Free Will and Choice – Lesson 9

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Quantum theory basically talks about this freedom that exists within physics, this gap, this opening that exists within physics, only on very small scales. On the scale of single electrons—"single" can also mean a thousand, ten thousand, maybe even a million, but roughly speaking. And the phenomena we’re talking about when we talk about human actions, about our world, are of course phenomena on much larger scales, and there the quantum phenomena get smeared out. So quantum theory probably does not—even at the level of a single neuron, as I said, the accepted view is that quantum phenomena don’t play a role, certainly not in systems of very many neurons. I said there is some debate about this too; people examine various quantum phenomena in the neuron. But I think it’s very hard to hang the explanation of free choice on quantum theory. But beyond that, even if we say that’s true, quantum theory only says that there are several possibilities. Not only does it say there are several possibilities, it also says that the decision as to which possibility will be chosen proceeds according to a given statistical distribution—what is called the wave function. The wave function basically determines the probability that the particle will pass through slit A or slit B. In other words, each result has some probability dictated in advance. And if so, that means that even if I accept that there are several possibilities here, and in reality itself there really is a gap, an opening, unlike chaos—even so, when a person chooses, that basically means he decides which of the possibilities to choose in a way that is in his hands. So that means it is not determined randomly or accidentally according to the distribution of quantum theory, and therefore this is still a deviation from the laws of nature. It is true that quantum theory may provide me with the only place in physics that can give me real freedom in reality itself, but freedom is a necessary condition and not a sufficient one for the mechanism of choice. The fact that I have two possibilities before me is a condition; without that there is no choice. But even if I have two possibilities, that is not enough to say that I choose, because it could be that I’m merely drawing one of the two possibilities by lot. And we’ve talked more than once about the difference between a lottery and a choice. Many people in this discussion identify those two things, but that’s not correct. Choice is not a lottery; choice is a reasoned decision in light of considerations. A lottery is just a blind and arbitrary process. So even if quantum theory gives me this reality in which there are several ways to proceed from a given physical state, that still does not necessarily tell me that the way one of those possibilities is selected is by way of choice. On the contrary: quantum theory says that it is by way of a lottery. Exactly how that lottery is carried out doesn’t matter, but there is a distribution given in advance. And therefore there too, it seems to me, it is hard to find free choice within physics.

I made another remark regarding certain interpretations that once were common in quantum theory. Today they are much less popular. Most of the—seems to me the common wisdom there already says that it is not true that human consciousness affects the physical system, which is also somehow perceived by defenders of free choice as a very attractive idea. And that basically means that I can influence physics, which is exactly what happens in free choice: that my will influences or changes the physics, or the physiology, of the brain. Now here, first, even in quantum theory apparently—as far as I know, and again, I’m really not fully up to date, but that’s what I understand—today people already believe that this is not true. These are interpretations proposed by some very smart and important people, but still it is probably not true. I think I mentioned that experiment where they place a detector next to one of the slits. So I said that the presence of the detector causes the collapse of the wave function, meaning it causes the wave function to decide whether the particle passes through slit A or slit B, and it will not pass through both. Now usually people thought—why? What is the meaning of a detector? A detector is just some physical device; how is it different from any other physical object? Because the detector reaches human consciousness—I look at the result, where the particle passed. And therefore there was a hypothesis that human consciousness is what causes the wave function to collapse. Then I told you about an experiment where they set up a detector, the information from the detector was passed to a computer drive that destroyed itself. No person saw that information. The information was collected by the detector, but no human consciousness encountered that information, and still there was collapse of the wave function there. Which means that this myth that in quantum theory consciousness affects reality is probably not true. Again, as far as I understand—I have to speak cautiously here, because I’m not fully up to date—but as far as I understand, and from what I’ve also asked, it seems to me this is up to date; that is, this is still the situation: people do not really believe that consciousnesses cause the collapse of the wave function. What does cause it? Not a simple riddle. I don’t know. Because really, why should it matter? A detector is just a collection of metal pieces and wires and a physical system. How is it different from any other natural physical system? That it is man-made—so what? Why does it cause collapse and other things do not? Fine, that’s a different discussion.

In any case, the conclusion is that quantum theory also does not give us the answer we want. And so if I summarize the situation—that was the end of the previous chapter, or the end of the previous section, not the chapter, or the collection of previous chapters—it basically means that you cannot insert free choice into physics. And that leaves us with two possibilities. One possibility is to assume that there is no free choice. Of course, that possibility assumes that there is only physics in the world. If you are a physicalist, you assume there is only physics in the world, and if you can’t fit free choice into physics, then apparently there is no free choice. That’s one possibility. The second possibility is to give up physicalism. To give up physicalism means to say: that’s not true. It is not true that the whole world is only physics. There are other things in the world too—spirit, soul, whatever you want. Therefore the fact that free choice can’t be inserted into physics does not mean there is no free choice. It is not inside physics; rather, it is from outside. And we already spoke about this in the past: basically, anyone who believes in free choice—the libertarian—has to assume that there is an influence of the mental, the will, or our spiritual side on the physical system, and that contradicts the laws of physics. It contradicts the laws of physics because a particle will move there even though no physical force is acting on it, or it will move not according to Newton’s laws, which determine the connection between the motion of the particle and the force acting on it. So there is a deviation here from the laws of physics, and that is exactly the conceptual expression of deviation from physicalism: that there are things in the world besides physics. But not only are there things besides physics; those things can also affect physics. Our spirit is not only alive in itself and not affected by physics, or affected by physics but not determined by physics—it also acts back on physics. That is, it can also change physical processes. When I choose to move my hand and then I raise my hand, the raising of the hand is an event in physics. Here is a body with mass that moves. And that happened because of a mental decision of mine. So that means the mental can generate physical processes. That contradicts the laws of physics.

Okay, so those are the two possibilities we are left with. That means either to be a materialist physicalist, in which case there is no free choice, because within physics you cannot fit free choice—as many materialists hoped they would be able to remain materialists and believe in free choice if free choice could be inserted into physics. That, it seems to me, doesn’t work. And the second alternative is to be an interactionist dualist, what I said—that is, to believe in the existence of matter and spirit and a two-way interaction between them. And then of course that means giving up a bit on the laws of physics, saying that there are particles that will begin to move not according to the laws of physics, or will move not according to the laws of physics but according to a mental influence. And we discussed this at length, if you remember, about lex specialis derogat—the principle of the specific overriding the general—and all sorts of considerations as to why I think this thesis is preferable to the physicalist thesis. In any event, that is the situation we are currently in, and now finally we arrive at neuroscience.

In neuroscience—and this is the next chapter, or the next part of this series—neuroscience ostensibly offers us, first of all—you know what, before neuroscience, one more remark. There are other claims that are similar, but one has to pay close attention to the difference between them in relation to quantum theory. There are claims that because quantum theory allows several ways to proceed from a specific given state, it is harder to rule out the existence of free choice. Meaning, not that quantum theory allows free choice within physics—it does not. But free choice can hide more easily in a world governed by the laws of quantum theory. The same is true, by the way, also in chaos. Because if I assume that there is some hidden involvement of our mental side in what we think, do, and act, then I say: what do you mean? Newton’s laws will show me that this is not true. I’ll see that the force was such-and-such a force and the resulting motion is such-and-such a motion according to the laws of physics. But if the laws are complicated and complex, and I have no way to calculate what the result will be—or it is only statistical in quantum theory, and in chaos I also have no way to calculate—then these complex physical systems can hide free choice behind them. Maybe a person chooses freely and you just don’t notice? You think it’s a quantum lottery, but the truth is that it’s free choice. That is of course an option that exists, but one has to note carefully that this still leaves us with dualism. Because this does not mean that quantum theory explains free choice or enables free choice. It does not. Because quantum theory basically says that the decision as to which possibility I choose is not a decision by choice but by lottery. But since there are several ways to proceed and you cannot know in advance which will be chosen, it could also be free choice and you think it’s a quantum lottery—you simply don’t notice, you don’t know, because it looks very similar. So in that sense quantum theory and chaos can serve as a screen behind which free choice is hidden, not as an explanation that enables free choice. That is possible. You can tell me that because there are such physical phenomena, you may miss the fact that a person really does choose freely. You think everything proceeds according to the laws of physics, but notice: there is chaos here and quantum here, and in truth you think it is chaos and quantum, but it isn’t—it is free choice. Only you don’t notice, because in quantum theory too there is after all the possibility of deciding in favor of slit A or slit B. So you think that’s quantum theory and not choice, but the truth is that it is choice. So that is an argument that has some plausibility; it is possible. It is just important to pay close attention to what it does and does not do. It only says: if you believe in free choice, physics does not prove that you are wrong. But it is not true that this allows you to remain a physicalist. You cannot remain a physicalist and believe in free choice, because quantum theory does not allow free choice. It only hides free choice on the assumption that it exists. It is harder to detect the existence of free choice if our world includes quantum and chaotic phenomena. Okay? That is something completely different, and there are those who try to make that claim, and with that claim I am entirely willing to agree. But of course that changes nothing on the philosophical level, because on the philosophical level you still have to assume dualism. You still have to assume that there is something in the world besides physics, and that it has an effect on physics. Therefore we arrive at interactionist dualism, except that it is harder to rule it out by the force of physics, because there are certain physical phenomena where you cannot know whether they are quantum theory or free choice, or whether this is chaos or free choice. In that sense I do accept that these two domains can slightly affect our discussion. They can simply conceal the bitter truth from the physicalist. That can explain to me why a physicalist is mistaken, but it cannot explain to me why physicalism is true. That is, that is not what these fields can do. Okay, that is just a supplementary remark regarding what we already did.

I return to neuroscience. In recent decades this field of brain research has been developing very strongly. And it combines within itself—I think if there is any truly multidisciplinary field in the scientific world, it is this one. In most places where people talk about multidisciplinarity, it’s throwing sand in people’s eyes. That is, it’s only because it’s very fashionable and brings in a lot of money, but there is not really productive multidisciplinarity in most of the fields people talk about. But in neuroscience there is very built-in multidisciplinarity: physics and mathematics and computer science and psychology and chemistry, biology of course, lots of things—not to mention philosophy. There is a combination there of a great many fields of knowledge and research, and with the development of each one separately, somehow suddenly people managed to see that joining the forces of all of them would help advance our understanding of how the brain works. And indeed in the last few decades this business has begun to move ahead very rapidly, and of course all kinds of brain-research institutes are being created. It gets huge budgets because it opens practical options too—medical, therapeutic ones. Someone told me that at the Hebrew University they considered at one stage bringing psychology in as a branch of brain research. That is, removing it from behavioral sciences, from the human sciences, and putting it under brain research. And maybe that expresses somewhat, first, the justified disappointment, in my opinion, with psychology in its classical sense as a scientific discipline, and second, the materialist conception that says that basically psychology is talking about the distant results, whereas we can actually get at the roots—and the roots are the brain, neuroscience. So why deal with psychology, which is only the distant expression of the matter? Let’s grab the bull by the horns. Let’s talk about the essence, about the thing itself. And then indeed these fields gather a great deal of momentum. They affect many—or not many, but they are beginning to affect areas of our lives and our way of thinking, including of course perhaps the most prominent place, the world of law. More and more brain scans and testimony by neuroscience experts appear before the courts and take part in judges’ decisions. In my opinion, often not justifiably. But there is a growing influence here.

Now, what happens is that because of the phenomena I described earlier—and this is what I discovered after I got into the matter a bit, because I began to get annoyed by various statements coming from brain researchers, and somehow I felt there was some mistake there that I did not agree with, when they speak about a materialist or physicalist consensus that there is no free choice, that everything is deterministic—and I wondered how it could be that this problem can be solved with scientific tools. Because that is basically the claim. The claim of neuroscience in this discussion is that the problem ceased in recent decades to be a philosophical problem and began to be a scientific problem. It can be tested in the lab: does a person have free choice or not? Up to now everyone argued, raising one philosophical argument or another, and we have encountered many of them, but philosophy—you know, philosophy doesn’t buy groceries. Anyone can raise arguments this way or that way. And in neuroscience there is a kind of feeling that there is a scientific framework here within which it is possible to decide the question whether we have free choice or not by scientific means. We’ll perform an experiment and check whether we have free choice or not. And not only can it supposedly be decided scientifically—and even that one can discuss, I’m not sure I agree, though I cannot rule it out categorically—the claim of many is that we are already beyond that. We have already ruled it out; we already know there is no free choice. And you can hear such people all over the internet and in media interviews and in all sorts of places like that. I personally heard Sompolinsky, with whom I also happened to study at Bar-Ilan—he is a religious, observant Jew, one of the senior figures in neuroscience at the Hebrew University and perhaps in the world in general—who claims in many places: a person has no free choice; today we already know this very clearly; the world is completely deterministic. So part of my effort when I wrote the book—I went to hear a course he gives at the Hebrew University to research students, also from various departments. He and Yemima Ben-Menahem, who came from philosophy, gave a course together on this subject of neuroscience and free choice. So I went to hear it precisely in order to see what the arguments actually are, what these claims are based on, and following that I wrote the book The Science of Freedom.

In any case, these claims stirred in me the desire to try to examine what neuroscience is doing in this story, what has changed in the last few decades regarding this question that has accompanied us for thousands of years since Greek philosophy. You can maybe also see it a bit in Jewish sources, but in my view, when it is properly conceptualized and defined, it began in Greek philosophy. In any event, the insight I arrived at is that precisely the multidisciplinarity required in order to engage in neuroscience is sometimes what undermines the philosophical pretension of these people. Why? Because the moment you need a great deal of knowledge and scientific methods in order to treat a certain field, you actually need a combination of many people, each an expert in his own field. When you make that combination, many times things can fall between the cracks. The biologist talks with the physicist, and they talk with the mathematician; each one gives his input, but none of them is an expert in the other’s field. And then the seam between them can contain failures. That is, they do not always manage to stitch their perspectives together. One of the points where this is most prominent for me—because I am not an expert in most of these fields—but one seam that stands out most strongly for me is the seam between science and philosophy. Because when we deal with free choice, it is not enough to perform the tests and scientific experiments and the imaging and all the other things they do there. One must understand what free choice is, when we are seeing before our eyes something that is free choice and when it is not free choice. And for that you have to define the concept of free choice properly, understand what it is and what it is not, understand the difference between, say, quantum chaos and free choice—and that is a philosophical difference. And scientists, even good scientists, are not always sensitive to those nuances. On the contrary, often they are not. I think at the beginning of this series I gave several examples of even Nobel Prize winners talking nonsense in these contexts. And this point—that there is a joint effort of, say, philosophers and physicists or scientists in fields where to be an expert you really have to study a great deal; it is not enough to read popular literature, so I’m talking about the hard sciences—so in a place where there is a combination of philosophy and, say, physics, since the physicist doesn’t understand philosophy and the philosopher doesn’t understand physics, many times the structure they build together has no mortar. Why? Where do you get the mortar that connects those two things? So what happens is: the philosopher says something, the physicist, who is not really sensitive to the nuances, says, I found it here in the lab, it’s here and here. Now the philosopher doesn’t know how to read the physical texts because he hasn’t studied physics. So he is very happy that the physicist told him he found it here and here, and then they arrive at the conclusion that there is free choice or there is no free choice, when in fact there are conceptual mistakes there.

And gradually, as I entered this field, I saw to what extent almost all the discussions conducted in this area—almost everything I saw—and it is amazing how important people, and truly smart people, not important in the populist sense, but intelligent people and people who are experts in their field, miss the most basic things, the most basic things, when it comes to the interpretation given to their own scientific work: what its conceptual and philosophical significance is. So I am not arguing with him in the scientific domain; in the scientific domain he is excellent, a talented person, a professional, he knows the work. But once he begins to talk about interpretations, implications, meaning—then sometimes they say nonsense, nonsense that makes your hair stand on end. And this phenomenon basically means that one has to do the whole path in an orderly way before beginning to talk about this issue. That is why I devoted several sessions to defining the concept of free choice, because I think most of these discussions collapse over the very definition of the concept. People are simply confused, or mistaken, about how to diagnose or define the concept. When is it free choice? Is it free choice when one cannot predict something? I showed you physicists who make that mistake. Does the plasticity of the brain—Ciechanover, right?—does the plasticity of the brain mean that we have free choice? That determinism is false? Simply nonsense. That is a conceptual mistake. That is, very often the mistakes are found simply at the level of defining the concepts, and in most cases it seems to me that this is how it is. I want to show this also in the context of neuroscience, because indeed neuroscience is the next stage in the history of these discussions about free choice.

And in order to talk about this, I’ll give a little introduction. As I said, I’ll say it again now: I am far from being an expert in neuroscience. I also don’t think one has to be an expert, but one does need to understand the nature of this discourse. After all, it doesn’t matter exactly which neuron or exactly which area in the brain does what. That is for the neuroscience experts to investigate. There are, of course, disagreements, a great deal is unknown, much more is already known, but there are disputes about that—that is not the point. The point is: what does it mean that something specific is taking place in a specific region of the brain? Someone who understands this kind of discourse—seems to me that is enough knowledge of neuroscience in order to engage in our philosophical discussion. It is not enough to cure Parkinson’s; there you need to know the details, how it works, the chemistry, what happens in different areas of the brain, and so on. But the concept that asks what the connection is between the processes in the brain and the mental phenomena—that is what one needs in order to conduct the discussion. So I’ll give some kind of introduction from a non-expert to non-experts. I hope there are no overly great experts here who will catch me in mistakes. So I’m giving an introduction from a non-expert to non-experts, but in order to present this type of discourse.

Our brain—people have known for many centuries already that the brain basically lies at the center of human functioning. It does many things. It coordinates the autonomous activity of our various organs, decision-making, emotions, desires—almost all our mental and physical abilities and activities are basically centered in the brain. The brain controls them, the brain coordinates them. And decision-making, of course, willing, remembering, learning, emotions—everything ultimately converges in different places in the brain. And exactly which places—of course that is subject to various debates—but broadly speaking the brain has two hemispheres, right and left. There are many myths surrounding these hemispheres, which apparently, as far as I understand from the experts—and again, I’m really not an expert—are inaccurate myths. The division between the right brain and the left brain is commonly accepted; apparently I understood that it is more or less correct, that the left brain is more responsible for analytical work, and the right side is more responsible for creative, intuitive thinking, art, things of that kind. Contrary to common stereotypes, by the way, it seems to me that if anything—and there are various disputes about this and a lot of political correctness here—but if anything, women are stronger on the left side than on the right, and men are stronger on the right side. Not in mathematics, but in creativity and art and intuition—what people often attribute to women. There are all kinds of interesting things here, the relation between myths and facts, but…

But that is the large structure of the brain, between those two lobes, those two hemispheric parts, those lobes. There is the corpus callosum, the interhemispheric bridge that connects the two lobes to each other. Very often people used to cut it in order to treat various mental problems—simply cut it. By the way, they still do this today in extreme cases, although people are very shocked to hear it. It is perceived as immoral, unfounded treatment, and indeed that is what it used to be. In the past they did it for the treatment of many, many severe mental problems when they did not know what to do with them. They cut this bridge in a person, and sometimes it treated the problem and sometimes it made it worse; many times it created other problems. It was something of a symbol of invasive, unfounded, and immoral procedures. But people know less that even today there are cases where this is done. There are situations in which it is done, of course; today it is somewhat more grounded, or when there is no more grounded alternative and this is the maximum we can achieve. But of course it is done much less. What is the meaning of this cutting? It basically disconnects the connection between the right lobe and the left lobe. And that is a very important point, because one of the things that characterizes our brain is connectivity, interconnectedness. That is, the various functions the brain performs are carried out through a combination of several parts of it. So of course in broad terms this is a combination of the right and left lobes, but even within the lobes there are divisions, finer divisions, so that within these lobes too there are combinations. In other words, the view that this or that function is done there is usually not correct. It is done there and there and there and there—some collection of centers whose combination together creates the activities we are talking about: image recognition, decision-making, detection, whatever, all sorts of things, emotions, experiences, and the like. So the brain’s connectivity is perhaps the most important feature, and people keep discovering it anew each time. It exists to such an extent that sometimes when one lobe is damaged, the other lobe begins to function in its place. That is, there is a dynamic in which certain parts of the brain can begin doing work that traditionally belonged to other parts. They compensate for damage in other parts. Sometimes this succeeds and sometimes not; of course there are injuries that cannot be overcome. But often it does happen.

Now there is of course also a connection between the lobes and our bodily structure, which is also symmetric between right and left, more or less symmetric, except that the connection is a crossed one. That is, the right lobe is responsible for the left side of the body, and the left lobe is responsible for the right side of the body. Look, for example, I brought here some demonstration.

[Speaker C] Look at this, for example.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Do you see this picture? What we have here is basically a drawing—or a photograph of a drawing—yes, it’s a drawing, that is completely symmetrical between right and left. Meaning, whatever exists on the left person’s right side exists on the right person’s left side, perfectly symmetrical. Now if I ask you which guy looks happier, most people will answer that it’s the guy on the right. Our right-hand guy, yes—that is, the one on our right is this one. Okay, that’s the happier guy, right? Look at it a bit, try to get an impression, and you’ll see. And what’s the explanation? Think of yourselves as all standing today facing that guy on the right. Okay, so who picks up his left side? Our left eye. Our left eye picks up his left side; our right eye picks up his right side. Our left eye connects to the right hemisphere, the right lobe of the brain. The right lobe is responsible for emotions, intuitions, the non-analytical aspects, so therefore we interpret this as happiness. By contrast, if you look in the same way at the guy on the left, then what picks up his smiling side—which is the right side—is the right eye, meaning the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere doesn’t know how to decode emotions; it doesn’t deal with that, that’s not its field. Therefore with him we don’t interpret it as happiness. That, for example, is one explanation given in neuroscience and psychology for bodily correlates. You can see what an expression this has, that our hemispheres are responsible for different functions. By the way, they discover things—I’m jumping ahead a bit—but they discover amazing things there. Meaning, you can have a person where, when you cut the corpus callosum, yes, you leave his hemispheres disconnected from each other, then his right hemisphere tends to be right-wing, politically, Republican if you like, and his left hemisphere is Democratic. When it’s connected, then he weighs the arguments for this and for that and reaches some conclusion about what his political position is. When it’s disconnected, you hear schizophrenic messages from him. Meaning, since his speech is connected to the… wait, speech is connected to the right lobe, I think, and then when he speaks he’ll express messages that reflect the outlook of the right lobe. But that isn’t really what his view is. They did all kinds of experiments there, which I may still describe later, that show the fascinating phenomena that happen when we disconnect the two hemispheres. But as I said, on the other hand, many times one hemisphere begins to develop functions that are usually performed by the other hemisphere; sometimes, by the way, there are all kinds of stories we tell ourselves in order to synchronize these two hemispheres. There are truly fascinating experiments on this. In any case, this is the general structure of the brain: two hemispheres. It’s divided, of course, into various more… here you see the lobes, there are different lobes of the brain: parietal lobe, frontal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe, and so on. The frontal lobe is actually the largest, and most of our higher functions are located there. So in any case, that’s the division of the brain. I’m giving this only as a schematic; I’m not going to use it, it’s just so you can get an impression of what we’re talking about. But now, what is this thing called the brain? What is there in all these areas? Now it turns out that in the cerebral cortex there is what we basically call the brain. There is a network of nerve cells, yes, nerves, called neurons, which are connected to one another with all kinds of electrical wires, dendrites and axons. The axon is a long wire that comes out of the neuron, and it connects to a dendrite, which is a short wire coming out of the receiving neuron. And so basically—look at the picture maybe that I’m describing here, look at this. Let’s say there’s some neuron here marked with a plus sign, yes? Now around it there are all kinds of neurons; you see all these ellipses, those are neurons. Now the long lines—say this double line—it’s an axon. It’s long. Okay? Or no, you know what? No, actually it isn’t an axon, sorry. This thick black line is an axon. It comes out of this neuron and goes very far, sometimes for meters. A giraffe has axons meters long from the head to the legs or something like that. And it reaches some junction point here, which is basically a chemical process—it’s not really connected, there’s some interesting effect there. And this little thing here is the dendrite. The dendrite comes out of the receiving axon, and the information from this axon to the receiving axon passes—sorry, from this neuron to the receiving neuron—passes through the axon, is received by the dendrite, and is absorbed into this neuron. The same thing happens from this neuron: an axon comes out, and another dendrite receives it. So you see, from every neuron there comes out one long axon and many dendrites, and these dendrites receive the axons from all the other neurons. Various other neurons send information to this neuron through their axons, and it has many dendrites that gather the information into it. And of course that’s true for every neuron. But the number of axons and the number of dendrites is not the same; the number of dendrites is greater. And why? Because each cell in the neuron network is not connected to all the other cells. It’s connected to some of them. And that is something that can change. Sometimes it’s connected to these cells, sometimes to other cells, and that is basically the process of development, learning, remembering, and sometimes forgetting. All the changes that happen to us in the brain—we accumulate information, process information, acquire skill, lose skill—their meaning is basically a change in the connections between the neurons in the brain. Now what happens in these electrical wires? These are basically electrical wires. These electrical signals, these electrical signals—look here—are called action potentials. And this description here is a series of electrical pulses, yes? This is an action potential, this rectangle—not a square of course, though it’s not exactly a rectangle either, but roughly. This means there is some… this is the time axis. All right? So along the time axis there is a brief electrical excitation here that fades, then after some time another excitation that fades. This duration is the same in every action potential. The action potential has a fixed structure. What changes is the spacing between the pulses. Those intervals basically determine the character of the pulse series that one neuron sends to another neuron. Okay, and each neuron—here there’s one series and here there’s another series—and both essentially come from different neurons to the receiving neuron. It weighs all the series it receives from its friends and decides which pulse to emit. Whether to emit a pulse, not to emit a pulse, and then it itself emits such a series and sends it with its axon to dendrites and other neurons. Okay, so basically notice: in principle we have some sort of network. Now ignore everything I’ve just said here. Think of some collection of points connected by lines, like a fisherman’s net. There are these junctions, the sites, yes, those are the vertices, and there are bonds, these branches that connect the vertices. There’s a vertex connected to one vertex, not connected to another vertex. And this network is basically our network of neurons in the brain. And these bonds are basically the electrical wires; the sites, the vertices, are the neurons. The neurons are connected to one another by various electrical wires. In these electrical wires, electrical information travels from one neuron to another, and the whole brain is networked in this way. The different centers of the brain are centers that are set up, located in various defined places, but there are also connections between the centers. Not only between the neurons within each center, but there are also connections between the different centers. And therefore the brain is very, very much a connective phenomenon. And what becomes clear—and that’s why brain research started gaining momentum—is that this connectivity gives the brain insane computational power and the ability to do all sorts of things that, in traditional models of computation, would simply have been science fiction. Thanks to this connectivity there are enormous powers. Because think about the number of combinations. Let’s say we have, I don’t know, a hundred neurons—of course there are many, many more—but say there are a hundred neurons. So how many possibilities are there? Suppose each neuron can be in state one or zero. Okay, then there are two to the hundred possibilities. That is a lot, by the way. But now I’m talking about different connections between the neurons. So it could be that neuron number one is connected to neuron number forty-two, eighty-three, ninety-nine, and seven. Okay, and neuron two is connected, and so on. How many such combinations are there? You can’t even count such a thing. And I’m talking about a hundred neurons. Do you know how many neurons there are in the brain? Far, far more than a hundred. So the number of combinations of brain structures and electrical messages that can pass through is just insane. And what makes this happen is connectivity. Connectivity is a key concept in brain research. Because on the one hand you want to identify where in the brain things are done; on the other hand you constantly have to be aware that almost nothing is done in a specific, isolated place in the brain. Rather, many of our actions are carried out by neurons and centers that are located in different places in our brain, and somehow the action is some weighted sum of the actions of all these centers together. Now, what happens—I’m going back to the input-output phenomenon—what happens in brain research, basically, when I look at a human phenomenon and at a person’s interaction with his environment, action, reaction, yes, an interaction we create with the environment—how is this described in brain research? Everything is very schematic, of course, but it’s enough to understand the idea, the way of looking. I see a person in front of me; look at this happy person we looked at earlier. I see this person in front of me, and I come to the conclusion that he is happy. Okay, what does it mean that I come to the conclusion that he is happy? Coming to the conclusion that he is happy is already a mental act. Reaching a conclusion is a thought. It’s not a physical action, okay? It’s a mental action. Now this mental action begins with visual information. I simply see him in front of me; I receive an image. That’s the image. This image creates in me a kind of awareness or experience: a happy person is standing in front of me, a laughing person. How does that happen? In the description of neuroscience it means this: there is video information, yes, visual information that I absorb with my eyes. The eyes transmit it via nerves from the eyes, from the perceptual sensory cognitive system, from the sense organ, to the visual center in the brain, which processes it. What does it mean to process? It’s all electrical signals like I described earlier. It goes there, and again more electrical signals come out. Those electrical signals pass to the center that in us is responsible for decoding emotions or giving an emotional interpretation to phenomena I see in front of me, and somehow a certain state is created there, accompanied by the experience: I see a happy person in front of me. All right? That’s basically how the feeling is created in me: I see a happy person in front of me. Or alternatively, someone punches me and I punch him back. How does that happen? I receive a punch. That pain plus the visual information that he punched me is a collection of signals, an electromagnetic wave. That electromagnetic wave hits the eye, creates electrical currents that pass through the nerves to the brain. The brain of course electrically processes the information arriving to it; of course the video information too, that electromagnetic wave turns into electrical currents, everything gets translated into electrical currents. It goes to the visual center and it’s all electrical currents and it’s all processed there in the same way I described earlier, by summing signals arriving from different neurons and so forth, interaction between neurons. From there it sends information to another center in the brain responsible for decision-making. The decision is to punch him back. That thing sends a signal to the hand muscles—yes, I’m skipping a lot of stages of course—the hand muscles move, and I punch him. Notice that at no stage here did I introduce thought, decision-making, values, whatever—all the things we usually use in everyday language to describe this phenomenon. Nothing. It’s all electrical processes of action and reaction, input-output. Nothing goes through our mental part. In the perspective of neuroscience, we basically focus only on that. Where do they talk about the mental part? The mental part is the plane that accompanies the physical occurrence. Meaning, when he punched me, then I have all sorts of processing in the brain and suddenly I feel pain. What is the sensation of pain? The sensation of pain is a mental phenomenon; it’s not an electrical current. The electrical current creates a feeling of pain. Okay? It creates it where? In our mental part, I don’t know where. Now as a result of that—not as a result of that, sorry—now this thing, this electrical current, also passes to the decision-making center in the brain, which decides to return the punch. I interpret that to myself as: because it hurt, I exercised judgment—or didn’t exercise judgment—and decided to punch him back. The neuroscientists tell me: nonsense, utter nonsense. The so-called decision to punch him back is the result of a calculation over which you have no control. Who are you anyway, what does “you” even mean? It’s action and reaction. You receive electrical input, it performs operations in the brain, the brain computes, sends a signal, and your hand flies back to punch him. Parallel to that process, a mental process is occurring that accompanies it, in which it hurts me and then I get angry and then I decide to punch him back and boom—I feel that I punched him back, I feel it in my hand too. But all that takes no part whatsoever in the decision-making. All that merely accompanies it; it’s called an epiphenomenon, a side effect. That is—not a side effect, an epiphenomenon. It’s an accompanying phenomenon; it takes no part at all in the events. The events happen on the electrical plane. It’s just that along with every such thing that happens, experiences, sensations, supposed decisions arise in my mental part, but none of that is really responsible for anything. It simply accompanies what is happening here. It’s like when, say, I see—we spoke about what light is, yes, Bertrand Russell and his example—what is the color yellow or what is light. So I said that the electromagnetic wave that strikes my eye creates in me a sensation of light. Okay? Now clearly light is a mental phenomenon. But in the physical world, what there is is an electromagnetic wave, not light. Now when this light—I don’t know—say I focus this light and it burns a piece of paper with a magnifying glass. Okay? What did that? Did the sensation of light in my consciousness do that? Did the light do that? Of course not. The electromagnetic wave, the physical phenomenon, is what did it. But for me, afterward, as a result of the focused light, fire is created. These are all things I perceive in light of what is happening in reality. It’s not that I do it. I am passive. All this is simply generated in me as a result of processes occurring deterministically in reality. And this is basically an analogy to how neuroscientists conceive of decision-making, desires, emotions, all our things. And therefore one has to understand that basically the average neuroscientist looks at the work of a psychologist as one giant absurdity. Because he basically says: you, the psychologist, are treating the side effect. But you want to affect the electromagnetic wave, not the light. Meaning, after all, you want to change something. In order to change something you need to go into the brain with electrodes. Because when you try to treat his feelings of rejection or his feelings of frustration, you’re treating the results, not the causes. There are people—I’m not saying everyone says this—because on the other hand the treatment itself is also some kind of input. And that input enters the brain, and the brain takes it, turns it into reception of an electrical signal, and that itself changes the structure of our brain network and has an effect. Therefore in the end neuroscientists can accept that a psychologist’s action can change something. That far-fetched claim they can accept. The reason is that the psychologist’s action too ultimately reaches the brain. It’s not that it also happens on the mental plane. Rather, through the mental plane I insert messages or signals into the brain. The brain takes these electrical signals and processes them, and if I’m a good psychologist, then I hit the same center that performs an electrical action or changes the structure of the patient’s neural network so that the problem is solved or improved or whatever it may be. But basically everything happens in physics and chemistry. The mental plane is epiphenomenal; it is an accompanying phenomenon. Yes, sorry?

[Speaker B] Rabbi, may I ask a question? Yes. When someone punches me—when a punch is given in the world—does a punch get returned in one hundred percent of cases? No. Certainly not. Right. There are cases where a punch won’t be returned.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that depends on what kind of brain structure you have. That’s what the neuroscientists would tell you. If your center, when it receives the signal “I got punched,” meaning the electricity that expresses that, okay?—if it is built so that the output is an instruction for the fist to go out, for the muscle to move, then you are an impulsive type and you punch back. If you’re another type—what do you mean another type? That’s nonsense, it has nothing to do with psychology. It simply means the mechanism, the electrical schema, now sends a signal to restrain yourself and not punch, then you don’t punch. But it’s not a decision, it’s a calculation. Do you understand?

[Speaker D] So for that same person, for that same person, if he gets millions of punches?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The same person in the same circumstances, in the same situation, will always react the same way. When the same person reacts differently, that means something in the circumstances is different, and therefore the electrical signal is different and the result of the calculation is also different. Either his life situation is different, or it’s a different moment in the day, or the person who punched him—the context in which the punch was given—is different. Something has to be different; that is exactly the deterministic view. Meaning: one input, one output. It’s the same—there’s no—it’s one-to-one. Meaning, if it’s the same input, it’s the same output. If the output is different, that means the input was different. This is exactly the point. You now see why brain research leads people in deterministic directions. Not only does it lead them there—they actually assume determinism as the basis for the research. The research is based on some view that there is something to investigate, that there are cause-and-effect relations here: give me the input and I’ll calculate the output for you. If it weren’t deterministic, then what exactly are we researching? So in a certain sense a neuroscientist is almost condemned to be a determinist. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but almost. Okay, so we’ll talk more about that.

[Speaker E] Following up on that question, can I ask something else? Yes. What happens when I receive the punch and I start—I hesitate? I don’t know whether to punch back or not, I start making calculations.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then it’s a long calculation. Your brain enters some kind of limbo, performs a long calculation, and it takes time until it reaches a result.

[Speaker F] I have another question, there’s some experiment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll get to it. Those are Libet experiments; there were hundreds and thousands of experiments. Not only Libet’s, it continues to this day. Okay, so there is the… but I’ll get to that. That’s a chapter in itself.

[Speaker G] I have one more question. Yes. Why should such a side sensation be created? Why should sensations be created for me in this process? I can’t hear. Why should sensations be created in this process? Why should there be a side process?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, that’s how we’re built. What do you mean why? That’s a question for evolution, for heaven, for nature, but it’s not the business of the neuroscientist. The neuroscientist examines what exists in front of him; he doesn’t ask why it happened. He examines what there is, and the fact is that we have it. All right? Look, there is what’s called the trolley experiment, yes? These are fairly famous illustrations. The trolley experiment basically says—Josh Greene and others; I think it started with the philosopher Philippa Foot. And afterward there were various psychologists and philosophers and neuroscientists who examined different variations of these moral experiments, moral dilemmas. And they basically check what happens when there is a train—look at the picture here. There is some train, here you see five people lying asleep on the track. Here one person is lying down. Now if the train continues on its track, it will run over five people. I am standing here. Do I activate the switch to divert the train so that it runs over the one and saves the five? They ask people: what would you do in such a situation? Okay? That’s one situation. The second situation is what happens here—you see, this is a bridge with railway tracks underneath it. And the train is moving in this direction; here lie five people. On the bridge sits a fat man, a mountain, okay? I can push him down; he will stop the train and it won’t run over the five people. Do I push or not push? And of course I am sending him to his death. Do I push or not? They make comparisons between these two experiments, asking people—empirical research, that is—psychologists ask people, what would you do. It turns out that in very many cases, in the first situation there is a large majority of people who would divert the train here in order to save the five at the cost of the life of the one. In this case, most people would not push the man. Even though here too you are sacrificing one in order to save five, what’s the difference? So indeed Josh Greene and his team and others examined this in the brain—what happens in the brain in the two situations. They present these situations to subjects as concretely as possible, and try to see what is happening in my brain. He finds some pretty wild brain activity there when we are inside this dilemma, and his claim is that it reaches the emotional area, it doesn’t reach the emotional area, and basically on that basis he tries to argue what determines our moral principles. And what is his assumption? His assumption is that in both cases I sacrifice one person in order to save five. So why should there be a difference between case A and case B? Therefore his claim is that this is the result of brain structure, of certain emotions or, if you like, certain electrical calculations. Of course there is room for discussion here, because someone used to, say, a halakhic mode of thought immediately sees that one could argue there is also a moral difference between these two situations. Because here I perform an act of killing a person, I send a person to his death with my own hands. In this case I am only diverting the train somehow, by indirect causation. I am in a more indirect way sending these people to their deaths, or sending the arrow toward them, if you like, as Tosafot in Bava Kamma says—that I send the arrow toward them and do not throw them off the roof myself—and therefore someone might come and argue that this action really is less morally problematic. And therefore people do it. Now Josh Greene will tell us that when you say it is less morally problematic, that is basically a rationalization you are making for a brain structure. Your brain gets less angry when you do this, it arouses fewer difficult moral feelings in you, so you decide that it is more moral. That’s all. But basically it all originates there, and the moral feelings are epiphenomena. They are not really what causes you to decide. On the contrary: what causes you to decide is the calculation in the brain; the moral feelings are a result that reflects that form of calculation, that’s all. Okay? So this can range from our lowest functions—punch for punch—to the highest functions of making decisions in moral dilemmas, including fateful moral dilemmas, yes? A person who makes decisions about world wars sits at the right junction and makes his decisions the same way I make my decisions sitting at my table. He is a human being and I am a human being. He has a brain and I have a brain. So his decisions too are made this way. And one has to understand that this perspective of neuroscience basically sees all our decision-making as some physical computational mechanism. That’s all. The whole mental business is simply a side effect. All right, so up to this point I’ve tried to give a really superficial and preliminary introduction to how people think in neuroscience, what the accepted interpretation is, and why it usually leads to determinism. I’ll stop here. If anyone wants to comment or ask anything more, you can.

[Speaker B] Yitzhak? Sabbath peace.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sabbath peace. All right, that’s it?

[Speaker H] No, no, I want to say something. Maybe the calculations in me are working very incorrectly, but quite clearly, when I look at the two faces, the one on the left looks happier to me than the one on the right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wow, then we need to check whether your hemispheres got switched.

[Speaker H] But you have thirty listeners; I wonder if I’m the only one.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, interesting. We can do an experiment, ask around. What do you say? Want me to show it again?

[Speaker B] I don’t see a difference.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Really an interesting question. I’ll show it again, because maybe you don’t remember. I do feel that the one on the right is clearly happier, but there isn’t a right and wrong here. Though actually here there is a right and wrong. I was mistaken, because in the end I can discover in other ways who is happy and who isn’t. I see how he behaves and then I get feedback, and presumably from that I’m supposed to learn which of them really is the happy one and apply that next time. So it doesn’t depend only on the question of which hemisphere the information reaches. After all, I also learn from experience, and learning from experience changes my neural network. So look now. Who thinks the one on the right is happy?

[Speaker I] The one on the right is happier.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The one on the right, Itzik. I can’t see all of you together with the picture, so it’s hard to conduct this parable. But let’s say—does anyone else see the one on the left as happier? Say it out loud. Yes. One. Besides Yitzhak? I see them both equally.

[Speaker I] I see them both equally.

[Speaker J] I already know the answer, so I can’t be in the poll, but sometimes I look at the one on the left and he seems happier to me, and sometimes this way and sometimes that way.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The one on the left seems a bit cynical to me. He’s smirking. The one on the right is happy; the one on the left is smirking. That’s how it seems to me. Again, that’s how I see it, but of course, that’s true—

[Speaker I] That’s how I see it too.

[Speaker H] I see it that way too.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It seems to me that most people see it that way, it seems to me, but fine, it’s just an amusing experiment. Of course there is no uniform answer, by the way, to everything, in anything. The brain is a dynamic thing, and each person is built differently, and by the way there also isn’t always a right and wrong here. After all, in the end what your brain says is what it says—what does “right” even mean? This isn’t decision-making, it’s calculation. And the calculation is the calculation you make. In this case it’s an interesting question because there is right and wrong. If I check now, I ask him, tell me, are you happy or sad, are you smirking, are you cynical? Then you can get some kind of feedback on the decoding I’m suggesting. So here there is right and wrong. All right, but it’s an interesting question.

[Speaker K] Maybe it depends on the dominant eye of the observer. I can’t hear. Maybe it depends on the dominant eye of the observer.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. I said, it could be that the hemispheres got switched, or the connection between the eyes and the hemispheres is somehow different, which usually doesn’t happen. I don’t know. Interesting question. I’m not a brain expert; I’m sure they’ve checked things like that and have answers. I don’t know.

[Speaker L] Is there any significance to testimony with all this? Each eye sees something different.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But our brain—the corpus callosum—takes all the information, weighs it, and arrives at one answer. When it’s cut, you can get two contradictory answers. We’ll talk about that shortly.

[Speaker I] I don’t know whether you saw on the screen, but while you were doing the experiment I closed one eye and looked at both of them with only one eye, and still the one on the left looked happier to me. Fine, okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] All right, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s just an example. I’m not an expert and I don’t know how to answer those questions. But it’s another example of how the division between the hemispheres can work. Apparently it doesn’t always work that way, and that’s quite obvious. No phenomenon in these areas is always the same. It’s too complex a business to work identically for everyone. Anyone else?

[Speaker C] Sabbath peace. Thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Sabbath peace.