-such an event, that may be something we find in a document and then we know something specific—but when I’m talking about the general laws that govern history, there I gather the facts, explain them with a theory, and that’s how I arrive at the laws of history, how history works.

Now Carr says: this cannot be right. Why not? Let’s try to think—if I’m not mistaken, this is his example—about Napoleon’s battle at Waterloo. Okay? Napoleon’s last battle. So Napoleon fought there against the Prussians and the British—Wellington and Blücher. Okay? The British and the Prussians. At first it was, yes, the British against Napoleon, Wellington against Napoleon. At the very end, when the British situation had become difficult, Blücher arrived with the Prussians and they decided the battle against Napoleon, and then they sent him to the island of Elba and so on, to Devil’s Island.

Carr’s claim is basically this: now let’s try, as historians, to understand what caused the victory of the British-Prussian coalition over the French, over Napoleon. In the naïve view, I’m supposed to gather certain facts and from those facts discover what caused the victory there—or, more generally, what causes victories in war. Because after all, I want to build a theory not about Napoleon; I want to build a general theory of what causes victories in wars. And let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that I have no information whatsoever on this matter. I now want to begin building my military doctrine. So I begin collecting the information, the facts.

So let’s try to look at what happened with Napoleon. What facts am I going to collect? Maybe I’ll collect the facts about what was the height of the adjutant of the second battalion from the left in the two armies. If in one case it was six feet, and in his case five foot ten, then apparently an adjutant of six feet in the third battalion from the left is the parameter that determines victory. Sounds logical, no? There you go—we see that it was the adjutant’s height, and in fact they won too. Very quickly, of course, we’ll raise the claim: forget it, the adjutant’s height isn’t relevant. Fine, so maybe we’ll look for something else: the number of soldiers on each side, or I don’t know, the equipment the soldiers had on each side, and so on. But there are infinitely many facts I could try to collect about these battles. How do I know which facts to focus on? What makes sense.

What do you mean, what makes sense? After all, I know that the adjutant’s height has no effect on the battle. It can’t be the relevant parameter. How do I know that? After all, I’m tabula rasa. I still don’t know anything about how battles are won. I’ve just begun my research. Okay? So I have no theory telling me what causes victory in war. But if I don’t have a theory, I have no way to determine which facts are worth collecting. I can start collecting infinitely many facts, because I have no way of knowing which of them are relevant and which are not.

So without already having a theory, I basically have no way to collect facts. Notice, the picture has been turned upside down on us. We were sure that you collect facts and from them create a theory. Carr tells us: what are you talking about? Without a theory you won’t be able to collect the facts. The theory comes before the facts; it doesn’t come after them. Fine, but that too sounds absurd. If the theory comes before the facts, then why collect the facts? After all, I already know the answer. So obviously there is some back-and-forth here. I have some general theory, some general, unformed ideas, but I already know roughly in which directions to look. It’s clear to me that the adjutant’s mother or the adjutant’s height won’t be a relevant parameter. Why is that clear to me? Because I understand intuitively that this isn’t a parameter that will cause victory in battle or failure in battle. By contrast, the number of soldiers sounds to me like a relevant parameter, or the quality of the equipment, the weapons, and so on. Tactics, yes, strategic ability, and so on. All these sound to me like relevant parameters. On what basis? Because clearly—just a second—clearly I have some prior intuition that tells me in what direction this theory of how wars are won will go.

True, I supposedly still know nothing about it—but it’s not true that I know nothing about it. I already have initial directions that help me sort the facts: which facts will be relevant and which won’t. And then I can begin to search for facts. Now from the facts I’ll begin to shape those initial ideas I had more fully, then go back to the facts to see if it works, from those facts I’ll go back again to see if it doesn’t work, I’ll refine it further, go back to the facts, and so on—back and forth all the time, from facts to theory, from theory to facts, until I move toward a theory that works better and better. That’s the hope, at least.

So you understand that although I didn’t know the theory at the initial stage when I set out to collect facts, I already had ideas of what the theory could be and what it could not be. Those ideas are based on intuition. I have an intuition that tells me something directly about the theory—notice, not from the facts. It is the infrastructure underlying the collection of facts; it is not a result of the facts.

[Speaker D] There are no facts. You’re arguing that intuition exists even in tabula rasa? Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can say that it’s an indirect result of some experience accumulated over generations, genetically embedded in us and somehow passed on between generations. But it can’t be only that—and I can prove that mathematically. It can’t be only that. If it were only that, then we would today be in the position of Adam, because there are infinitely many possible theories and no intuition can help us sift out which theory is correct from among an infinity. But I’ll show that at the next stage.

Let’s take another example to sharpen this idea. Look, there’s another example that is exactly the same thing, but this time it appears in a book by Hempel, a philosopher of science, and he’s speaking specifically about the natural sciences—in this case, medicine. He brings a very famous example that was later also used in the Open University in the introduction to philosophy of science—they also bring this example there; Hempel’s book is the one accompanying the course.

And the point is this. There was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian doctor named Semmelweis, who was the head of a maternity ward in a hospital. There was another maternity ward in that same hospital—there were two wards, and he was in charge of one of them. Now consistently there was a much higher mortality rate among women giving birth in his ward—childbed fever. Some women died in the second ward too, but in his ward the mortality was far higher, significantly so. He decided to investigate systematically why this was happening. What was there in his ward that caused maternal mortality? You see, this is really a Baconian process. Okay, now we’re looking for what causes maternal mortality. I have no idea, no knowledge, okay? I set out tabula rasa. I now begin to collect facts.

Now there are very detailed descriptions of how Semmelweis collected the facts. You won’t believe what kinds of facts he collected there. He had no idea in which direction to look. So he started collecting facts like the frequency of the priest’s bell as he passed through the ward, or from which direction he entered the ward door, which direction he walked—did the priest enter from the east, from the west? Or all sorts of bizarre things that today we would look at and think he was some kind of lunatic. He wasn’t a lunatic. He was an intelligent man. He just had no information, and in the absence of information there are infinitely many facts: what is the length of the ward, how many windows are there, how many patients are hospitalized, what is the average height of the patients, what is the name of the senior doctor, I don’t know—you can collect millions of facts. How old is the senior doctor? Is his mother nice or not nice? A huge number of facts you can collect. If you have no idea what the explanation might be, you won’t know which facts to focus on.

And he really didn’t know; he was at a loss. At some point—I don’t even remember exactly how the idea occurred to him—it turned out… it turned out that students entered Semmelweis’s ward; in the second ward there were no students. They helped deliver the women because they were doing their internship there. Now the students’ previous class was a pathology class. That means they dissected corpses and afterward came to deliver babies. Then—I don’t even remember exactly how it happened—Semmelweis tried having the students wash their hands before they approached the women in labor. Notice: he had not the slightest idea that some contamination on the hands could really cause fever; it was a shot in the dark. He simply decided to try this thing.

You understand: today it’s very clear to us that hygiene is important, but back then it was not clear. He tried it like the direction of the priest. You need to understand that if we don’t know that hygiene matters, then washing hands is like a voodoo ritual.

[Speaker E] Why? It’s supposed to be something physiological. The priest entering from here or from there isn’t intuitively rational.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? Why? What? Who said the influence of the priest’s bell doesn’t cause one or another medical effect? Depression does that. There is an effect from spirit to matter.

[Speaker E] Is this what you mean by subjecting things to criticism, things you intuitively try to analyze?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate. So I’m saying: a priori, if you worked without intuition—just facts, okay?—if you worked only with facts, today you’d still have the medicine of Adam. Because if you don’t have some prior theory, some intuition about the theoretical direction, you have no way to know which facts to focus on, and after all there are infinitely many facts. Now he decided that they should wash their hands, and it turned out that this lowered the mortality rate of women giving birth from childbed fever.

[Speaker D] So that doctor had no intuition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He did. So—

[Speaker D] Then why did he start looking for facts?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Intuition is, you know—intuition is not something sharp and precise. You try things, but slowly, little by little, you understand: this is plausible, this is not plausible, without formulating it to yourself, and suddenly you focus and get to the result. Now it’s not a mathematical tool that lets you immediately go in the right direction, but it’s also not something completely arbitrary. Because if it were completely arbitrary, to this day he’d still be going on checking those infinitely many facts and discovering nothing. Rather, something helped him sort things out or focus in the right direction until eventually he got to hand-washing. And from that point onward people began to understand that hygiene affects mortality or morbidity. Why?

[Speaker E] From the story it sounds like he shot in the dark and in the end, by luck, hit on something and saw that it was consistent, and therefore…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The chance that this happened by luck is a very small chance, because by luck—if you have one correct fact out of infinitely many facts—the chance that you’ll hit on it by luck is zero.

[Speaker E] It’s not infinitely many facts. There are certain facts that he sees happening around him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, there are infinitely many, infinitely many facts—infinitely many facts that distinguish Ward A from Ward B in the hospital. Infinitely many.

[Speaker E] Facts that keep recurring all the time consistently in the fact that the ones doing the deliveries… okay, it’s not infinite, there are a few facts.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Infinite—no, no, no—there are many, I don’t know, infinite, 10 to the 100th facts, okay? There are billions upon billions.

[Speaker D] Right, but after he found the right solution, then he found the right solution.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, but what’s the chance that he would arrive at the right solution at all if he’s collecting blindly and trying each of those 10 to the 100th facts?

[Speaker D] What’s the chance that he’d arrive at the right solution?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Zero. If after, I don’t know, a year—I don’t know how long it took—he sorted things out and got to the correct fact, that means this was not a completely random draw. Rather, there was something here that helped him find, or sort out, what was less plausible and what was more plausible. Now this doesn’t bring him straight to the correct result, but it helps him do elimination, to say: this is unlikely, this is unlikely, let’s try here, maybe this will work—and then, boom, he succeeded in the end. It took many attempts, but in the end he succeeded. If this were done completely blindly, the chance that he would land on the correct fact would be zero or negligible. Okay?

Therefore my claim is that from here we see that the relation between facts and theory is not from facts to theory. Rather, I have an unformed idea of what the theoretical direction might be. I collect facts accordingly. If it works, let’s go back to the theory and improve it. If it doesn’t work, let’s collect other facts, improve the theory, go back to the facts, to the theory—a complicated business. But it is not done like a shot in the dark.

What does this actually mean? That it is not true that I simply work empirically, collecting facts, and from this the theory emerges. No. I begin with thought even before I begin the observation. There is something in the mind that precedes observation; thought precedes cognition. After that cognition comes and corrects the thought; after that we return again to cognition and again to thought. And basically that means that this intuition is some kind of cognitive thought, some kind of synthesis between thought and cognition. To be an empiricist or to be a rationalist will not explain how science works; it cannot explain how science works. So this is, I think, a pretty good illustration of the necessity, the indispensability, of assuming that intuition is involved in this process. It doesn’t work in a completely empirical way, and it doesn’t work in a completely rationalist way. There is something here that combines the two.

[Speaker A] Regarding the first example the Rabbi brought—why is that intuition? I didn’t understand. If you have twice as many soldiers, you’ll win—that’s not intuition, that’s scientific. Why is that intuition?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s scientific about that? What are you talking about? First of all, not only is it not certain, in some cases it isn’t even true. In some cases, having more soldiers will only make you lose, because it’s a heavier army, less flexible, and therefore that also has disadvantages.

[Speaker A] It’s really not certain; sometimes it’s also not true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m aware that sometimes it’s also not true.

[Speaker A] No, obviously, I’m aware—but still, with a very high probability it would help me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Probability as such only says that it’s a relevant parameter, unlike the height of the adjutant’s mother. But that itself is intuition. How do you know that? You know it because reason tells you so. Meaning, reason—before you even collected the facts—reason started the process. Reason was there at the beginning. It’s not a result; the theory is not a result of the facts, or not only a result of the facts. It is also the basis according to which I collected the facts.

[Speaker A] I picture the line in my head and I see that two against one—I’ll simply take it. I have twice the chance. How do you—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] know? You know it from experience plus logical thinking. What you just described is a description of common sense—that’s what I call intuition. It sounds very logical to me too, just like it does to you. Just think for a moment what “logical” means. “Logical” means that your intuition tells you that it’s true.

[Speaker A] Okay, the second example is much more intuitive than the first example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, choose whichever example you want. To me, both of them…

[Speaker A] So I’m saying—where exactly is the boundary between what you call intuition and what is already less intuitive? The first example is much more plausible than the second.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] More and less—but in both cases you won’t be able to explain it without intuition. What do I care right now? Bottom line: there is no way to describe the progress of science if you are only a pure empiricist or only a pure rationalist. You have to bring in intuition, which is somewhere in the middle, as I said earlier, because without that you won’t be able to describe the progress of science. Without it, the search for theories would be chasing your tail forever among infinitely many possible theories and infinitely many possible facts, and you’d get nowhere. If you are making progress, that means your draw among infinitely many theories or infinitely many facts is not completely random. It is not completely arbitrary, because a completely arbitrary draw among infinitely many facts will not get you anywhere in finite time.

Next time—next time I’ll show this from another angle, through the theories. Here I showed it through the facts. Next time I’ll show it through the theories. But I’ll show the same point.

[Speaker A] Does part of the definition of intuition also have to be that it’s shared by many people, say? What if only one person feels it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Usually intuition is shared by other people too. But sometimes there is a genius who has a certain intuition that others don’t have, and in the end it turns out that he is the one who was right. That can happen. I once wrote a column about why the minority is always right, why the majority is always wrong. Since there are few wise people and many fools, then if there’s a dispute between a few people and many people, apparently the few are the wise ones and the majority are the fools, so usually the minority is right. Of course that’s not true, but never mind, we won’t get into that here. Okay, so I’ll stop here and we’ll continue this next time.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, right—you’re arguing that intuition exists even without prior experience and even without prior learning, right? Tabula rasa?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not—I’m not making that claim in such an extreme way. Clearly prior experience—and even that of previous generations through genetics, yes—affects my intuition in some way. But what I’m claiming is that it cannot be only that. Because if it were only that, this couldn’t happen. Because experience itself also cannot work in the long run unless it is guided by intuition, because otherwise how would experience reveal to you what is correct from among infinitely many possibilities? But let’s leave that. Next time I’ll present it from another angle where it will be easier for me to explain it. Eight questions.

[Speaker H] This series we’re learning now—does it not follow the Rabbi’s first trilogy, the books? I can’t hear? This series we’re learning now, does it follow…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. This introduction that I’m giving here appears, at least in part, in Two Carts and in And with Those Who Are Here, but this is only the introduction, it’s not… this will be over soon.

[Speaker D] Yes, yes. Regarding your move with Francis Bacon, I wanted to know whether your whole move assumes scientific realism, or whether it is also true for scientific non-realism. That is, the empiricists can tell you that basically… it’s not realism, it’s Bacon.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a claim about me and not about the world.

[Speaker D] Yes, it’s a claim about me, so he goes with that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s the beginning of the next lesson. Okay.

[Speaker E] Can I just make one request? The “Thought of Jewish Law” series that the Rabbi gives and publishes—there’s a bit of a sound problem there. I don’t know if it’s because the Rabbi moves or because it’s recorded badly, but many times the sound just comes and goes, so if it’s possible to try to improve the sound. Okay, we’ll try. Is it okay now? What?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Was it okay now?

[Speaker E] No, here it’s okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In “Thought of Jewish Law,” you mean? So maybe I didn’t have a microphone there or something like that. Yes, you do, but it seems to me you move away from the microphone that you have here.

[Speaker E] Right, yes. So if it’s possible to use that same microphone, that would be excellent.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On what

[Speaker F] day and at what time is “Thought of Jewish Law”?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] By the way, I’m not even sure that I’m going to upload this “Thought of Jewish Law.” For now I told Oren not to upload it, because the group there seems to me pretty beginner-level; that is, we’re dealing with things and they don’t—it’s not coming out systematic, not at a high enough level. I don’t even think I’m going to upload it. I think there are some previous series on the site that deal with it. It’s worth looking. I think I didn’t upload the second one to the site already, the second lesson.

[Speaker D] In any case it’s interesting.

[Speaker E] Yes, you didn’t upload the second lesson either.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] To the site? To WhatsApp?

[Speaker E] I don’t know if to the site, but it was sent, yes, on WhatsApp.

[Speaker D] Yes, not to the site either.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Oren did that without me—I told him I thought it wasn’t worthwhile, but okay, maybe I will do it, I’m still debating. We’ll see how the next lesson goes.

[Speaker D] You should, you should.

[Speaker H] On what day is it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not a Zoom class. It’s an in-person class that I give at the university on Sunday evening, but afterward it gets uploaded as a recording—or maybe it will get uploaded, we’ll see.

[Speaker D] You should, you should,

[Speaker E] we’ve already gone through all the Rabbi’s videos, there’s nothing left, so…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, so maybe I’ll upload it, fine. I hope the next lessons will be okay, because it’s a bit—the previous lesson frustrated me a bit. They were, I don’t know, too much beginners; they don’t grasp the point. It’s hard for me to move forward, so it was a somewhat frustrating lesson.

[Speaker D] What is the lesson actually about? What content in this series

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] do you mean?

[Speaker D] About “Thought of Jewish Law.” Yes, “Thought of Jewish Law.”

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It seems to me that large parts of it will be from the third book of the trilogy, so overall the material exists. Okay. Fine, okay,

[Speaker D] then let’s—

[Speaker A] Sabbath

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] peace.

[Speaker E] Thank you.