Free Will and Choice – Lesson 1

Table of Contents

• Determinism, compatibilism, and brain plasticity
• Genetic and psychological studies, and the mistake of “influence = determination”
• Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma and the third possibility
• Models of elections: Syria, Switzerland, a place with real problems, and the story from Burma
• The parable of the terrain and the topographic outline of influences
• Who the human being is, humanistic psychology, and materialism versus dualism
• Time, Einstein, Laplace, and trees of causality versus new chains
• Foreknowledge and free choice, Maimonides, and the claim that prior knowledge of a choice does not exist
• Omnipotence, “logical impossibility,” a round triangle, a wall and a ball, and Puss in Boots
• Moshe Rabbeinu, Rashi on “he turned this way and that,” deterministic calculation of the future versus choice, and the details of knowledge
• Prophecy, Hezekiah, “everything is foreseen yet permission is granted,” the Shelah, and discussion of questions from the audience

Summary

General Overview

The text argues that real freedom requires behavior not to be dictated by any set of factors, and therefore both compatibilism and the emphasis on brain plasticity miss the distinction between “influence” and deterministic “determination.” It rejects the claim that genetic and psychological studies prove determinism, because at most they show influences, not a one-to-one determination of action. It presents a response to Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma through a third possibility: an action that is not dragged along by a compelling cause, yet is also not arbitrary, but is done through judgment and for the sake of a purpose. From there, it builds a libertarian picture that is “not cartoonish,” in which a person acts within a framework of internal and external influences but can choose how to relate to them. From this follow differences in the question of “who the person is,” in understanding psychology, and in the nature of time and the future. In the religious context, it is argued that prior knowledge of free choices does not exist, because the future information has not yet been created, and therefore the question of foreknowledge and free choice is also solved by giving up foreknowledge with respect to choices.

Determinism, compatibilism, and brain plasticity

The claim is that the two mistakes—compatibilism and brain plasticity—are rooted in the same issue, because they do not understand that freedom contains something that is supposed not to be dictated by any kind of factor. Determinism is defined as a situation in which some set of factors dictates behavior, whether internal or external. The failure to distinguish between choice and prior determination appears in the way studies about psychological and genetic influences are sometimes presented as decisive proof of determinism, because they show something that is not our own decision determining the act or the mental state.

Genetic and psychological studies, and the mistake of “influence = determination”

The text explains that the picture attributed to libertarianism—as if decisions are made in a vacuum—is a straw man and a caricature, not really libertarianism, because a thoughtful libertarian does not deny internal and external influences. It argues that the real disagreement is whether influences dictate and determine uniquely what will be done, or only influence without determining. For a study to prove determinism, it would have to show absolute influence, such as: “the moment a person has a certain gene, he will always behave in a certain way.” The text states that there does not seem to be any gene or mental/behavioral trait that can be linked in a completely deterministic way. Therefore it concludes that all these studies are irrelevant to the question of determinism, and presenting them as relevant is a common mistake.

Peter van Inwagen’s dilemma and the third possibility

The text presents Peter van Inwagen’s “either way” argument: if there is a cause for an action, then it is determined deterministically; and if there is no cause, then the action is indeterministic and arbitrary, and therefore cannot ground responsibility. From this it follows that there is no free choice. It explains that the only way to respond is to show that these two possibilities do not cover the full range, and it proposes that within “there is no cause” there are two sub-options. The first is arbitrariness and randomness, but the second is action taken through judgment, though not from a compelling cause—for example, action done “not out of a cause but for the sake of a purpose,” in which a person realizes values and goals. It concludes that van Inwagen begs the question when he identifies “no cause” with arbitrariness, and once the third possibility is recognized, the argument collapses.

Models of elections: Syria, Switzerland, a place with real problems, and the story from Burma

The text illustrates three models through elections: in Syria there is only one ballot, so despite a feeling of freedom this is a deterministic picture in which circumstances dictate the result. In Switzerland there are several ballots, but there are no real problems, so the choice is equivalent to a lottery and lacks the meaning of judgment; this parallels indeterminism as arbitrariness. The third model is elections in a place where there are real problems and prices to pay, where there are genuine options and considerations that allow a decision that is neither forced nor random; this is presented as the third possibility that van Inwagen denies. In addition, the story of “the post office in Burma” is brought as a fourth model, where there are several options and also problems, but all the choices fall into the same sack, so in practice there is no difference in outcome, and in a certain sense this returns us to the picture of Syria.

The parable of the terrain and the topographic outline of influences

The text presents a parable about a topographic landscape with mountains and valleys: a little ball or a stream of water is completely dictated by the terrain, and therefore represents determinism; while someone flying above the terrain is not influenced at all, and therefore represents the caricatured “vacuum.” The libertarian model is described as a person walking on the terrain, influenced by the difficulty of climbing and the ease of descending, yet able to decide to climb the mountain and accept the cost despite the discouragement. In the analogy, genetics, brain structure, education, and environment together create the “terrain” that pulls and repels, but they are not the person himself; they are the environment within which he acts. The person is the one who decides whether or not to respond to the influences, and therefore influences do influence, but they do not dictate.

Who the human being is, humanistic psychology, and materialism versus dualism

The text presents two implications of the dispute, the first being the question of human identity: the determinist identifies the person with the collection of influences and with the terrain itself, whereas the libertarian sees this as an internal and external “periphery” within which the person acts. It rejects any automatic identification of the position with materialism or dualism, and argues that one can be a “dualist determinist” without contradiction. It claims that psychology describes the inner environment of drives and pressures, not the person himself. Therefore, even with “complete information,” an ultimate psychologist would not be able to predict the choice with certainty, because one still has to wait and see how the person chooses to relate to the pressures. In this context it is argued that “the essence of humanistic psychology” is that your environment is not you, and you can choose what to do with a given environment and even change your own psychological structure through your actions.

Time, Einstein, Laplace, and trees of causality versus new chains

The second implication concerns the timeline: from the determinist’s perspective there is no fundamental difference between past and future, and the gap is merely technical, a matter of access to information; a being beyond time, such as “the Holy One, blessed be He,” can know the future just like the past, or calculate it. A letter of condolence from Albert Einstein about Besso is quoted: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” The text then cites Laplace’s idea that if one had a sufficiently powerful computer and all the data, one could calculate everything that will happen until the end of history, so that the moments are already “embedded” in the nature of the world since the Big Bang. By contrast, the libertarian describes a tree in which at points of human choice, new chains are born that are not derived from the previous stages, so that the graph is “disconnected” and the future is not laid out in advance but comes into being. From this it concludes that the future is not merely unknown because it is inaccessible, but because “there is not yet anything to experience” and “the future does not yet exist, it has not yet been born,” and the human being “creates the continuation of the line” rather than discovering an already existing line.

Foreknowledge and free choice, Maimonides, and the claim that prior knowledge of a choice does not exist

The text presents the question of foreknowledge and free choice as formulated by Maimonides in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance: if there is free choice, how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance; and if He knows in advance, how can there be free choice. It argues that the common answer—“the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time”—answers at most how the information is obtained, but not the question of how free choice is possible if the knowledge already exists with certainty. Beyond that, it is argued that this answer assumes a deterministic conception in which future information already exists and simply needs to be “pulled out,” whereas in the libertarian picture there is nothing to pull out, because the future that stems from choice has not yet been created. Hence its conclusion is that even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know in advance what a person will choose, and the solution to the dilemma is to give up foreknowledge with respect to choices—contrary to the Calvinist conclusion of Calvin and Luther, who infer determinism from this.

Omnipotence, “logical impossibility,” a round triangle, a wall and a ball, and Puss in Boots

The text argues that omnipotence means the ability to do everything that is defined and possible, but contradictory states are not a “thing” that can be done, and therefore even an omnipotent being does not do them. It illustrates this with a wall that stops every ball versus a ball that penetrates every wall, and with the question of a “round triangle” as a meaningless combination. It then brings the “example of Puss in Boots” to illustrate that turning into something that contradicts one’s essence is not a possible act—similar to the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot “turn Himself into a human being” in a way that would allow Him to be killed, because that would contradict necessary existence. From this it argues that “knowing information about the future that does not exist” in the case of free choice is like a round triangle, and therefore the lack of such knowledge is not a flaw in omnipotence but the absence of an object of knowledge.

Moshe Rabbeinu, Rashi on “he turned this way and that,” deterministic calculation of the future versus choice, and the details of knowledge

In connection with “He turned this way and that, and struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand,” two interpretations of Rashi are brought, and the text explains that the idea in the midrash about no convert descending from him is not prophecy about the future but a root-level diagnosis in the present of “what can come out” of the person in his current state. It distinguishes between deterministic events that can be calculated or foreseen and human choices that cannot be known in advance. It adds that punishment is according to the current state and not “according to something future,” and that calculating the future is possible regarding physical processes such as a river, but not regarding choices.

Prophecy, Hezekiah, “everything is foreseen yet permission is granted,” the Shelah, and discussion of questions from the audience

In response to questions, it is argued regarding Hezekiah that seeing the future is an optimal prediction based on present circumstances, not certain knowledge of a future choice, and it is determined that this also applies to prophecy in general. It is cited in the name of the Shelah, in the introduction to Shnei Luchot HaBrit, in the section “Beit HaBechirah,” that prophets do not know the future with certainty where choice is involved, because even the Holy One, blessed be He, does not reveal what cannot be known. The expression “everything is foreseen yet permission is granted” is interpreted to mean: “everything is foreseen except for those things that depend on the permission granted to us to choose,” and it is also said that denying free choice would allow certain knowledge. Rav Dessler’s approach about “points of choice” also comes up, and it is said that there is no problem with this because not everything is located at a point of choice, and a future discussion is promised about coercion, “an impulse that cannot be overcome,” Pharaoh, and other reservations. Questions are also discussed about a true prophet and a false prophet, the distinction between the individual and the collective, and innate tendencies such as homosexuality, while arguing that science can at most show correlations and influences, and that even if a tendency is innate, the practical question is the choice whether “to give in to the attraction.” At the end, a participant presents a psychiatric position of multifactoriality and partial rates of influence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. One second. I already said that these days I’m becoming a sound technician. Right, so the claim is that the two mistakes—compatibilism and the plasticity of the brain—are both rooted in the same issue. They don’t understand that there’s something about freedom that is supposed not to be dictated by any kind of factor. I don’t care if you tell me that one type of factor doesn’t affect me because another type does, or that the other one doesn’t affect me because this one does. As long as there is some set of factors that dictates my behavior, that’s called determinism, whether that set of factors is internal or external. And I said that this failure to distinguish between choice and being predetermined often shows up in statements based on studies that show some psychological or genetic influence on our behavior. Right, every now and then there are headlines saying they found the gene responsible for stinginess, or faith, or whatever, or being in a good mood. And that’s often presented, at least in the newspaper, as some kind of decisive argument in favor of determinism. Why? Because we see that there is something dictated, structural, not our decision, that determines what we do or what our mental state is, and therefore there’s no room here for free decision, for some intervention by the person or some human decision; rather there’s something external—education, environment, genetics—that influences us. And my claim was that indeed there are things—and maybe before that, why is this considered an argument for determinism? Because the libertarian picture—libertarianism meaning someone who believes in free will—the libertarian picture imagined by the person making that argument is as though there’s supposed to be no influence on us at all in order to say that I’m a free person. There isn’t supposed to be any influence, as I said earlier, right? Neither internal influence nor external influence. So decisions are made in a vacuum. And those studies show that that’s not true. Genetics does affect our decisions, education affects them, psychology, right, all kinds of things affect our decisions—we don’t act in a vacuum. But that claim is mistaken. Because the figure that this argument attacks, the libertarian figure, the libertarianism that sees the person as acting in a vacuum—that’s a straw man. It’s a caricature of libertarianism; it isn’t really libertarianism. An informed libertarian doesn’t deny the fact that there are influences. Of course there are influences on a person, internal and external, of all kinds. What the libertarian argues is only that these influences do not dictate what we do; they merely influence what we do. Meaning, if a person is born with certain genetics or lives in a certain environment or received a certain education, of course that influences what he does. The question isn’t whether it influences him; the libertarian agrees to that too. The question is whether it dictates what he does. “Dictates” means determines uniquely, meaning that given the circumstances I can tell you what the person will do. Here the libertarian says no, and the determinist says yes. Therefore, for such a study to show determinism, it’s not enough to show that there is influence; it would have to show that it is an absolute influence. Meaning that once a person has a certain gene, he always behaves in a certain way. And I don’t think there is a single gene on earth, or a single mental or behavioral characteristic, that can be linked in a completely deterministic way. I don’t think such a thing has ever been done; I don’t even see how one could do such a study. So all these studies are irrelevant to the question of determinism. It’s a very common mistake. In addition, I said one more thing, and here I’ll more or less finish the summary. I said one more thing: often another argument comes up against determinism, and that argument basically says—I think I said this, though maybe I’m mixing it up with another lecture because there was another class where I touched on these questions—the argument of Peter van Inwagen, the American philosopher of, I think, Dutch origin. He argues that there is no free choice, based on what in Talmudic language is called a “whichever way you look at it” argument, a dilemma argument. He basically says: whichever way you look at it, if there is a reason for what we do, then what we do is determined deterministically. If there is no reason for what we do, then our action is indeterministic, meaning it’s just random, it’s in a vacuum, it’s a free action, and therefore that too is not free choice, because free choice is something that involves some kind of judgment, something that imposes responsibility on me. If I act arbitrarily, if my actions are a coin toss of some kind, then there’s no basis for holding me responsible; that’s not what’s called free will. Therefore, says Peter van Inwagen, there are only two possibilities. Either there is a reason for my actions or there isn’t a reason for my actions. There is no third possibility. And you see that under both options it turns out that this is not free choice, not decision, not libertarianism. It’s either indeterminism or determinism. So if that’s the case, and since these are the only two possibilities—either there is a reason or there isn’t a reason—then there is no free choice, because there is no such conceptual category. Either there is choice and then it’s determinism, or there is no choice and then it’s indeterminism—what else could there be? And this is a kind of whichever-way-you-look-at-it argument: you present two possibilities, under both of them the result follows, and therefore obviously the result is correct. In logic you’d say: P implies Q, and not-P also implies Q, so you can throw out P, and the result is Q. Meaning Q is always true. If Q follows both from P and from not-P, then Q is true—it doesn’t follow from anything and doesn’t depend on anything. Okay, that is basically the structure of the argument. And how can such an argument be refuted or dealt with? The only way is to show that the two possibilities presented in the argument are not the possibilities that cover the whole range. Meaning: there is a third possibility. It’s not true that those are the only two possibilities. Now in the case of Peter van Inwagen, apparently these are two possibilities: either there is a reason for my action or there isn’t a reason for my action. What else could there be? My claim is that if there is no reason for my action, that still leaves open two sub-possibilities. He assumes that if there is no reason for my action, then that is indeterminism. I say no. Even if there is no reason for my action, under that heading there are two possibilities. One possibility: there is no reason for my action, and therefore it really is random, some completely arbitrary action—and that’s what he calls indeterminism. But the second possibility is that if there is no reason for my action, that still doesn’t mean the action is arbitrary. I do it out of judgment but not out of a reason. Meaning there is no reason that dictates what I do, but that doesn’t mean it’s an arbitrary action. For example, in this context I suggested that the action is done not because of a reason but for the sake of a purpose. Meaning, when I act based on considerations of what I want to achieve or what values I want to realize, then even if that action has no cause, it isn’t correct to call it an indeterministic action, an arbitrary action. It’s an action that has some kind of judgment in it on my part. And Peter van Inwagen is basically begging the question. The moment he assumes that there are only two possibilities and no third one, then of course he can prove, by a whichever-way-you-look-at-it argument, that there is no free choice. But he assumed it; he didn’t prove it. And if you reject that dichotomous assumption of either indeterminism or determinism, and I say that under indeterminism there are two sub-possibilities, then the whole argument collapses. I think I gave the example—yes, I think I did—the example I like so much, though by now it feels a bit worn out to me, of elections. Right, I said there are three models of elections. I’m simply illustrating these three possibilities I raised here. One possibility is elections in Syria. Elections in Syria are basically entering the polling booth, freely choosing the only ballot slip that is there, and putting it in the box. And whoever counts the ballots, and whoever gets the majority of the votes, is the president of Syria—which of course is always Assad. Why? Because there was only one ballot in the booth. So I supposedly chose in a completely free way, right? But there was only one possibility, so what difference does it make that I basically chose freely? That is determinism. The circumstances dictate what I will do. It may be that my inner feeling was that I have freedom, nothing external tells me what to do, right, so there are no internal circumstances dictating what I do, and apparently nothing external forcing me either—but that’s an illusion. In the end it’s a deterministic picture. Then there are elections in Switzerland. In elections in Switzerland, you enter the booth, choose one of several ballot slips, put it in, they count the votes, and the majority determines who will be president of Switzerland. Apparently this really is a free person, free elections. But the problem is—in quotation marks, “problem” in quotation marks—that in Switzerland there are no problems. And if there are no problems, then what do I care who becomes president of Switzerland? You can make it a lottery. Meaning, there’s no significance to the fact that I freely chose among the ballots, because all the ballots will give me the same result. So in fact, yes, there is freedom here, but there isn’t what I call choice or judgment, what I called earlier. There’s no significance to judgment here. Toss a coin. So you’re free in the sense that there’s no cause making you do what you do; you decide freely what to do, but that basically parallels what van Inwagen called indeterminism. Because it’s basically a kind of lottery. There are no considerations you can use in deciding which ballot to put in the box, because there are no problems. You won’t lose anything and you won’t gain anything by choosing correctly or incorrectly. The third possibility, whose existence Peter van Inwagen denies and I claim does exist, is the possibility of elections in a place where there are problems. And still, if there are several ballot slips in the booth and you enter and choose one of them, then these are free elections. Why? Because on the one hand you choose freely among the options, and on the other hand there is a price that doesn’t depend on you, that tells you what the consequences are. Meaning, if you chose wrong, you’ll suffer; if you chose right, you gained. The moment there are costs around, that there are considerations by which you can decide who should be president or prime minister or whatever, then this choice is not deterministic because you choose it; it’s not something forced on you—there are several options. But this choice is also not indeterministic, because it’s not a lottery. You make considerations; you decide what seems right to you and what doesn’t, what you’re for and what you’re against. Therefore it’s not indeterminism either. It’s a third possibility. I said there is also a fourth possibility, like the story in Burma. A friend of a friend of mine who was in Burma got to the post office there, and he saw there in some shack in a Burmese village in the middle of the jungle—he had wanted to send a letter, and he saw on the wall some kind of grid of boxes sorted by continents and countries. Amazing, in such a village where nobody gets there, in the middle of the jungle. When he got closer, he saw that on the other side of that matrix of boxes there was one big sack collecting all the letters. Meaning, you put the letters into all the different boxes, but they all fall into the same sack. And what that means is that there is also a fourth model: a place where there are several options and there are also problems, but everyone who gets elected does exactly the same thing, so it doesn’t matter whom I chose. Here it doesn’t matter whom you chose not because there are no problems and not because you have no choice, but because all those among whom you chose don’t really represent different paths. This basically takes us back to Syria. Anyway, for our purposes, this picture is trying to sharpen the meaning of the claim that we have free choice. The claim that we have free choice means that indeed we have internal influences and also external influences, but those influences, on the one hand, do not dictate what we will do. You can’t calculate from them, in a one-to-one way, what the outcome will be, what we will think or what we will do. On the other hand, it’s not true that there is no influence. There is influence, only after that influence we exercise some judgment and still decide. There are influences, but we can decide whether to take them into account or not. And the third picture says there are influences around, but in any case they don’t affect me. Right, that’s the caricature of libertarianism that says a person acts in a vacuum, which is the third model. I want to go a little more deeply into this picture of non-caricatured, informed libertarianism, where a person is under influences on the one hand, but they do not dictate what he will do; he has a choice in what he will do. So the example I want to bring is what I might call the hiker parable. Think about a person—wait, one second—think about a person walking around in some area that has some kind of pattern, terrain pattern, whatever, both things. There are hills and mountains and valleys and saddles there, all kinds of terrain structures like we know from a topographic map. Now if a little ball were placed in that terrain, the structure of the terrain would dictate where in the end we would find the ball. Because the behavior of that little ball is dictated by the terrain structure within which it operates. Dictated, not influenced—completely dictated. If there is someone flying above the terrain, then of course there is terrain, but the terrain does not affect him. He acts in a vacuum. Right? That’s the first model. The little ball is the deterministic model; the second model is van Inwagen’s model of indeterminism. The model I’m talking about is the model of a person walking on that terrain. A person walking on that terrain—so yes, in one direction let’s say there is a very high mountain, and therefore it will be hard for him to climb it. It may be that most people decide not even to try, not to climb that mountain, but to go down in the other direction, toward the valley. But a person has the ability to decide that he climbs the mountain anyway. True, he has no ability to decide what the prices will be. It will be difficult for him if he climbs the mountain. But he does have the ability to decide whether he takes those prices upon himself, whether he does it or doesn’t do it. And in that sense there is a difference between a person and a little ball, or if you like, a stream of water flowing along that landscape. A stream of water or a little ball—the terrain dictates where they will go. I can tell you, given the terrain, what will happen here. That’s determinism. But if it’s a person there, then notice that this parable draws very well the picture I described earlier. On the one hand there are influences on him. Meaning he knows that if he climbs the mountain it’s hard; that deters him, that causes him not to try to climb the mountain. On the other hand, the direction of the valley obviously causes him or attracts him to go that way because it’s easy there, you lose potential energy, it’s comfortable and easy. But that means there is influence. It’s not like the little ball and the water, where it dictates your behavior. And why not? Because a person, unlike a little ball or water, can decide that he climbs the mountain even though it is high. So he can’t decide that it won’t be hard for him. Those are costs given to him from outside. But he can decide that he takes those costs upon himself and does it anyway. Meaning the terrain influences what the person will do, but does not dictate what he will do. That is basically the claim. That’s the parable. What is the lesson? The lesson is: now I’m going to put all the examples I gave earlier into this framework of the hiker. And from here on I’ll use it, so this is an important point. Because what I want to claim is basically the following. Suppose we have a collection of influences, as I said earlier. The libertarian accepts this too: both internal influences—genetics, brain structure, whatever, traits I was born with or traits present in me—and external influences, education, environment, and so on. The determinist claims that all these influences determine what I will do. And the libertarian does not deny their existence; he claims that they create the topographic landscape within which I act, in the parable I gave earlier. Meaning, the mountains, valleys, saddles, hills, all those things I described earlier, express the total set of influences on me, internal and external. Sum it all up, weigh it all together—ultimately it creates some environment that says to me: it would be worthwhile for you to go here; it pulls me to go there because that’s a valley and it’s easy for me to go there; it deters me from going there because that’s a mountain, so it isn’t worth going there. Therefore it creates for me a kind of series or collection of influences that try to pull me or stop me from going in various directions. That is what represents the total set of influences, both the plasticity of the brain, the external influences, and also genetics, the internal influences. All these influences together, I claim, for the libertarian, are not the person. They are the environment within which he acts. Who is the person himself? The person himself is the one walking on that landscape, and he can decide whether to go along with the terrain—meaning to go in the low directions like the little ball, like the water, and avoid the steep climbs—or not. He can decide that yes, he goes uphill and does not simply slide downhill. So this is basically the third model I spoke about. It’s a picture in which there are influences on me, but these are influences that do not determine what I will do; they only influence. I take them into account, but in the end I decide what I do according to my own considerations. This is basically the picture of libertarianism. From this you can understand two things, two implications of the dispute between determinism and libertarianism. One implication concerns the question of who the person is. The determinist, in a certain sense, basically claims that the person is nothing but the totality of influences, the totality of what the influences created. The topographic landscape is the person—that is, in the lesson of the parable. Meaning, the fact that there is a little ball rolling there adds nothing to the picture. The terrain gives me all the information. There’s nothing in the little ball that isn’t in the terrain. Adding the little ball to this whole setup only expresses the fact that there are actions. But it doesn’t dictate what kind of actions there will be. The nature of the actions is completely dictated by the environment, or what I called the environment. Therefore for the determinist this thing is not an environment. For the determinist this is the person. By contrast, for the libertarian, this thing is the environment. And this whole environment affects the person from all directions, both internal environment and external environment. That is not me. That’s the periphery within which I act. “Environment” not in the sense of external or internal. Both the external and the internal are environment. But I myself am the one who acts under these influences and decides what to do: whether to respond to them or not respond to them, what to do. And in that sense there is a different perspective here on the question of who the person is. It’s not only the question of how he behaves, but who the person is. Is there something more in us besides the collection of influences? Or are we simply nothing but that collection of influences being discussed? So beyond the question of determinism and libertarianism, there is also some different perspective here on what a person is. I don’t think it is correct to tie this automatically to materialism and dualism, that is, to the question whether everything is matter or not. Because one can be—as I said in the opening lecture—one can be a determinist dualist. A person can be a non-materialist, believe in the existence of spirit or spiritual elements in reality, and still be a determinist. Meaning, to say that those elements also do not act freely but according to some laws or circumstances that dictate what they will do. There is no logical obstacle to thinking that way or holding such a picture. Therefore I don’t think it is correct to identify the environment I spoke about earlier with the material dimension. A psychological environment is also an environment in my eyes. The person is not his psychology either. Meaning, my psychology is not me. My psychology describes the environment within which I act—the system of drives and pressures and what influences me. But in the end I make a decision. Because if psychology is the description of myself, then we’ve gone back to the deterministic picture. Because that basically means that the pattern within which I move dictates what I will do. If the psychologist could predict—say he had full information. Psychology today doesn’t have full information, but suppose theoretically we finish all psychological research; we have full information. Okay, would this ultimate psychologist be able to predict with certainty in advance what I will do? My claim is no. Why? Not because we lack psychological knowledge. Often people attribute it to the fact that psychology is very complex and we don’t know everything yet, we haven’t finished researching the field. I claim that’s certainly true, but I claim more than that. Even when we finish researching everything—let’s assume that happens someday—what we will discover is still the person’s environment, what the totality of influences does to him. But in the end, when you ask yourself what he will do, it’s not enough to know what the environment is. You have to wait and see what he chooses, or how he decides to relate to those environmental pressures. And therefore this also sheds a completely different light on all sorts of psychological analyses. Psychological analyses—it isn’t merely the imperfection of psychology, and that’s one of the greatest understatements I’ve heard recently—the imperfection of psychology does not derive only from the fact that our psychological information is incomplete, but from the fact that psychology does not deal with the person. Psychology deals with the environment within which the person acts. In this case, the internal environment. But the environment within which he acts—the system of pressures and drives. In the end, that’s really the essence of humanistic psychology, it seems to me. Humanistic psychology says that in the end your environment is not you. You can decide what to do with your environment, even if the environment is given. Of course your actions can also later change the environment, and you have an effect on your own psychology. What you decide to do can alter your psychological structure a bit. But in the end it really depends on you. So that is one implication of the dispute between determinism and libertarianism. The second implication concerns the perspective on the axis of time. From the determinist’s point of view, looking backward along the time axis and looking forward along the time axis look the same. It’s just a technical matter whether you look backward or forward. It just so happens that we are built in such a way that we have knowledge of the past and no knowledge of the future. Why? Because we already experienced the past, so that knowledge was imprinted in our memory; we remember it, that’s how we’re built. Therefore we know what was in the past and we don’t know what will be in the future. But that’s not a fundamental difference. Meaning, on the principled level there could be some supra-temporal being—think of the Holy One, blessed be He, in this context—that can know the future just as much as the past. It doesn’t really matter, after all; everything is predetermined. You know, even if He doesn’t know the future, He can take the present circumstances, perform a complete calculation of the results, and arrive at the conclusion of what will be in the future, even if He is not seeing the future. He can calculate it. Therefore on the principled level there is no difference between future and past; both are completely fixed. The fact that we don’t have this information is simply because we are built so that the information accumulated in us is only the information we experienced. But future information also exists in some sense, somewhere and somewhen; it’s just inaccessible to us. That’s all. Let me perhaps give you a nice example of this. There’s a very famous letter that Albert Einstein wrote, a letter of condolence to the family of a friend of his named Besso, who had been with him at the Polytechnic in Switzerland, in Bern, and when he died, Einstein wrote a condolence letter to the family. I’ll read you a passage. He writes as follows: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. This means nothing. People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” That is the deterministic picture regarding the axis of time. Einstein is basically saying: what are you mourning over? That he died? It was equally true that Besso died on the third of February 1952 even in the year 2000 BCE. It was there and fixed there. The only difference is that back then you didn’t know it was going to happen, and now you know. So you’re not mourning what happened; you’re mourning the fact that you suddenly found out what happened. Because in principle you could have known it a thousand years earlier too. Why weren’t you mourning then? Simply because you didn’t know. In principle you should have been mourning even without that. Okay, so this attitude toward the axis of time is the second distinction or second aspect of the difference between determinism and libertarianism. And now I want to sharpen its meaning even further, which somewhat connects the two aspects, but mainly the second one. In the deterministic picture, in effect, as Laplace said: if you give me a strong enough computer—he didn’t talk in those terms, I’m formulating it in our language today—if you give me a strong enough computer and all the relevant data, or all the data about the world, I can tell you everything that will happen until the end of history. Ultimately it’s a matter of calculation. Therefore the fact that we are sitting here today and that I am uttering this word at this moment is basically already engraved in the nature of the world at the moment of the Big Bang. That is the deterministic conception. Meaning—and then why can’t we know it in advance? Again, as I said earlier, because the calculation is very complicated; we don’t have such a computer, we don’t have all the data, first of all; and second, if we experienced it, we would know it even without calculation. But since we have experienced only the past and not yet the future, we don’t know it. But that is merely technical. If there is a being that can look at the future, or a being that has infinite computational ability and ultimate knowledge of all the details in the world, it can know the future just as it knows the past. There is no difference between the future and the past. Therefore the world basically looks like one long chain, or if you like, like some tree that begins at one point, the Big Bang, and from it all sorts of chains unfold, all of them of course dictated by the structure of the Bang. Each such chain branches into more chains, but everything, everything, everything could in principle already have been stated at the moment of the Bang. In principle everything was already latent there. There is no gap in this genealogical tree. By contrast, the libertarian says no. This tree begins at the Bang, yes, let’s talk about one chain there, and then suddenly something jumps in and starts here. And then something jumps in and starts here and continues forward along the time axis, keeps advancing along the time axis, but new chains are born. The deterministic view says there is one chain from the Big Bang until the end of history—Fukuyama’s end of history. But according to the libertarian view, there are points in this tree where new chains begin. They do not emerge from the previous stages of the tree. These are points at which something new is born. What are these points? They are the points at which a person chose something. Meaning, the moment a person chooses something, this is an action not caused by previous causes. It is not on the causal chain of this deterministic tree. Therefore it basically starts a new chain. From the moment the person performed some action, from there on there are consequences in the world, of course, causal consequences, and another chain is born. But of course chains are constantly being born, suddenly, as if from nothing. And each such chain that is born can continue and influence things indefinitely in principle, but not everything comes from one point. This is a disconnected graph. In graph theory, right, not all these chains come from the same point and unfold or are influenced—or rather dictated—by it. There are beginnings of chains at various points in time. So this is basically the libertarian perspective as opposed to the determinist perspective. And as a result of this, an important implication emerges—or several important implications. The libertarian basically claims that there is an essential difference between the past and the future. We know the past not only because we experienced it, or alternatively we do not know the future not only because we haven’t experienced it, but because there is not yet anything there to experience. A thing that has not yet come into the world cannot be acquired, because there is nothing there to acquire—not because there is some problem in the laws of acquisition. The laws of acquisition are just fine, the act of acquisition is wonderful, only there is nothing there to acquire with that act. So here too, the libertarian perspective on the future basically says that I do not know the future not merely because I haven’t experienced it, but because there is not yet anything there to experience. The future does not yet exist; choice creates it. Einstein in his letter said: the future is already there somewhere in our space-time, only we have not gotten there yet. What flows is not time; what flows is us along the axis of time. But the world, the world of events, what Einstein calls the world-line, exists, it is laid out there. We merely stroll along it and each time encounter more and more events, and thereby turn them from future into past, but they were lying there before too—we just didn’t see them. In the libertarian perspective there is not yet a continuation of the line; I create the continuation of the line at every moment. When I choose something, I create the continuation of the line; I do not discover a continuation that was already there. This is a completely different perspective. You have to understand that this is a very, very significant thing. Let me perhaps give an example of an implication of this. One of the troubling problems in the context of free will, certainly if we are talking in a religious context, is the question of foreknowledge and choice—what Maimonides asks in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance. Maimonides asks: if a person has free choice, how can it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what will happen? Or alternatively, if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance everything that will happen because He is omnipotent, how can it be that we have free choice? He already tells us in advance what will happen. So on this issue there are various claims that say: the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time. And since He is above time, He can know what happens in the future. We are limited; we have not experienced it, we do not yet know what will happen in the future. But the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent; He can see what will happen in the future. And then it comes out that He sees what will happen in the future, but that does not dictate what will happen. I conduct myself as though I am choosing freely, all is well. He merely knows in advance what I will do because He can skip across the axis of time and see what will happen at a time that has not yet existed, a future time. My claim is twofold. First, it seems to me that this explanation—and it is a very common explanation in religious thought, perhaps the most common explanation—actually answers a different question entirely. This explanation answers the question: how does the Holy One, blessed be He, obtain the information, even though that information exists only in the future? So they tell me: He is above the axis of time. But that is not the question Maimonides is asking. That is a question about God. I’m asking a question about me. If the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance what will happen, how can it be that when I arrive at the crossroads I can freely choose whether to go right or go left? After all, the Holy One, blessed be He, already knows in advance whether I will go right or left—it doesn’t matter which—but whatever He knows in advance, I cannot choose otherwise. So that means that when I get to the crossroads, I don’t really have the option to choose. It is already known in advance which way I will go. Therefore the question is not how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtained the information, where you tell me: He is above the axis of time. My question is: assuming He has the information, how can it still be that I have free choice? I can go right, I can go left. If I go left and He knew in advance that it would be right, then it would turn out He was mistaken, and He is not omnipotent. If He knows with certainty what I will do and it cannot be otherwise, then that is not free choice. And to that question, saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the axis of time does not answer anything. Because that question is about me: how is it that I have free choice if the information already exists with the Holy One, blessed be He? So what do I care that He is above time? If the question is about Him—how He gets the information—then tell me He is above the axis of time. But if the question is: once He has the information, He is above the axis of time, He got the information—now the question is, fine, the information exists with Him, how can you say that I have free choice? But I’ll say more than that. Even the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the axis of time and therefore obtains the information is problematic. It is problematic because that claim assumes the deterministic view of the axis of time, what I described earlier. Because it assumes that the information already exists there in the future and all that is needed is simply to pull it out. We as human beings do not have the ability to pull out future information even though it already exists there, because we are limited and we only have the experiences we have undergone; we cannot know something we haven’t undergone, but it is still there, as Einstein wrote in his letter. It is there; we just have no access to it. So here you tell me: the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the axis of time; for Him all information is accessible; He can obtain it even though it lies in the future. I can understand that if the picture of the world is deterministic. But if I look at the axis of time in the libertarian picture, my claim is that there is nothing there ahead. That continuation has not yet been created. When I make my choice, only then will that future be created. So even if the Holy One, blessed be He, is above the axis of time, there is nothing there for Him to obtain. The problem is not how He obtains future information. My claim is that the future information does not exist. It is created only when I get there and carry out my choice. Therefore I claim that even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know what I will choose in the future. And my answer to Maimonides’ dilemma is this: Maimonides asks how it can be that the Holy One, blessed be He, as omnipotent, knows everything in advance, and at the same time I have free choice? My claim is: right, that really cannot be. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance. Some people say: correct, those two things cannot go together, therefore we do not have free choice. They draw a deterministic conclusion from it. For example, in Protestant thought that is the Calvinist conclusion—Calvin and Luther. That is basically the conclusion they reached: that the world is deterministic and the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, therefore we have no free choice and everything is deterministic. I say the conclusion is this: yes, these things do not fit together, because the theory that He is above time and all those things does not really solve the problem; therefore one must give up His foreknowledge. He does not know in advance. Why is that not a blow to His omnipotence? Doesn’t that contradict His omnipotence? My claim is that to say that some being is omnipotent means that it can do everything that can be conceived, everything that is defined. But a thing that has no meaning whatsoever, that is not defined at all—even an omnipotent being cannot do that, and that does not mean it is not omnipotent. For example, can the Holy One, blessed be He, make a wall that stops every projectile? Apparently yes, He is omnipotent. Can He make a projectile that penetrates every wall? A shell, a missile, that penetrates every wall. Apparently yes, He is omnipotent. Can He make both? Obviously not. Because if He made a projectile that penetrates every wall, then there is no wall that stops every projectile, including that one; and vice versa. If there is a wall that stops all projectiles, then there is no projectile that penetrates all walls. So the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make both things. That is obvious. Maybe one of them yes, I don’t know, but both He certainly cannot make. Does that mean He is not omnipotent? No. It means such a state simply is not logically defined. It is self-contradictory. It’s like asking whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a square circle. He cannot make a square circle because there is no such thing as a square circle. Not because there is some limitation in His power, but because there is no such thing. It’s like asking whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make blah blah blah blah. Not to say blah blah, but to make what the blah blah means—the meaning of the blah blah. That is a meaningless question; you can’t answer it. I can tell you the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do it. But do what? You didn’t tell me what. You didn’t tell me what! The same thing when you ask about a square circle. A square circle is like blah blah blah. There is no such thing. What is a square circle? It’s just a string of words with no meaning at all. So once it has no meaning—or it has no referent, not just no meaning, but no referent—once it has no referent, then what exactly are you asking when you ask me whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a square circle? There is nothing there that He could make. It’s not that this is no defect in His omnipotence. He is omnipotent; whatever can be done, He can do. Whatever exists, He can do; whatever is possible, He can do. But a thing that is impossible—His inability to do it is because it is impossible, not because it is a deficiency in His omnipotence. My favorite example in this context is the example of Puss in Boots. Right, Puss in Boots—the miller’s son inherits a cat and he is in despair, he has no property, he is utterly poor, doesn’t know what to do. One day he goes to bathe in the river, folds his clothes on the side, and the king passes by there with his carriage and his daughter. The cat goes to the king and says to him: listen, my lord, the count who is bathing here had his clothes stolen. Would you perhaps be willing to give him some royal garment of your own? It’s not proper for the count to go without clothes. Fine, the king says: of course, we won’t leave a count without clothes, and gives him some garment to wear. Then the cat suggests to the king that he come to the palace of my lord the count—right, who is actually the poor miller’s son, no palace and no nothing. So the king says: of course! Then the cat runs ahead and arrives at the palace of the terrible sorcerer. He invites the king to follow after him. He gets there before the king, enters the palace of the terrible sorcerer. The sorcerer sees the cat come in and immediately turns himself into a lion. The cat gets very frightened and says to him: wait, wait, before you devour me, can you also turn into a mouse, not only into a lion? So the sorcerer says: of course! Makes a move and turns into a mouse, and then the cat devours him and that’s the end of the story, and the king arrived and they got married and they’ve lived happily ever since. What’s the problem in this story? The question is whether the terrible sorcerer really can turn himself into a mouse. Because if he can turn himself into a mouse, then he isn’t really a terrible sorcerer. Let me give you the lesson: can the Holy One, blessed be He, turn Himself into a person? If He turns Himself into a person, I’ll shoot Him in the head, and then there won’t be God. Alternatively, you’ll say: He won’t die even if I shoot Him in the head. But then He didn’t turn into a person, because a person who is shot in the head dies. Like the wall and the projectile, right? These are just different examples of the same point. So what does that mean? That the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot really turn Himself into a person. That’s obvious. He is a necessary being. The moment He turns Himself into a person, that contradicts His essence. What does it mean that it contradicts His essence? That the demand that He turn into a person is really a demand that He remove Himself and create something else in His place—a person. That is not turning Himself into a person, but disappearing from the world and creating in His place a person. But a necessary being cannot disappear from the world. And when I say “cannot,” I do not mean something is lacking in His power, that He is not omnipotent. Since the disappearance from the world of a necessary being—a necessary being that does not exist—is like a square circle. To know information that does not exist about the future is exactly the same thing; that too is a square circle. Therefore to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows information about a person’s future free choice is like saying He can make a square circle. He does not know that information, not because there is something defective in His omnipotence, not because He is not omnipotent, but because that information does not exist. There is nothing there to know. It has not yet come into the world. And since that is so, it doesn’t help that He is above time and that He is omnipotent. Being above time might perhaps allow Him to obtain future information, but if the future information does not exist, then there is nothing there to obtain. But all this applies only to information of that type, information that is the result of human choice—what a person will choose. Physical information, say deterministic information about how some river will behave at some future time—that the Holy One, blessed be He, can know in two ways. He can try to foresee it, to look at the future and see what will happen to that river in ten years, and of course He can also make the scientific calculation, and since He has all the data and knows the laws of nature completely, He can calculate and know by calculation what will happen in the future. In this context—yes, there’s another nice example, also connected in a certain sense to the Exodus from Egypt—about Moses our teacher going out walking there in Egypt, and he sees an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man, and then “he turned this way and that way, and struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” Rashi gives two explanations there for what “he turned this way and that way” means. The first explanation is that he saw that nobody was looking so that they wouldn’t catch him. The second explanation is that he was basically looking—once you killed him, you thereby created the future result that no one would come out of him who would convert. So to know that no one would come out of him in the future who would convert is not to know the future; it is to create the future with your own hands. I could have done that too. I could have seen that no one would come out of him who would convert and killed him. Obviously. Because if I kill him, no one will come out of him. That’s not prophecy. So what is it? Clearly the intention of this midrash—Rashi brings a midrash—the intention of this midrash is that Moses our teacher was not looking at the future. Moses our teacher was looking at the present. Moses our teacher was looking at the person at his root, at his psychology, at his spiritual structure, and asking himself: what can come out of this fellow? According to what I see here with my spiritual X-ray, says Moses our teacher, nothing beneficial will come out of him, and therefore he killed him. He wasn’t looking at the future; he was looking at the present. But this look at the present can actually be relevant only to events that proceed deterministically, not to human choices. Here he was looking at a person. Maybe the person will repent? Maybe he’ll change his mind? Very true. That Moses our teacher cannot see. As I said earlier, even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot see what a person will choose. But Moses our teacher does not need to judge a person by his end; Moses our teacher judges him according to what he is now. And according to what he is now, nothing beneficial can come out of him unless he chooses otherwise and repents. But the punishment a person deserves is based on his current state, not on something future. Therefore Moses our teacher says that when he says that nothing good will come out of him, he does not mean to give a prophecy about the future. It is an indication of his present state: that if his present state remains, nothing beneficial will come out of him, and therefore he killed him. He killed him because of his present state, not because of the future event. That is an example of the second type of perspective on the future, a perspective that calculates the future, not one that looks directly at what will happen. Deterministic events can simply be calculated. But of course that cannot be done when the events in question are events of human choice, not deterministic events. Therefore there too even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot see what will happen. And I think that is an implication of what I described earlier as the difference between looking at the past and looking at the future. According to libertarianism, the difference is essential. We know the past not only because we experienced it, but because it is already there. Even if we didn’t know it—events in the past that we don’t know about because we didn’t experience them, fine, details in history that I don’t know—still it’s clear that they were there, right? It’s only my lack of access. The information exists; I just don’t know it. But what I don’t know about the future is not only because the thing is inaccessible to me, but because there is nothing there that could be accessible to me. The future event has not yet happened; choice brings it about. That is exactly the chain I mentioned in the picture from the Big Bang to us, where in the libertarian picture chains suddenly come into existence from nothing. If you look at it from the vantage point of the Big Bang, you won’t see them at all. Those chains are not anticipated in advance as coming into being. They are created at the moment a person makes some choice. At that point in time the chain is created. Before that it did not exist. Okay, I think we’ll stop here. I’ll open microphones—and wait, I’m opening microphones—and I ask that even after I open them, everyone keep their microphone muted. Only whoever wants to speak should unmute, because otherwise there will be all sorts of problems here. Okay, so I’ve released them. Whoever wants is welcome to comment or ask. There are also questions here in the chat, but it’s a little hard, a little hard to relate to chat questions in parallel with spoken discussion. They’re asking me what about prophecy, so I’ll say—I’ll say briefly—maybe I’ll actually answer a few of the questions that were asked here in the chat, because they really are natural questions that I didn’t get to answer. First question—wait—first question: what about the case of Hezekiah in the midrash, where Hezekiah refrained from marrying because he knew that an evil son would come from him—“What have you to do with the hidden matters of the Merciful One?” There too I would make the same claim. Hezekiah saw that according to the present circumstances, that is what was going to come out of him. But he cannot know whether that person would not choose to be righteous. Therefore there is not really a certain view of the future here. There is some optimal prediction about the future, which the Holy One, blessed be He, can also make. So that too Hezekiah could do, and a prophet can do as well. And that’s one of the questions asked more generally—what about prophecy? Someone here is asking me. My answer is the same answer. And the Shelah writes this in the introduction to his book Shnei Luchot HaBrit, in the section called Beit HaBechirah. There are ten subsections there. In the section called Beit HaBechirah, the Shelah argues that prophets too do not know the future with certainty. If a person will choose to do something, that cannot be known in advance. Even the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot know it in advance, and therefore He cannot reveal it to a prophet either. Consequently, all that a prophet can prophesy is the same kind of prophecy that Moses our teacher made about the Egyptian. Prophecy is never a direct look at the future. Prophecy is a calculation of what is expected to happen, unless a person chooses some surprising alternative. Okay? Therefore it is only an optimal calculation; it is not really ultimate knowledge of the future. “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted”—I say exactly, that is what… They’re asking me, after all, “Everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted”—people usually bring a proof from there. But it’s the other way around. What is written there is exactly what I’m saying. On the one hand everything is foreseen, and nevertheless that does not contradict the fact that permission is granted. Why? Because in principle, if everything is foreseen, then permission cannot be granted. What they tell me is: everything is foreseen except for the things that depend on the permission granted to us to choose; those things, of course, are not foreseen before they become… Okay? It seems to me that with that I’ve more or less answered it. What else? One more question I didn’t answer, and then we’ll move to whoever wants to comment orally. What about a ninety-nine-percent influence? If a driver comes to a red light, he can continue through, or if an ordinary person can kill another person—if a person chooses, then that’s the end of society. Okay, what can I say? And thankfully not all people choose to kill, but that’s true. We’ll get later to Maimonides in chapter 6 of the Laws of Repentance, where that is really the topic of discussion: if the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed that the Egyptians would enslave Israel, to what extent did the Egyptians have free choice? That’s chapter 6 of the Laws of Choice—of the Laws of Repentance—and those are exactly the questions we’ll deal with. Okay, questions we’ll deal with. Yes, like Waze—I agree with that parable. It gives me a prediction of what is expected, how I am expected to arrive, but if people choose differently then that prediction can change. One last question they’re asking here, like what the Holy One, blessed be He, says regarding Pharaoh. That is connected to the discussion I said I’ll have in the next lecture. It may be that in principle the Holy One, blessed be He, can remove a person’s choice, and then of course He would know what the person will do, and then of course He can also prophesy or give a prophet that information. Obviously. I’m talking about a situation where the person has choice. If the Holy One, blessed be He, takes away that choice, then there’s no problem, of course. That even Laplace, in principle, could have done. If you have a strong enough computer and all the data, you can know what a person will do if his choice has been taken from him. Okay, now if there’s anything orally—that’s the chats. Come on, ask orally and not in the chat. Now the microphones are open, so it’s better.