Free Will and Choice – Lesson 12
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- Scientific methodology versus a claim about the world
- The Libet experiment and its deterministic meaning
- Critiques of conscious reporting and unconscious decision-making
- Libet’s veto and the possibility of RP without action
- The requirement of no exceptions and the statistical problem
- Picking versus choosing and the experiments of Liad Mudrik
- Even airtight results in choosing are not decisive: a value scale and calculation
- The feeling of a decision versus the feeling of a choice, and trust in experience
- Weakness of will: value-versus-value versus value-versus-impulse
- Moral responsibility, being coerced in one’s mind, and the multiplicity of forms of “coercion”
- A libertarian solution to weakness of will: choosing “whether to choose”
- Conclusion about the limits of Libet-style experiments and the continuation of the discussion
Summary
General overview
The lecturer argues that the question of whether human beings have free choice is indeed being investigated today with tools from neuroscience, but the move from a deterministic methodological assumption for research to a true claim about the world is a philosophical fallacy. He accepts that brain research must methodologically assume there is no free choice in order to enable systematic experiments, but rejects the conclusion that this implies determinism as a position about reality. Through an analysis of Libet’s experiments and the critiques of them, he argues that even improved experimentation will not settle the issue in the laboratory, because the findings can always be interpreted in a way that does not rule out free choice. He then develops an explanation for cases of weakness of will by distinguishing between choosing the good and choosing “to be a chooser,” and locates moral responsibility in the fact that a person sometimes “lets go of the reins” and chooses not to choose.
Scientific methodology versus a claim about the world
The lecturer describes a sense of consensus among many brain researchers that science has already proven there is no free choice and that the human being is deterministic, and he says that students of neuroscience are sometimes given the message that the issue is “over” without ever being exposed to the other side. He accepts as a methodological assumption that neuroscience must operate as if there is no free choice, because otherwise every finding could be attributed to “choice” rather than to some brain process, and research would come to a halt. He compares this to the fact that physics does not assume the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He, during experiments, in order to allow the formulation of fixed laws, but argues that this is a fruitful methodological assumption, not a claim about reality. He says the common failure in confrontations between science and philosophical-religious conceptions is the leap from a methodological assumption to an ontological claim about the world.
The Libet experiment and its deterministic meaning
The lecturer describes Libet’s experiment, in which a subject presses a button “whenever he decides,” reports by looking at a clock when he felt the moment of decision, and meanwhile an EEG measures the appearance of the RP, the readiness potential, as an electrical arousal that precedes action. He raises the question whether the RP appears before the reported moment of decision or after it, and explains that if the RP comes before the decision, then the feeling of deciding becomes an epiphenomenon of a neural process; whereas if the RP comes after the decision, that only means the experiment did not prove there is no free choice, but it does not prove that there is. He emphasizes an asymmetry: a result in which the RP comes before the decision leads to a clear deterministic conclusion, while the opposite result does not settle the issue in favor of free choice.
Critiques of conscious reporting and unconscious decision-making
The lecturer addresses the claim that the choice is made unconsciously and only afterward reaches awareness, so that the subject reports the time when “the decision reached awareness” rather than the time of the decision itself. He argues that even if there is a non-deterministic unconscious decision, philosophically this has no significance for moral responsibility, because responsibility is directed toward a conscious and deliberate choice. He rejects the idea of “levels of consciousness” and holds to a dichotomy of conscious or unconscious with respect to the threshold of awareness, and argues that whatever has not crossed into conscious awareness cannot bear moral responsibility, even if it was done with “unconscious intention.” He notes later experiments in which the gap between the RP and the reported decision became very large, up to eight seconds, and presents this as a result that strengthens the difficulty of attributing everything to tiny reporting errors.
Libet’s veto and the possibility of RP without action
The lecturer presents a claim made by Libet himself, according to which the finding shows that an action will not occur without an RP, but the experiment did not test the possibility that there could be an RP that is not realized in action because the person imposes a veto. He describes this within a kind of mental topographic framework in which there are pushes toward action and pushes away from action, and the libertarian can resist them. He illustrates this with the parable of a little ball versus a person climbing a mountain: the natural tendency pushes in a certain direction, but one can resist at an energetic cost. He says the experiment only tested situations in which an action was carried out after an RP, and did not test situations in which the RP appeared and the action was blocked, and therefore it does not fully rule out freedom of the will.
The requirement of no exceptions and the statistical problem
The lecturer argues that Libet’s experiment would be meaningful only if it showed that the RP precedes the decision always and without exception, in every subject and in every event, because free choice does not require that a person always use it; it may appear only rarely. He says that even a small percentage of exceptions in which the RP does not precede the decision undermines the ability to rule out free choice, so “99.5 percent” is not enough. He argues that such an experiment has never been carried out and in practice cannot be carried out, because the results require statistical processing and averaging, so one cannot guarantee a report free of even a single exception.
Picking versus choosing and the experiments of Liad Mudrik
The lecturer distinguishes between picking, an arbitrary selection like “when to press,” and choosing, a decision in a meaningful dilemma involving judgment, such as the trolley dilemma. He says he argued in his 2013 book that an experiment in a situation of moral dilemma might yield different results, and notes that an experiment in which Liad Mudrik participated did in fact test choosing in a clever way that did not involve actual moral harm. He states that in such choosing experiments, the RP was found not to precede the moment of decision, unlike in picking experiments in which Libet’s result remains intact. He emphasizes that this result too does not prove that there is free choice, but only shows that Libet’s experiment is not indicative for proving its absence, and therefore the discussion remains philosophical.
Even airtight results in choosing are not decisive: a value scale and calculation
The lecturer proposes a hypothetical scenario in which even in choosing experiments the RP would always precede the decision by a large gap in every person without exceptions, and he argues that even then this would not decide the matter against free choice. He illustrates this through Sartre’s example of the student in occupied Paris during World War II, torn between caring for his mother and joining de Gaulle’s Free French army. He argues that the practical decision can be the result of a calculation within a value scale that has already been built up over years, and therefore in the moment of dilemma the person is not “building values” but only calculating which value is higher. He concludes that even if the RP precedes the moment of decision, it may simply mark the outcome of the calculation and does not rule out the possibility that free choice was expressed earlier in the building of the value scale.
The feeling of a decision versus the feeling of a choice, and trust in experience
The lecturer explains that the subjective report of the “moment of decision” may capture the moment of summation and execution even in a deterministic process, and does not necessarily testify to a genuine “choice” arising from deliberation. He notes that in the button-pressing case there is no real deliberation, and yet the subject still reports a decision, so the feeling does not clearly distinguish between a decision as a conclusion and a choice as an act of selecting. He says that although experience can mislead, that does not require abandoning our basic trust in the feeling of choosing, just as an illusion like a mirage does not cause people to stop trusting their eyes. He admits that unlike vision, there is no simple experimental feedback here that strengthens that trust, but argues that the trust does not depend in advance on the ability to test it.
Weakness of will: value-versus-value versus value-versus-impulse
The lecturer defines situations of weakness of will as cases in which a person acts against his own value scale, and therefore the act cannot be attributed only to a calculation within an existing value scale. He distinguishes between value-versus-value dilemmas, in which both alternatives are value-laden, and value-versus-impulse dilemmas, such as a diet versus a cream cake, in which the person experiences failure in the face of temptation. He suggests that a Libet-style experiment on value-versus-impulse looks like a better candidate, because the decision supposedly takes place “now” and does not rest only on a historical value scale. He argues that even if the RP were always found there to come first, this still would not prove comprehensive determinism, because at most it might point to a certain type of action, and in addition the very construction of the value scale was never tested.
Moral responsibility, being coerced in one’s mind, and the multiplicity of forms of “coercion”
The lecturer argues that a sweeping deterministic conclusion in value-versus-impulse dilemmas threatens to eliminate moral responsibility, because if a person acts according to a bad value scale then he is “coerced” in the sense of being coerced by his own mind, and if he does not act according to his values then he is “coerced” by a brain mechanism. He cites a responsum of the Radbaz about a man who claimed that Moses our teacher is God, and the Radbaz rules that the man is coerced by his own mind and therefore should not be treated as a heretic who is to be lowered into a pit and not raised out. From this he draws the idea that there is no responsibility for a person who acts in accordance with what he truly believes, and he focuses responsibility on the tension between belief and action. He clarifies that the game of responsibility is binary: if a person is coerced he is exempt, and if he is not coerced he is responsible, even though one can argue about where exactly the threshold lies.
A libertarian solution to weakness of will: choosing “whether to choose”
The lecturer argues that a person does not “choose” impulse as impulse, because if he chooses it then it is already a value in his scale and not a failure, so the language of “my impulse took me over” sometimes conceals a truth about genuine desire or about the ranking of values. He proposes that situations of weakness of will are explained by the fact that a person chooses not to choose, that is, he lets go of the reins and stops maintaining continuous control, and then the “horse” of the body carries him off. He uses the parable of the rider and the horse, identifying the horse with the body and the rider with the soul, and argues that responsibility lies not in the choice of evil but in the relaxation and the closing of one’s inner eyes that allows the current to carry the person away. He admits there is a formal difficulty, because one can ask again about the decision to let go of the reins the very same question of weakness of will, and he says he has been wrestling with this for years and refers to columns he wrote on his website, but still holds to the intuition that this is different from value-versus-value dilemmas.
Conclusion about the limits of Libet-style experiments and the continuation of the discussion
The lecturer concludes that Libet-style experiments, whether in versions of picking, choosing, or value-versus-impulse, will not be able to decide between determinism and libertarianism, because there will always remain interpretive room for veto, exceptions, the prior construction of a value scale, or the choice of whether to choose. He argues that the enormous efforts and the many articles in this field will not settle the philosophical question along this path, unless some brilliant experiment appears that he himself has not thought of. He ends by promising that next time he will move from Libet’s arguments to other arguments from neuroscience, and they too will not settle the question, after which he will turn to thought experiments.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time we began to deal with—let’s say, to harvest the fruits of this whole series we’ve done up to now. And I remind you that the goal was really to examine the question of freedom of the will, the hypothesis that we have the ability to choose freely, using scientific tools. If for thousands of years, ever since this question arose, it belonged to the philosophical sphere, with different philosophers expressing different positions based on philosophical arguments, psychological arguments, and so on, then in the last generation the claim has begun to be heard that this question can be decided using scientific tools. That is, that neuroscience gives us the ability to examine the question of freedom of the will in the laboratory. Not only has this claim begun to be heard, but sometimes there is even a feeling—at least I have this feeling—that almost a consensus has formed that not only can we test this in the lab, but we’ve already done it and we already know the answer. And the claim of many brain researchers—not all of them, but many—is that we already know scientifically that we do not have free choice, that the human being is a deterministic creature. There are different voices pushing back against this, and apparently it also depends on places and fashions—it turns out that even in science these things play a role. But still, I know, I hear from students by the way—one of the reasons I wrote the book was approaches from various neuroscience students who got the impression that we basically already know everything, that this issue is over, that it has completed its historical journey. And no one bothered to present to them the other side, or the possibility that despite all the findings we have today, there is still room for the claim that a person has free choice. And I said maybe I’ll add one more sentence before I go into the matter. I said that as a methodological hypothesis—that is, as a methodological assumption—I accept this completely. Meaning, I think neuroscience research should be conducted on the assumption that we do not have free choice. Because only that way can you make progress and investigate phenomena systematically. If we assume that we have free choice, then basically we can hardly examine anything, because every time you get some finding, you can always attribute it to some choice of the person and not to this or that brain response. I gave the example of vitalism in biology, and I said this is a very fruitful and useful methodological assumption. The failure comes when you turn a fruitful methodological assumption into a true claim about the world. A true claim about the world is something different from a fruitful methodological assumption. And it’s like the fact that there is no point in assuming the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He, when you conduct experiments in physics. Because for every event that happens here I can always say, fine, it happened because the Holy One, blessed be He, said so—and then I have no reason to formulate fixed laws that describe physical phenomena, because there are no fixed laws; rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, is constantly deciding what will happen and how it will happen. So a physicist assumes methodologically that there is no Holy One, blessed be He. There is no Holy One, blessed be He; everything here proceeds according to fixed laws, and then he tries to extract those fixed laws from the phenomena. He observes the phenomena and tries to isolate the laws that govern them. But that is a good and fruitful methodological assumption; it still doesn’t mean it’s a claim about the world. As a claim about the world, for example, I do not accept it. As a methodological assumption, yes. So in many, many places—almost, I think, in all places where there is an apparent confrontation between science and philosophical, theological, religious conceptions—in most of those places, if not all of them, what we really have is a philosophical claim confronting a methodological assumption. And the people speaking in the name of science simply make the leap from a methodological assumption to a claim about the world. And here there is a kind of fallacy. One could argue that if it works methodologically, then presumably that’s also how the world is, but that is already a philosophical claim. And I want to show that in the context of free will as well, I completely accept that neuroscience research should assume methodologically that we do not have free choice. That the business proceeds deterministically, with brain reactions—action and response on the cerebral, neuronal, neurological plane. But that still does not turn into a claim about the world that we do not have free choice. And whoever makes that leap seems to me to fall into the same fallacy I mentioned with respect to vitalism and the rest. Now, how do you show such a thing, or how do I? First of all, I’m not sure one has to show such a thing. Who says it isn’t those who make the opposite claim who need to show what they’re saying? But let’s try to understand it anyway. So last time I started talking about the Libet experiment. And the Libet experiment, in short, says the following: I seat a person next to a table with a button, and I tell him, whenever you decide, press the button. In front of him there is a running clock, and he simply has to report. On his head there is an EEG that checks when the RP appears—yes, the readiness potential—which is a kind of electrical arousal that precedes physical action. So we know when he presses the button—that’s the physical action. We know when the EEG showed us that the readiness potential arose, when that electrical peak occurred. What we do not know, and that is the most important thing here, is when he decided. When did the person decide in his mind to press the button? We have no way to measure that. Here we depend on him. So what Libet did was try to get from the person himself the time of the decision—when he made the decision. And so the person, while sitting at the table, had to look at the running clock in front of him—and he trained him, this took time, it isn’t so simple to do—but he trained the subjects to report when they made the decision. Of course, this was before the actual press, that’s obvious. The big question is whether the moment of decision preceded the RP or appeared after the RP. And of course the subject cannot know that, because we record it via the EEG; he does not know when he has an RP in his head. And now we ask ourselves: is the RP that appears in his head after the moment of decision—then that basically means there is free choice, because I decide, as a result an RP is generated, and then the hand reaches out and presses the button; meaning, the decision drives the process. That’s a picture of free choice. Or does the RP appear before the moment of decision, in which case it basically means that the RP drove the process, and the feeling that I decide, or my subjective moment of decision, is really a kind of illusion. Because I didn’t really decide; the experimenter could have known that I was going to press even before the decision. Meaning that the decision didn’t determine it; the RP determined it, and the decision is some kind of side effect, yes, some accompanying phenomenon—an epiphenomenon, what I called an accompanying phenomenon of the neural process. All right, and that was basically the question. I’ll just say in parentheses: even if the readiness potential comes after the moment of decision, that still doesn’t mean we have free choice. It only means that the experiment did not prove that we do not. Because it could be that the moment of decision is also an illusion, and maybe there was some electrical thing before it that caused it. If the readiness potential appears after it, that means this experiment didn’t help us; you can’t infer from here that we have free choice. On the other hand, if the readiness potential appears before the moment of decision, then clearly we do not have free choice. Meaning, the deterministic conclusion follows from this clearly. So there is a kind of asymmetry in this experiment.
[Speaker D] How can I trust the person to give me the correct moment of decision?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You train him, and—what, that he isn’t lying, or that he understands how to do it?
[Speaker D] No, that it’s really correct. Maybe the moment of decision was before he pressed?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he himself is reporting. He himself is looking at the clock and knows when he decides. He reports to me when he decided. If he lies, then I have no way of knowing. But he reports when the moment was that he felt he had decided, that’s all.
[Speaker E] I want to reinforce what Itzik said—sorry, if I may just say that really you can’t know when the person actually made the decision consciously. That is, there may be a gap between when he said it and when the decision was actually made.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, wait—about that I already spoke, and I’ll return to it. That’s not precise. Because in another second I’ll comment on that. Because in principle I rely on the person’s report, and he looks at the clock and reports when the moment was that he made the decision. It turns out that the gaps they found there—in Libet it was a few, I don’t know what, up to half a second I think, or maybe even a bit less. In later experiments by Soon and others, it sometimes reached eight seconds. Eight seconds is a huge, huge, huge amount of time. Here there is no room for error. There are eight seconds in which he made the decision after the readiness potential was already at a significant level. So Libet—just a second, I’ll come back to the comments that were raised here earlier. Libet, who himself was a libertarian, that is, he believed in free choice, got a fairly surprising answer from his point of view. That is, indeed the readiness potential preceded the decision. And as I said, hundreds of experiments were carried out, many experiments after him, and to this very day such experiments are being conducted in various versions and variations, and many of them basically confirm Libet’s result—and as I said, sometimes we’re talking about a very, very, very large gap. This is not experimental error or anything like that. Now, various critiques were raised against the interpretation of these experiments. Why don’t these experiments really mean that we act deterministically? Some of these critiques I rejected last time. Since this critique came up here, I’ll make this point anyway. The claim was raised that maybe the person chooses freely at an unconscious stage, and only later does it become conscious to him. And when he reports the moment of decision, that is simply when the decision reached his awareness. Then he sees that the time was such-and-such, the clock was at such-and-such a point, and he reports to the experimenter. But the truth is that he had actually decided it several seconds earlier; he just wasn’t aware of it. That is one of the claims raised against the interpretation of Libet’s experiments. As I said, I don’t think that is a significant claim—at least on the scientific plane maybe yes, but not on the philosophical plane. Because on the philosophical plane, even if we accept that a person has the ability to decide unconsciously, that changes nothing regarding the philosophical implications. When I impose responsibility on a person on the basis that he freely chose the act he did, I mean a choice made consciously. If this thing happened unconsciously earlier, and only afterward reached his awareness—just a second—then even if it was done non-deterministically, one still cannot say that the person consciously and deliberately decided, with considered judgment, what he did. So, for example, as far as moral responsibility is concerned, it changes nothing. Therefore this claim, even if it is true, may have scientific interest—that a person has some ability to deviate from determinism—but as far as the philosophical implications of the question are concerned, it has no meaning. That’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
[Speaker E] Can I just comment that there could be a state of lack of awareness but with intention? Then when you have intention but lack of awareness, you still can derive some kind of free choice from it, because there was, as it were—there’s a difference in psychology between an unconscious state and a state without intention. And that’s the point, that actually an unconscious state can be full of free choice. So from that standpoint there could perhaps be a philosophical implication.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] An unconscious state can be full of free choice, as I said before, but that has no significance for moral responsibility. So that’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don’t know what you mean when you talk about intention versus awareness.
[Speaker E] Why, if you have—sorry for interrupting—but why, if you have some kind of intention and some kind of taking responsibility for the act, why is there still no free choice here in your view?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: because if the person did not make the decision consciously, he has no responsibility for that decision.
[Speaker E] I don’t know what this concept of intention is. But if it’s unconscious with intention, that’s what I’m saying. If it’s unconscious but still with intention—there are many levels of awareness that are in fact…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not levels. Either conscious or unconscious. There is no such thing as levels. It is conscious when it passes the threshold of awareness. If it did not pass the threshold of awareness—no matter where that threshold is—there is no moral responsibility. It doesn’t matter that hypothetically the decision was made non-deterministically. As far as the philosophical implications are concerned, it changes nothing. Okay? So I’m saying that on the scientific level one can argue about this—whether there is in us some element that is non-deterministic on the unconscious level. But as far as the philosophical implications are concerned, it seems to me it changes nothing. So that—and I went over a few other objections that came up. I now want to move to the line I mentioned at the end of the lesson. I said it seems to me there are three or four arguments that stand against the interpretation of Libet’s experiments, and they basically rule out future experiments as well that may be performed—and some of them have already been performed, as I mentioned in the name of Liad Mudrik—so that even future experiments, even more refined ones, will not succeed in deciding this question in the laboratory. The first claim was raised by Libet himself. Libet himself basically said that all we find in such an experiment are only situations—only situations of veto. That is, if the person does not—we will not find a situation where there was no readiness potential and an action was performed. That is clear. But the libertarian agrees with that too. The libertarian also agrees that we will not find an action not preceded by an RP. What the libertarian claims is that there can be a situation in which there was an RP and I imposed a veto on it and therefore no—you’re very broken up.
[Speaker E] What? You’re really cutting out.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait. I’ll try again, I don’t know what caused that. Wait just a second. The microphone is fine. I don’t know, I hope it sorts itself out, I don’t know. So Libet claims that the libertarian too agrees that an action cannot occur unless it was preceded by a readiness potential. What the libertarian claims is that there may be a situation in which there is a readiness potential and no action emerges from it. That is, the person imposes a veto on the readiness potential. And he says that in the experiment all we found was that before the person performed an action, a readiness potential arose. We did not test in the experiment whether there were states of readiness potential that were not realized in action. And what this basically means—I explained this last time as well—what this basically means is that we have, I talked about this at the beginning of the series, basically some sort of environment, what I described as a topographic outline, a topographic mental outline within which we act, and it tries to cause us to perform actions or pushes us away from performing actions, and according to the libertarian we can decide ourselves to resist, not to accept those pushes or those deterrents. Now what Libet basically wants to claim is exactly this point. The readiness potential describes what this system is trying to make me do, but the readiness potential does not describe what I actually do, because I can impose a veto. For example, there is a mountain in a certain direction so that naturally, if I were a little ball, I would not climb in that direction. But a person can decide anyway to climb the mountain, even though it will cost him potential energy. So here too, same thing: the readiness potential describes the fact that you now have a valley; here you have some push to go in this direction, to press the button. But if I am a libertarian, I believe I can impose a veto and nevertheless not press the button. But a libertarian also agrees that no action will occur without an instruction from the brain. That is obvious. Therefore, very often the instruction from the brain will precede the action—in fact the instruction from the brain will always precede the action. What will not always happen is that there will not always be action after the brain instruction, because there may be the possibility of imposing a veto, and the experiment did not test that. That is what Libet claimed. I’ll add maybe one more sentence—I’m not sure I said this last time. Such an experiment can be meaningful only if we get the result that the readiness potential precedes the action constantly and without exception. That is, in every experiment, with every subject, you always get this result. Why? Because if there are exceptions—and in a scientific experiment there are always exceptions, which is why averages are made and in the end one reports a result that has undergone a great deal of processing—but if I examine case by case, decision by decision, press by press, person by person, and in each case the readiness potential preceded the press, then we can begin to discuss it. If there is one percent, or a quarter of a percent, of cases in which the readiness potential did not precede the decision, that already means the experiment is worth nothing. Why? Because when I say that a person has free choice, it does not mean that he always makes use of it. It could be that usually the person just goes along with what he feels; he does what he feels like doing. Sometimes he stops and chooses. Therefore, in order to rule out the possibility of free choice, I need to show that it never happens. Not that in 99.5 percent of cases it doesn’t happen—that is not enough. This is an important point. Such an experiment has never been carried out; there is no such experiment. To this very day, to the best of my knowledge, no such experiment has been carried out, because it cannot be. Results like these are so complex and require such complex statistical processing that you really cannot report a situation in which there was not a single exception to the claim that the readiness potential always preceded the decision. So such experiments, on the theoretical level, maybe one could do them, but in practice that does not happen. That is an additional remark on what I said earlier. The second layer that I said rules out the possibility of drawing conclusions from such an experiment is the layer of picking versus choosing, and here I brought Liad Mudrik. I argued in the book—and the book came out in 2013—I argued that if they conducted a similar experiment in a situation involving a moral dilemma, where a person has to consider and make a decision through deliberation, in that kind of case we would get different results. Because I, as a libertarian, estimate that in that kind of case we would get different results. That could be a more interesting experiment. For example, we talked about the trolley dilemma, right? Whether to divert the train onto another track where one person is lying and will die if it runs him over, because if I don’t do that then it will run over five people. So there is a dilemma here: should I move the train and thereby directly cause the death of one person, or should I do nothing—not touch anything—and then the train will run over five people? And people disagree among themselves about what should be done in such a case. That is, it’s a moral dilemma. If I were to place a person in such a dilemma, put an EEG on his head and a clock in front of his eyes, and ask him when he decided, and repeat Libet’s experiment when here the action is an action of choosing and not of picking—that is, there is a real dilemma here. Pressing a button is just random. If a readiness potential arises telling me to press, then I press—why not? I have the consideration of veto, I have the consideration of why not doing it, what’s the problem? What makes this moment for pressing the button preferable to another moment for pressing the button? It isn’t preferable in any way. Therefore such an experiment can be relevant only if it deals with situations of choosing, like the trolley experiment or whatever else. Now in such a case—Libet’s experiment of course dealt with a case of picking, not a case of choosing. But later experiments—I said there in the book already that a friend of mine from the Hebrew University, from the institute for neural computation, told me that they were in fact working on such an experiment at that very time. I don’t know what eventually came of it, if anything did, but I was happy to discover that experiment that Liad Mudrik participated in, because they really did examine this, and it’s very far from simple to do such an experiment. You cannot put a person in a moral dilemma for the sake of a scientific experiment and let him act immorally—yes, choose to divert the trolley so that it kills five people or one person. You cannot run such an experiment, do you understand? You can’t place people in a situation where people are sent to their deaths just to perform a scientific experiment. Nor can you let a person steal money or let a person do something immoral or illegal. So such an experiment has to be designed intelligently. And indeed I think that in that sense they did have a very nice idea—she described it in the lecture I brought last time. And there they found, to their surprise—or I don’t know whether to their surprise, but not to mine, in any case—they found that indeed there the readiness potential did not precede the making of the decision. In a choosing experiment it doesn’t happen. In a picking experiment it did happen, and it continues to happen to this very day. In a choosing experiment it doesn’t happen. And that means that Libet’s experiments basically cannot teach us very much about the question of freedom of the will. And I stress again: the fact that it doesn’t happen there does not mean we have free choice. It only means the experiment did not prove that we do not. This experiment is not indicative—it does not show us. But the question remains open, and that is really my claim all along. I want to argue that, at least up to now, what the scientific findings show us does not fundamentally change the discussion. Contrary to what all the brain researchers I mentioned earlier claim, I think the scientific findings do not change it. The discussion still remains on the philosophical plane. There are as yet no scientific indications that change that. Yes.
[Speaker E] Are you saying that there really wasn’t any experiment on choosing?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said that Liad Mudrik’s experiment was about choosing.
[Speaker E] I sent the link on WhatsApp.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Once again, you can hear there—we talked about this last time—and in that experiment they found results different from Libet’s. They found results showing that the RP does not precede the moment of decision. Now, that’s the second layer of the process. What I want to argue now is a stronger claim. I’m trying to show you that anyone who goes down the path of Libet-style experiments will not be able to decide the question, even if they refine them to death. Meaning, let’s suppose we run an experiment on the trolley dilemma, or like the experiment by Liad Mudrik and her many collaborators—I’m mentioning her because we heard this from her—and we get results like Libet’s. Meaning, we get results showing that the RP really did precede the decision even in choosing experiments, not only in picking experiments. The question is whether that would count as an indication. Whether that would give me grounds to conclude that we do not have free choice. And again I say: the RP precedes the moment of decision always, for every person, in every experiment, with no exceptions. Because if there are exceptions, the whole thing collapses. So I’m saying, let’s go with them, with the determinists. Let’s assume they did a choosing experiment and found that in every experiment, for every subject, without averages, without anything, just the result itself—the RP precedes the decision by an hour. Okay? That’s the claim, basically. Now the question is whether that constitutes an indication. Whether that would allow me to conclude that we do not have free choice. I claim that even that would not. Why? Think, for example—let’s go back for a moment to Sartre’s student, the example I brought in our discussion in previous sessions. Yes, there was a student in occupied Paris during World War II, a student of Sartre, and he was in a dilemma: his elderly mother was there and needed help, and on the other hand he wanted to enlist in the Free French army, with de Gaulle, to fight the Nazis. And he was torn over what his moral duty was: to help his mother, or to leave her there and join the Free French army. Now he agonized over it, agonized over it, consulted Sartre, and in the end he made some decision. Now how is that decision made? In the simple picture, that decision depends on a scale of values. Right? The question is whether the value of fighting evil ranks higher than the value of helping an elderly mother, or vice versa. Of course that’s a simplistic description, because the question is how much help the mother needs, and what added value I bring if I join the Free French army—it’s one soldier, how much extra am I contributing to the ability to defeat the Nazis. But never mind; for the sake of discussion, let’s assume I’ve already factored all that in, and I have the value of fighting evil versus the value of helping my elderly mother, and the question is which of them ranks higher on my scale of values. Now I ask myself: when did I determine that scale of values? Libet’s assumption—whoever would run a Libet experiment on a situation like this—assumes that at the moment of decision the person constructs his scale of values, and then the question is whether he constructs it freely or whether the readiness potential basically dictates his scale of values. But that’s very strange. We all understand that a person’s scale of values is something built over a very long time. It’s a long process influenced by a lot of things—some innate, some environmental, some decisions, lots and lots of things that build my scale of values. Everyone has his own scale of values. Now it could be that when I arrive at a situation—whether the trolley case or this student’s case—I come to it with a value scale that is already built, already given. And now when I need to make the decision, all I really need to do is calculate. Meaning, check which of these two values ranks higher on the scale that is already built inside me. Now that is not a process of deciding; it’s a process of calculating. And therefore it can also happen unconsciously. And if that’s so, then the Libet experiment—even if it were reading results that in fact do not occur, but even if they did occur, and an hour earlier there was a readiness potential, and we’re talking about a choosing dilemma and not a picking one, and this happens in every subject all the way to the last one in every case—even then, if I got in every situation that the RP precedes the moment of decision, it still would not mean that we decide deterministically. It would not mean that. Why? Because the scale of values may already have been built. So from that point on, all that remains for me is just to check which value ranks higher on the scale of values and decide in light of that check. That check is completely mechanical; it does not involve a decision. It’s a mechanical check. I need to see which values are involved, which one ranks higher on the scale, and that dictates the result. My choice was made at the stage when I built the scale of values. But that stage was somewhere in the past—I don’t know how long ago, five years, ten years, twenty years, I don’t know. Of course it’s an ongoing process; I assume it didn’t happen at one instant. But it certainly could have happened somewhere in the past. Not only could it have happened—it’s even likely. A person does not build a scale of values at the moment he has a decision to make. When he has a decision, when he’s in a dilemma, he uses the scale of values that was built in him over the course of life, and therefore the real decision a person makes is the decision of what his scale of values is, not the decision of what to do now. Once I have a built scale of values, that scale already dictates what I am supposed to do in the given situation. Therefore, if Sartre’s student already had such a scale of values five years earlier, and now he enters the dilemma, then now it really is only a question of calculation, not decision, not judgment. And therefore it’s no wonder that the readiness potential precedes the decision, because the readiness potential only marks the result of the calculation. So that’s why he did the calculation and reached a conclusion. Therefore even such a hypothetical experiment—which hasn’t happened, and I don’t know whether it ever will—but even if such a hypothetical experiment were to happen, with results as airtight as I described, even that would not settle this question. That strengthens even more my claim that neuroscience, at least for now, is not really in a position to decide this philosophical question.
Now here I want to make a few remarks. First remark: this concerns that feeling we have of a moment of decision. After all, the person looking at the clock reports what the moment was when he decided. So he had some feeling that he decided at a certain moment. In light of what I described before, the person did not really decide now at all—he only did a calculation. The decisions were made sometime back when he built his scale of values. So how do I explain the feeling of decision that the subject reported? My claim is that this feeling is a feeling of decision, but not a feeling of determination. Those are two different things. In other words, a decision is something that can certainly happen even on a deterministic track. That is, I carry out some calculation, and as a result I arrive at some conclusion that this is what should be done. Now I decide that this is what should be done and give the hand an order to move and press the button, or the leg to do something, whatever. So there is a moment when the brain sums up the bottom line and moves into action, giving the organs instructions to do what it has decided to do. That moment can be called a decision. All I am claiming is that it is not determination. Meaning, it is not the result of judgment, but the result of a mechanical calculation. Now when you ask a person at what moment did you decide, it is not clear that the person knows how to distinguish between the question “At what moment did you determine?” and “At what moment did you decide?” And the proof of that joins everything I said before: in pressing a button, there is obviously no doubt that the person did not deliberate, weigh things, and determine. Pressing a button is picking. The person decided, not determined. And in fact when Libet asked him, he said yes, I decided at such-and-such a moment. Meaning, the feeling at issue is a feeling of decision, not a feeling of determination. If the person said, “I deliberated and reached a certain conclusion and now I determined,” that would be different. But the person does not go to that level of resolution. The person says, “Now I decided.” More than that: even if he says, “Now I determined,” it may be that “I determined” means “now the calculation ended,” because the scale of values was already built. Now my calculation ended. So it is very hard for a person to decipher himself when he reports on the question of the moment he decided or determined. Therefore this feeling that I have—the feeling that I went through a decision—doesn’t tell us very much.
You may say, fine, so if that’s the case, then we can’t trust our feelings at all that we make decisions. After all, the whole claim that we have free choice is based on that same immediate experience we have that we make decisions. And if it could all be an illusion, then why assume we have free choice at all? Here I say: I assume it because that is my intuition, or my immediate feeling, and the fact that there are situations in which I am under an illusion does not cause me to throw away the basic trust I have in those feelings. For example, someone who experienced a fata morgana in the desert—would he then stop believing his own eyes? We trust our eyes even though we know that here and there they can deceive us. That means that the fact that there are deceptions does not mean I necessarily have to give up my trust in the deceptive instrument. I should treat it with limited confidence or with a certain suspicion, and not take it for granted, but it is not true that if I see one case of illusion, I need to throw away the instrument entirely, or my trust in it.
[Speaker F] Now, can I ask a question, Aryeh? Yes. About the fata morgana—I think it’s a little different, because there I can check that my eyes usually tell me the truth and I know that’s correct. It’s just that I found in the desert that sometimes they deceive me. Whereas here, it’s not something I can check.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That only means that there you have indications that here you do not. So what? My trust in my eyes would still exist after the fata morgana even before I checked whether I was right, because I trust my eyes. True, there I can also get feedback. I can check—assuming there is feedback; philosophically there is no feedback, but never mind—I can check and discover that indeed my eyes told me the truth. Okay, but my trust does not depend on that. My trust existed even before I checked. Go out and see: people who have experienced visual illusions do not stop believing their eyes. Okay? Therefore the trust is not built on the ability to check. True, the ability to check can strengthen it. In our case we don’t have that ability to strengthen it, but that still does not mean I need to give up that trust. Two different things. I am not claiming it has to be with the same intensity, my trust in free choice and my trust in the reliability of my eyes. I am only claiming that the fact I discovered one case of illusion does not mean I automatically have to give up that trust. It remains a philosophical question, the question of whether I do or do not accept the reliability of the eyes.
Now I want to argue—well, I want now to make the following claim, but I need a certain introduction. In the third level, in the third diagram I brought, I said there is a gradual process of building a scale of values that happens over years, and at the moment of decision I am really only doing a calculation. The question is then: how, after all, does a person make decisions at the moment he decides? Meaning, is there nevertheless somewhere a moment of choice for a person? Or is it always really something built over time, and in the end the person only does calculations—the person does not decide? Or alternatively, when a person is in some moral dilemma, I said earlier that the decision in the dilemma is not a decision he makes at that moment. It is born from the building of a scale of values that happened over a long time. It is not a decision he is making now, it is not a determination he is making now—it is a decision he makes now, but it is a calculation. However, there are situations where I feel nevertheless that I have a dilemma, and not only that I have a dilemma, but that I acted in a way that does not fit my scale of values. And then that means that the scale of values did not determine what I would do, because in fact I acted against my own scale of values. These dilemmas, these situations, are called in philosophy situations of weakness of will. I think I mentioned this sometime in the past. Weakness of will, yes. What does that mean? A person’s scale of values says he should do X; he is in a dilemma whether to do X or not to do it, and he does not do it. Okay? So in that case he acted against his own scale of values. Here, seemingly, it is quite clear that the decision he made was made now, not when he built the scale of values. Because if the decision was really the building of the scale of values, then he should have done X, because that is what his scale of values says. In other words, a person who feels he failed, that he acted against what his scale of values says, is a person who made a decision at that moment, not over the process of building the scale of values. And that basically means that maybe I can do an experiment on such situations. I’ll call it an experiment dealing with dilemmas that are not value-versus-value dilemmas, but value-versus-desire dilemmas. Meaning, what I described in Sartre’s case is a dilemma between two values. Fighting evil is a value, helping one’s mother is a value. So there is a good question here which value is stronger. That’s what I call value-versus-value dilemmas. Okay? Or diverting the train so that it kills one person but saves five, or leaving it to kill five—here too this is not about impulses. It’s a dilemma between two value-laden options, and the question is which value-laden option is preferable in my view. About that I said that perhaps I made the decision when I built my scale of values and not now. But in value-versus-desire dilemmas, there seemingly I make the decision now. For example: I decided to go on a diet. And now in front of me I see a cream cake—yes, attractive. And I decide to eat it against my true desires, against my scale of values. That decision I made now, not in building the scale of values over time. My scale of values over time said I should keep the diet. That is, in the end, the conclusion I had arrived at cumulatively until now. And yet I did not do that now. That means I have now made a decision against what my scale of values says. Can we run a Libet experiment on such a decision and check whether the readiness potential precedes that decision? If it does, does that mean I did not make that decision freely? I’ll translate the question: apparently yes. In light of everything I’ve said until now, all the objections I’ve made so far fall away in such a situation. All three objections—three and a half objections—I made until now, here they fall away. They fall away because this is choosing and not picking, and because I’m making active decisions and not merely exercising a veto. And because the decision is not a value-decision built on the construction of a scale of values, but a decision of desire versus value, and therefore it is a decision made now and not over a long process. Therefore it is apparently a good candidate for a Libet experiment, to see there whether the readiness potential determines the outcome or does not determine the outcome. And again, let us assume for the sake of discussion that we got the result that the readiness potential always precedes it, for every person, in every experiment, by a significant amount of time—there is no way to dismiss it in an experiment of that sort. Would that lead to an unequivocal conclusion? Here I want to say: not even that. Not even that.
And the point is this. First of all, even suppose a person decides in favor of desire and against value. It could be that this impulsive action indeed was not chosen. But that still does not mean a person has no choice. Because the scale of values he built—the one that told him yes, keep the diet, or yes, help his mother, or whatever—that was built through choice. Libet did not test that. Libet only tests the present decision: whether to go with that scale of values or yield to desire. So even if I accept that here the conclusion is that this action is the result of calculation, not of choice, that is a very, very specific type of action. Yielding to desire is not the result of determination but the result of calculation. So even that—even saying I accept it—would not lead me to a deterministic conclusion. But I want to claim more than that. Think what the meaning is of what I have just said. The meaning is that every person who sins is one of two things. Either his scale of values is to do evil—he simply acted according to his scale of values, and he has a bad scale of values. Second possibility: his scale of values is in fact good, but he was compelled to act against it. Yes, because it is the result of a calculation; he did not choose, he did not determine, so in effect he was deterministically forced to go with desire against values. In both of those cases there is no responsibility upon him. In both cases. Because if he goes with his scale of values, and his scale of values says, for example, that one should desecrate the Sabbath or not keep a diet or whatever you want, then that really is what he thinks is right to do. So what do you want from him? There is no greater compulsion than that. He is compelled—what the Radbaz calls intellectually compelled. That is the conclusion he reached; those are the values he believes in. So what do you want him to do? Therefore it is clear that here I cannot assign responsibility to him. And if we say these are not the values he believes in, but he was compelled to act with desire, then again he is compelled. He has good values. Why did he sin? Because the readiness potential forced him to sin. What can he do? It is not in his hands. He did not make a decision, or did not make a determination in this matter, did not exercise judgment in this matter, and again he is compelled. That means this situation actually removes entirely the ability to assign responsibility to a person.
Now of course this is no surprise, because the determinist really does reach that conclusion, and if we claim that we have proven determinism in this experiment on value-versus-desire dilemmas, then yes, the conclusion is that you cannot assign responsibility to a person. Only notice: what I said before—that I still had not proven that a person has no free choice, because maybe he has free choice when he built the scale of values and not when he decides now—that falls away. Because there too, in the end, either it happened unconsciously or I will ask about that itself how it happened. And ultimately one cannot assign responsibility to a person for what he genuinely thinks. I’ll maybe give you the example the Radbaz dealt with. In a responsum, the Radbaz discusses—he received a question about a person who proclaimed that Moses our teacher is God. He claimed that Moses our teacher was God. A bit similar to Christian conceptions, yes, with the Trinity. And they asked the Radbaz what to do with such a heretic. Should they lower him into a pit and not raise him out? So the Radbaz says to them: what do you want from him? He is intellectually compelled. He is intellectually compelled. What does that mean? He says: this is the conclusion he arrived at. He truly believes this, so what do you want—that he should not believe what he really believes? That is what he truly believes. What can he do? Therefore there is ultimately no responsibility for a person who does what he himself truly believes in. Responsibility can only be imposed on a person who believes in X and does not do it, or does something else. But if he believes in what he does, then what do you want from him? This is what he believes, and this is the result of his reasoning, and this really is what he does. You cannot complain to a person who examined the issue, reached a conclusion, and acted according to the conclusion he reached. To me it may look wrong, but to him it looks right. What do you want from him? So if that is so, then indeed we arrive at a situation where if this value-versus-desire dilemma experiment leads to a deterministic conclusion, there is no more moral responsibility. That illustrates very well what is at stake here.
Now I want to explain why I do not accept even that far-reaching conclusion. How would the libertarian really explain this situation of weakness of will? How can a libertarian explain a state of weakness of will at all? After all, whichever way you look at it: if the person really believes in that scale of values, why didn’t he act according to it? If he did not act according to it, apparently that is not his scale of values and he has another scale of values. Or if we translate this now, then let us say it this way: a person decided to go on a diet. He ate the cream cake, and then he feels, “Oh, I failed, my will was weak. I failed.” Now I ask him the following question: Did you really, truly decide that going on a diet is the right thing? He says yes. Then I say to him: and nothing forced you? Nothing forced you to make that decision? He says no. So I say: then why didn’t you do what you yourself think, if nothing forced you not to do it? You yourself think this way—why didn’t you do it? So what are you going to say—that there was something internal or external, it doesn’t matter, that forced you to do it? Well then, if there was something that forced you to do it, then you were compelled. And if you were compelled, you have no responsibility for your actions. Alternatively, maybe you are fooling yourself. You think your scale of values is to go on a diet, but the truth is—yes, you want to go on a diet, I’m not arguing with you—but you also want, no less and maybe more, to enjoy yourself. And enjoyment ranks higher in your scale of values than the value of dieting. Therefore when you ate that cake, you acted according to your scale of values. Your scale of values was enjoyment above dieting, above health or aesthetics or whatever the reason is that you are dieting—it doesn’t matter. You are feeding yourself nonsense that in your scale of values you want to diet, but that is only a partial picture. You do have such a value in your scale, but it is not in the highest place. The value of enjoyment ranks higher than the value of dieting. In other words, what we called desire before—what exactly is the difference between that and a value? On this one, you decided that you want to enjoy yourself more than be healthy, thin, whatever it may be, and therefore you ate. So why are you telling me stories about weak will and all these things? It is not weak will. It is what you wanted. So the question is: how can a libertarian nevertheless explain states of weak will? How can a person do something—let me sharpen it—how can there be a person who does something that he himself does not believe is right, while nothing else compels him, and there is also nothing else forcing him to do it? If it’s not what you yourself think, then apparently something else forced you—unless you yourself do not actually think X. We sell ourselves nonsense. After we basically fall into a religious sin, or a moral sin, or a dietary sin—I don’t care, for me all of these are sins. It is a sin against the scale of values I built for myself. It is convenient for us to say, “Ah, the evil inclination took me. I believe in the true scale of values, but what can I do? The inclination took me.” The inclination did not take me, because I was not compelled. So if the inclination did not take me, why did I do it? I did it because that is what I wanted to do. I tell myself, I sell myself nonsense, that it is not what I wanted to do. So if I wanted to do it, then I am responsible—it is my scale of values. So the question is: how can the libertarian nonetheless accept situations of weak will?
And I want to argue that the only possible way to explain it—and again, this is not an airtight explanation, there is a point here one can still continue to struggle over, and I have been struggling with this question for many years already—but it seems to me this is the only possible way out. And that is: when we are in a dilemma, at least in the case of a value-versus-desire dilemma—and we are talking right now only about these dilemmas, a value-versus-desire dilemma—I do indeed have a decision that I make now. And that decision is not a decision whether to go with desire or with value. There is never a decision to go with desire; there is no such thing. When I go with desire, I fail; desire takes me. I do not decide to go with desire, because if I decide to go with desire, that means that this desire is part of my scale of values and is not a desire but a value, at least for me. So what is it? A person can often simply fail to decide, fail to choose. The analogy I brought for this: there are situations where I am riding a horse. Okay? Usually I steer it, I tell it turn left, turn right, keep going straight, stop—I tell it what to do. Now suppose I chose to take the horse to the right; the soul chooses to take the body to the right. Fine. So here the body—if I go right, if that is what I believe in, then that is what I will do. Now it turns out that I went left. What does that mean? One of two things. Either I believe one should go left—but that’s not true, I believe one should go right. So apparently something forced me to go left. Because if nothing forced me and I do what I think is right, I would go right. Why did I go left? Apparently something forced me. That is basically the dilemma. I say: no, there is another possibility. Maybe I was asleep. I was asleep, and the horse took me left. What does that mean? I let go of the reins. I stopped leading the horse, and now the horse took me left. In the moral of the analogy, what I want to claim is that beyond the choice between values, or beyond the choice of what the values are, we also have a choice whether to choose. We have a choice whether to choose. A person may in principle have free choice, but be asleep—not asleep in the physical sense, but he lets himself flow with reality, lets reality take him wherever it takes him. He lets go of the reins, and the horse takes him wherever it decides. So the claim is basically that a person can thereby come to perform actions that he believes are not right, where on the one hand it is not by his choice, and on the other hand he is not compelled to do it—there is nothing external forcing him. What do I hold against him? Not that he went left, not that he committed the sin, but that he let go of the reins. He chose not to choose. That too is a kind of choice. He did not choose evil, because if a person did Y, then either he believes Y is right or he was compelled to do Y; there is no other possibility. But that is all if he chose to do Y. Yet it may be that a person does Y because he let the horses pull him in the direction of Y. He chose not to choose. Or in other words, what I want to claim is that a person has not only a choice between values; he also has a choice whether to be a chooser. And sometimes you decide not to be a chooser. You hand yourself over to circumstances, let the horse take you. And then you can find yourself doing things that you yourself do not believe in. And I think that if you examine closely cases of weakness of will—I assume most of you have experienced such things, situations where you failed, did something you think was wrong to do, religiously, morally, in dieting, whatever you want, it doesn’t matter right now—in the end, if you check, you will see that you let go of the reins. If you really believe that that was not the right thing to do and you did it, and on the other hand it also wasn’t something you were compelled to do, then the only way to explain it is that we simply let go of the reins. Somehow we closed our eyes and did not notice that the horse was taking us left. Very often it is convenient for us to do that. And then the horse took us left, and suddenly—oh, wait, oops, how did I fall, I went left, when my whole being believes that we have to go right. But nothing forced me. So how did I get there? Simply because I let the horse do the work in my place. But on the other hand, what do I gain from this? On the one hand, the person performed an action he does not believe is correct. On the other hand, he was not compelled to do it. He could have held the reins in his hands and continued to be a chooser the whole time, not lose control. And for losing control—that is what responsibility is assigned for. You did not choose evil; you chose not to choose. And for that, responsibility is assigned to you. Because a person needs not only to choose the good; first and foremost a person needs to be a chooser. After he is a chooser, he also has to choose the good. But first of all he has to be a chooser.
And therefore what I want to claim is that even in value-versus-desire dilemmas, a kind of choice is involved. The choice is not the question whether to go with desire or with value. There is no free choice to go with desire. If I do not believe it is right, I will not do it by my free choice—unless I simply believe it is right and I’m just telling stories that it’s desire. Then it’s not desire; it is my value, it’s what I want to do. Okay? Rather, very often we simply somehow let ourselves close our eyes and let the whole thing flow. And then we may find ourselves doing something we believe is wrong. But that is a choice. It is a choice not to be in a state of choosing, not to be in control now. And therefore I return to everything I have said so far: even this choice, the effort I invest in holding the reins and not letting go of them even for a moment—even that itself may very well be something I accumulated over the course of my history. Those strengths I activate in order to act by choice, in order to act in a way that stays attached to my values and does not let the environment carry me off to do something else. And therefore, once again, a Libet experiment even on these extreme and exceptional cases—even that will not succeed in deciding the question of determinism versus libertarianism. Therefore my claim is that this is not the path by which our glory will come. It seems to me that at least along the path I can see ahead, the greatest scientific refinement and the most distilled and clean and simple experiment we could perform, of the Libet type, will not succeed in deciding the question of determinism versus libertarianism, no matter what they do, even if they stand on their heads. Therefore the enormous efforts being made in this context—there are hundreds and thousands of experiments being done in these directions, and many hundreds of articles being published on these experiments up to these very days—in my opinion, they will not succeed in deciding the philosophical question in this way. Unless there is something I haven’t thought of, some brilliant experiment that didn’t occur to me. But it seems to me that on the path I described, this covers more or less all the kinds of Libet experiments one could imagine. I at least cannot think of another Libet experiment that could be done that would succeed in dealing with all these arguments. Fine. So I’ve finished the issue of Libet experiments. Next time I want to finish the issue of neuroscience and show that other arguments from neuroscience also do not succeed in deciding this question—not Libet experiments but other arguments—and then we’ll basically come to the end of the path with a few thought experiments that I want to present. Okay, whoever wants to ask or comment.
[Speaker C] Rabbi, where are the reins in the story of the cake and the diet?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The reins are whether I hold myself together and act, restrain myself and don’t eat because my value is to diet, or whether I now switch off my control mechanism and let my desires take me and eat the cake. In this kind of inward shutting of the eyes. And then after I’ve eaten the cake I suddenly remember: oh, what did I do here? This is against my values. We all know this experience. It’s some kind of shutting off of the internal control switch. I’m not really asleep. I’m fully aware of what I did—it’s not that I’m unconscious. But somehow I let myself go with the flow. I don’t insist. I don’t stand there with control, with the reins in my hands, not letting the horse take me left. I struggle with it and say: go right. That requires…
[Speaker G] But there’s no horse here, Rabbi, there’s no horse to take me. It’s all me. In the case of a wagon there’s a horse. In the case of a cake there’s no horse—it’s me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, there is a horse. The horse is my body. The horse is my body that wants to eat, and the rider is my soul, like the classical rabbinic analogy—every moral supervisor will tell you that one. In this case, even though moral supervisors say it, it’s also true.
[Speaker H] Isn’t that still an illusion? In any case, not choosing is still an illusion where you say, okay, part of the time I can, part of the time I can’t, and that way I’ll feel free of all the decisions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, there is an illusory dimension here: a person thinks that if he turns off the switch and closes his eyes, then he isn’t responsible—the desire took him. Yes: “Our Father in Heaven, it is revealed before You that the leaven in the dough holds us back. Our will is to do Your will, but what can we do? The leaven in the dough holds us back.” The horse took me. But that’s not—no, that’s not an argument. You are responsible. That’s exactly the point. I’m just feeding myself nonsense. A person is a complex being. Maybe—actually, now that I think of it, I don’t remember, it seems to me we still haven’t discussed here Rabbi Nachman’s story of the turkey prince. It seems to me that Rabbi Nachman’s story of the turkey prince illustrates this point very beautifully. Maybe we’ll talk about it next time. I think it will be a nice illustration. Anyone else?
[Speaker F] Yes, can I ask? Yes. Yes, this decision too—not to hold the reins—that’s also a decision, right? Yes. So I’m not sure I understood fully. Are you saying that this decision he really does make now?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. What I mean is—that’s exactly the point. I’ll formulate your question differently; this is what I said before I started explaining this solution. There is a problem with this solution, because about this very decision itself—whether to hold the reins or not—I can again ask the problem of weakness of will. After all, whichever way you look at it: if my values say to hold the reins, then I would hold them. The fact that I decided not to hold them apparently means something forced me not to hold them. So I am compelled. So what have I gained here? Therefore I say that here I am very torn; for many years I’ve been struggling with this issue. I also have two columns about it on the site that I wrote on weakness of will. Anyone who wants can search there and find them, and there I formulated this problem more precisely. I still think—and you’ll see there all the arguments—I still think this is essentially different from a value-versus-value dilemma. In this case, a person can choose to do something he does not believe in, because to keep oneself constantly in a state of awareness, to hold the reins at every moment and never let go of them even for an instant, that really is a kind of effort that sometimes I fail to maintain, and I am responsible for not maintaining it. Now it’s hard to formulate, because formally I can formulate the same problem of weakness of will about this decision too. But I think that if you examine it, you’ll see there is a strong intuition that it is different. Fine—look there in the columns, and I go into more detail there on this issue.
[Speaker F] Why can’t we do a Libet experiment on that decision itself?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: because there too I will explain it the way I explained value-versus-value dilemmas. The scale of values that determines how strongly I act in order to hold the reins and not let go of them—that too can be built over years. And then it may be that even this decision I am not really making now, but made sometime along the course of my history.
[Speaker F] So the choice is basically not made at the moment of the act, according to what the Rabbi is saying. The choice is made at the moment of the building.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like every value-versus-value choice, because this too is really a value—how much to struggle to hold the reins. And now we have to look at my scale of values and ask when it was built. Okay. Anyone else?
[Speaker B] According to what is a person judged?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?
[Speaker B] I mean, there’s something here—you’re saying there’s a certain side he’s not responsible for, so on what side are you saying he is holding the reins?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he is responsible for everything. What do you mean—they judge him for everything. For not holding the reins, that’s what they judge you for: for not holding the reins.
[Speaker B] Even if it was almost impossible?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, if it was impossible, then no. We talked about this at the beginning of the series. I said that someone compelled is exempt. We’re not talking about someone compelled. No—if you’re not compelled, then you are responsible. If you are compelled… because if you are not compelled, then you are responsible. If you are compelled, then you are not responsible. That’s it. The game is completely dichotomous.
[Speaker B] No, it’s completely binary.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Now, what counts as compelled? We can discuss where the threshold lies between compelled and not compelled. Fine? We can discuss that, it doesn’t matter, but wherever we place the threshold, above it you’re exempt, below it you’re not exempt. And that’s all. I already said that even according to the libertarian, it does not mean that every action we perform is an action of choice. The libertarian also agrees that there are urges that are irresistible, and that sometimes a person does an action even though he would not want to do it, but he has no choice. He has been seized by an irresistible urge, and that is also a legal exemption category, psychiatric-legal. You know? Okay. I can’t really respond to chat messages during the lecture, because it interrupts the discussion. So various messages came up in the chat; I can’t address them during the lecture because it breaks the flow. So if an important question comes up, ask it out loud. But even then, be careful, because people also want to move forward, so do it gently. Okay? All right then, goodbye, Sabbath peace, we’ll see each other. Sabbath peace, more power to you, thank you very much.
[Speaker F] Thank you very much, it was really interesting. Goodbye.