Free Will and Choice – Lesson 14

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This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

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Deterministic and materialist claims based on the dependence of behavior on the brain
The deterministic-chain model versus the caricatured libertarian model
The five-stage libertarian model and the influence of circumstances
A topographical metaphor: statistical bias without one-to-one determination
A critique of inferring determinism from genetic findings and Libet experiments
Two points of brain disruption: input (stage 2) and output (stage 4)
The question of “where” the decision takes place and the analogy to the soul and holiness
Split-brain, Nixon, and the question of integration of considerations
The prism analogy: the brain as mediator rather than producer of content
Amygdala, empathy, and criminal responsibility versus the metaphysical question
“A Beautiful Mind” (Steve Nash) as a case of faulty data and possible control
A legal critique of determinism: the question of exemption, not the question of judgment
Multiple personality as a “mirror image” and the difficulty of unlearned skills
Asymmetry in the discussion and the conclusion of the stages of the debate

Summary

General Overview

The text presents the claims of materialists and determinists, according to which human behavior is fixed by a brain-mechanical chain, and sets against them libertarianism, which emphasizes free decision that cannot be reduced to brain computation. It argues that many of the difficulties raised against free choice rely on a “caricatured” picture of libertarianism that ignores the effect of circumstances, whereas the “real” picture includes circumstances and brain processing that feed the will and intellect that decide, and then the decision passes again through the brain into execution. It explains how brain injuries can disrupt the reception of data or the execution of decisions without negating the existence of a choosing mental dimension, and it brings examples from split-brain cases, Libet experiments, genetics, empathy, schizophrenia, and dissociation in order to argue that science has not settled the metaphysical question and that in practice what remains is a philosophical decision.

Deterministic and materialist claims based on the dependence of behavior on the brain

The text describes the claim that if behavior is determined by a brain state, that indicates there is nothing in a person beyond the brain and that what occurs is mechanical computation. It gives examples of split-brain cases in which a structural change in the brain leads to a change in positions, including a case in which a person can turn from a Republican into a Democrat or vice versa, and the left hemisphere “puts words into the mouth” and describes something other than what was seen. It presents the impression that these phenomena portray the human being as a creature that is only a body or only a brain, and that the “illusion,” so to speak, that we have a soul or spirit that stands behind things, does not actually come to expression—that is, it is not what determines our behavior or our positions.

The deterministic-chain model versus the caricatured libertarian model

The text presents the deterministic picture as a chain in which external and internal circumstances—including mood, brain state, and genetics—determine a certain brain state, which produces brain output that activates muscles and leads to an action or to a moral and political position, without any stage of decision. It adds that in the deterministic view, already at the Big Bang or at the moment of the creation of the world, everything that will happen until the end of generations was determined, even if the calculation is too complex to perform in practice. Opposed to this it sets a simple libertarian description according to which the decision initiates the chain, the decision “gives an order” or “inspires” the brain, and the brain implements it in action and in the formation of positions, but it states that this picture is partial and misleading.

The five-stage libertarian model and the influence of circumstances

The text states that the non-caricatured picture of libertarianism includes five stages that begin with circumstances, which the brain receives and processes, and then the will and intellect weigh the processed data and reach a decision, from which the decision passes to the brain and then to the execution of action. It emphasizes that the arrow from the processed data to the decision is marked as a double arrow in order to hint at the non-deterministic character of deliberation and choice, whereas the other stages are described as a deterministic pipeline. It explains that omitting the circumstances causes any change of circumstances that leads to a change in action to be viewed as a refutation of free choice, whereas in the five-stage model a change in circumstances is supposed to affect the result even according to libertarians. It argues that the real dispute is not about the very fact that circumstances such as education, society, home, brain state, and mood have an effect, but about whether the circumstances necessarily determine the result or merely bias the probabilities.

A topographical metaphor: statistical bias without one-to-one determination

The text uses a comparison to a ball moving toward minimum potential energy and presents the human being as a physical creature on whom “downward” forces act, making it hard to “go uphill,” yet there is still the ability to decide to overcome them. It describes a hundred people on a “saddle” and concludes that most of them will go downward because it is easier, but from that it does not follow that the topographical contour determines in a one-to-one way the behavior of each person. It links this to the meaning of the model, in which the overall distribution is biased but individual choice is not nullified.

A critique of inferring determinism from genetic findings and Libet experiments

The text argues that headlines such as “they found the gene responsible for religious belief,” or for stinginess and violence, are nonsense, and that even when correlations are found they indicate influence in a certain direction and not deterministic fixing of behavior. It adds that if genetics “explains” religiosity, then by the same token it “explains” secularity, and therefore he does not understand why this is perceived as an attack only on religiosity. He states that only a finding in which a genetic structure necessarily and fully determines behavior in every human being would be a significant challenge, and he argues that this has not been found and does not seem fully testable without Orwellian surveillance. He applies the same point to Libet’s experiments and argues that in order to infer determinism one would have to show that always, “if there is an RP then I press, and if there is no RP then I do not press,” in all human beings—a thing that has not been proven and cannot be proven in a laboratory—and he mentions Libet’s veto.

Two points of brain disruption: input (stage 2) and output (stage 4)

The text argues that the brain can affect decisions in two different ways: through the processing of incoming data in stage two, or through translating the decision into action in stage four. It describes a situation in which distorted data processing causes the will and intellect to decide on the basis of warped data, or a situation in which the decision is good but the brain output disrupts its execution so that the action does not reflect the decision. It gives the example of a person who was punched, misidentified someone, and hit an innocent person because of faulty input, or alternatively identified correctly but the hand acted contrary to the decision because of an executional malfunction. It concludes that even within a libertarian framework a person can make moral decisions and still perform an improper action because of brain disruption, and therefore brain damage does not negate a choosing dimension but can disrupt either the data or the implementation.

The question of “where” the decision takes place and the analogy to the soul and holiness

The text answers the question of where stage three takes place by saying that it occurs in the will and intellect and not in the body, and that the question “where” does not apply to something that has no location in space. It compares this to questions such as “what color is virtue,” and to the nonsense of Lewis Carroll, and distinguishes between “no length” of a point and “zero length,” and between blindness as “no sight” and “seeing black.” He brings the Talmud in Berakhot page 5, which compares the soul in relation to the body to the Holy One, blessed be He, in relation to the world, and cites the idea of “fills the entire body” as a borrowed expression, and concerning holiness the phrase “Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?” in order to argue that talk of place is metaphorical. He states that the will and intellect give an instruction to the brain, and there the electrical activity begins, but the decision is not created in the brain.

Split-brain, Nixon, and the question of integration of considerations

The text presents an example from experiments during the Nixon period in which split-brain led to a change in support for or opposition to Nixon, and argues that this can be explained in a model of disruption of stage four or stage two without inferring that there is no decision. It describes a political decision as a weighing of pros and cons, and assumes for the sake of the example that arguments in favor are located in the right hemisphere and arguments against in the left hemisphere, and when there is a division there is no integration between the hemispheres and therefore separate conclusions are reached. It explains that speech is controlled by the left hemisphere, and therefore a verbal answer can be anti-Nixon, while an action such as voting can be driven by the right side and therefore be pro-Nixon, so that the action expresses only half the considerations and not the overall decision. He adds that the question “who is this ‘you’ that weighs things up” is actually an argument in favor of dualism, because the left hemisphere itself is only part of the data being weighed.

The prism analogy: the brain as mediator rather than producer of content

The text presents a prism that breaks white light into shades and argues that the materialists’ inference is similar to claiming that if changing the prism changes the colors, then the prism “produces” the colors and there is no white light. He states that all the shades are present in the white light, and the prism merely brings them from potential into actuality and disperses them according to different angles of refraction, and that without it one sees white, but the shades still exist. He parallels this to the brain as a mediating factor between the decision and its appearance in the world, so that changing the brain changes the expression of the content without changing the existence of the mental content itself. He concludes that the claim that “the brain determines everything” is like claiming that the prism creates colors rather than mediating them.

Amygdala, empathy, and criminal responsibility versus the metaphysical question

The text describes damage to the amygdala as a condition in which empathic capacity is lacking or the emotional dimension is either too suppressed or too aroused, and brings studies on Vietnam veterans in whom, he says, damage to the amygdala was found that prevents the reception of another person’s suffering. He argues that a person can make moral decisions in the strictest sense, but without empathic data he will not understand that pain and humiliation are harmful, and therefore he may behave atrociously without being “a bad person,” because the choosing dimension did not receive the relevant data. He distinguishes between the question whether there is a choosing dimension and the question whether it is fitting to assign responsibility, and he agrees that in extreme cases there is exemption from criminal responsibility and that the legal system examines this constantly. He argues that the conclusion from claims of exemption is not the absence of spirit, but at most a circumstantial disruption that affects action.

“A Beautiful Mind” (Steve Nash) as a case of faulty data and possible control

The text describes the film “A Beautiful Mind” about a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who at first appears to be living in a spy movie, but turns out to be a paranoid schizophrenic imagining characters such as “Soviet agents.” He argues that the case illustrates a “breakdown of stage two,” in which problematic data are received, and describes how Nash learns to identify the fictitious nature of the hallucinations, filter out false information, and ignore the characters in order to function as a healthy person. He concludes that even when the data are wrong, control is not always negated, and that a court should form an impression, with the help of experts, of the degree to which a person can cope with false information or brain damage. He emphasizes that his main point remains metaphysical: such phenomena are not proof that there is no spirit and that there is only a body.

A legal critique of determinism: the question of exemption, not the question of judgment

The text mentions an article he wrote on law and neuroscience and argues that the problematic point in the materialist-determinist conception is not “why do you judge,” but “why do you exempt” someone who is not responsible for his actions. He argues that in a world in which every action is dictated by the brain, there is no principled difference between “an impulse that cannot be controlled” and the theft of an otherwise normal person, and therefore if one exempts because of the brain, then “there are no criminals in the world” and the prisons will be empty. He adds that even judging itself can be justified within a deterministic world, and even the judge is “coerced to judge,” but the question of distinguishing between exemption and non-exemption becomes incomprehensible.

Multiple personality as a “mirror image” and the difficulty of unlearned skills

The text describes dissociative identity disorder as presented on the program “Amnon Levy: True Faces,” about a young woman with thirty different personalities, and argues that this is a mirror image of the earlier claim: instead of a change in the brain leading to a change in the soul, here the same brain with a change in the soul leads to a change in behavior. He states that if phenomena of brain change are taken as evidence for materialism, then a case of different personalities in the same brain is evidence against materialism, and then concedes that a materialist may reply that this results from changes in electrical currents or brain activity. He emphasizes two details that catch his eye: one personality knows how to play the piano, and another personality is blind and communicates in sign language, while the young woman and her parents know of no learning of piano or sign language. He argues that a random brain shift may explain a change in character, but it does not seem plausible that it would generate a “very, very unique state” of a complex skill that is usually acquired over years, and he suggests that it is almost as if one would need to assume “another soul,” like possession or reincarnation, in order to explain it, though without offering a positive explanation. He adds an example of a child in a Druze village who speaks fluent English without having learned it, and argues that materialism has difficulty explaining such knowledge as random and precise brain organization.

Asymmetry in the discussion and the conclusion of the stages of the debate

The text attacks the “church” of materialists and atheists who, he says, are certain of their openness but in fact practice an asymmetry: cases that fit their position are closed off as decisive, while opposite cases are dismissed as “requiring further analysis,” and he adds that dualists probably tend in the same direction as well. He summarizes the discussion as four stages: setting out the players (libertarianism versus determinism), a philosophical stage that remains open with a tendency toward libertarianism in his view, a “scientific” stage including laws of nature, chaos, quanta, emergentism, and neuroscience, at the end of which neuroscience did not essentially change the picture, and finally a fourth, “diagnostic” stage to be discussed next time, about what to do when there are no decisive indications. He clarifies in response to a question that he is not claiming that everything is choice, and that there are cases such as an uncontrollable impulse in which there is exemption from responsibility, but he objects to the deterministic claim that there is no “window of choice” anywhere. He concludes by referring to a source that appears in his book The Sciences of Freedom and offers to send the source by email, and quotes Ephraim Kishon: “It is so surprising that even I would not have believed it had I not invented it myself.”

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Last time I presented difficulties raised by materialists or determinists, or evidence they bring in favor of their view, based on kinds of human behavior that seem as though they are determined by a brain state. The moment behavior is determined by a brain state, that is taken as an indication—so many argue—that there is nothing in us beyond the brain. And basically, we see that the brain determines what we are going to do. We talked about split-brain cases, and we talked about the fact that a person can express positions, form positions, differently depending on whether his brain is split or not split. He can suddenly turn from a Republican into a Democrat or the other way around, and we showed how the left hemisphere abuses the right hemisphere, how it suddenly puts words into our mouths. We saw one thing and we describe something completely different. And all these things—and I’m not going to repeat them all here—it seems as though they present the human being as a creature that is only a body or only a brain, and that the “illusion,” in quotation marks, that we have a soul or spirit standing behind things, seems not to find expression. Meaning, that’s not what determines our behavior and our positions.

[Speaker C] Rabbi, maybe you should mute everyone.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, just one second. Yes. At the end of last time I presented three diagrams that try to show again things we had really already seen: the process of decision-making, or making decisions, forming positions—for me those are decisions. What I think and decisions about what I do are the same thing. I call both of them decisions. The process of decision-making according to the determinist and according to the libertarian. So I’m going to return to that here because this is really the root of everything that will come later. So this is decision-making in the deterministic picture. In the deterministic picture there are certain circumstances. I remind you that the circumstances include both external circumstances and internal circumstances. That is, my mood and my brain state and my genetics—all that is part of the circumstances. It is not under my control; I was born into it, born with it, and so these are basically the givens. These circumstances determine a certain brain state. As a result, a certain brain output is produced, which passes through the muscles, to the body, and gives an instruction to act—or, as I said before, it brings about the formation of some political, ideological, or moral position. That is the deterministic outlook. There is no stage in this chain where a person makes a decision. It is all the result of mechanical computation. In fact, in the deterministic outlook, at the Big Bang, at the moment of the creation of the world, everything we are going to do at every moment until the end of all generations was fixed, because overall this is a deterministic chain. It’s very hard to calculate the result, what exactly will happen, because it’s an insanely complex calculation. But in principle there is such a calculation. That’s basically the claim. Opposed to this they set the libertarian description, which says: no, it isn’t the circumstances that determine what we do, but our decision. We have free choice, we have the ability to decide for ourselves what we think and what we do, and therefore the chain begins not with circumstances but with decision. We have a decision, the decision determines, gives an order to the brain, the brain gives—or gives inspiration to the brain, if you like—and the brain transfers the instructions to implement the decision. And that is basically how positions are formed, and how the actions we perform are determined. But this picture really is a partial picture, a partial and misleading picture of libertarianism. The fuller picture of libertarianism is this one—that’s where I ended last time. One second. Okay, that’s where I ended last time. The full picture of decision-making in the libertarian chain has five stages. The first stage is the circumstances, exactly as in the deterministic view, and this is a very important point. Because those who omit the circumstances from the libertarian picture—yes, in this picture, you see, in this picture there are no circumstances. In this picture there is a decision that supposedly comes out of a vacuum, and the decision determines the brain state, which determines the result, the action. There are no circumstances. Now, what happens in a picture like that is that if I show that a change in circumstances brings about a change in action, then that basically means that the libertarian picture is not correct. And understand that this is really what lies behind all those difficulties I described last time. Because what they are basically showing me is that they change my circumstances—they cut the brain. My brain is split, my brain is damaged, something is different in my circumstances—yes, in my physiology, which in this case is internal circumstances, but it doesn’t matter. And that yields different behavior. And from that some people conclude that if so, the libertarian picture is not correct, we have no free choice, the circumstances determine what we do. What are they missing? They are missing the fact that even in the libertarian picture there is room for and an influence of circumstances. Here too the circumstances appear. And therefore, clearly, if the circumstances are different, then the action will be different. The libertarian agrees with that too. What sane libertarian denies that education has an influence on what we do? Or that society has an influence on what we do, or the home has an influence on what we do, brain state, mood, whatever you want. Of course. This is an entirely uncontroversial phenomenon, and no sane libertarian would dream of arguing with it. Therefore these difficulties, in my opinion, are based on a caricatured understanding of libertarianism. And the non-caricatured view, the real view, is a five-stage view. It begins with circumstances. The circumstances are received by the brain—yes, these are the circumstances—they are received by the brain here, and the brain takes in the data and does some kind of processing on it. After it has done some kind of processing, then come the will and the intellect, our higher mental faculties, and they weigh the processed data that are conveyed to them and arrive at a decision. Notice that the arrow here is different from the other arrows. The other arrows are single lines; this arrow is a double arrow. That is meant to suggest that it has a different character from that arrow. All the other arrows are a hollow pipe, a deterministic process. Here there is decision. This decision basically means that something happens here that is not just mechanical computation; it is not something deterministic. There is some kind of judgment, choice. And that is why I marked it with a different arrow. Good. Now, the brain has received a decision—the brain, no, sorry, not the brain—the will and intellect have reached a decision in light of the data conveyed to them, so we are at the decision stage, that is stage three. And from here on this decision proceeds exactly as in the caricatured picture. From here on, this whole business really is as described above. Meaning, this decision is conveyed to the brain, the brain constructs from it instructions to the muscles, or whatever, or to parts of the brain that form a worldview, and an action is produced. Okay? So the last three stages are indeed what the previous picture described. But it was missing the first two stages, stage one and stage two. It begins at stage three. And again, why is this important? It is important because of what I explained before. It is important because here suddenly we see that even the libertarian agrees that a change in circumstances will create a change in action. The fact that a change in circumstances creates a different action, a different decision, a different worldview, a different response, does not in any way prove determinism and materialism—determinism.

[Speaker D] I just have a question. The libertarians I hear out there claim that if there are circumstances—say, bad education—it only makes it harder for someone, but he can always overcome it and choose the way of the Torah, let’s say, and so it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, you can always overcome them. It’s just harder, nothing more than that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And that is exactly the point. The sentence you said in the middle—“it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are”—that is the only sentence I don’t agree with in what you said. Meaning, of course the libertarian—that’s the whole dispute. The libertarian says that after the circumstances comes decision. The circumstances do not determine what will happen. The circumstances provide some data, but I can of course still make the decision freely. Not always, but in most cases I can make a decision freely. But the caricatured picture says that the circumstances have no influence at all. Not that they don’t determine the result—of course they don’t determine the result—but they don’t influence the result? Now when a person lives in circumstances—we already talked about this more than once at the beginning of the series when I presented libertarianism with that topographical picture, right? I described a person’s relation to things, a person’s conduct, as compared to a little ball moving over some kind of surface. So the ball always runs to the place of minimum potential energy. It always goes to the lower place and it won’t climb the mountain, to the higher place. A human being is in the same situation. Forces act on him too. A person is a physical creature. Meaning that a downward force also acts on him, pushing him downward, and when he tries to go upward there will be a force resisting that. But he can decide to overcome it. So now if you take a hundred people standing on a saddle—yes, a saddle is a saddle point, where you have two descents to two sides and two ascents to the other two sides. Okay? And you put a hundred people there. Obviously it won’t be that fifty go down and fifty go up. More will go down. I don’t know, seventy, eighty, sixty, whatever, but more people will go downward because it’s easier. Can you conclude from that that the structure of the terrain—the topographical contour—determines in a one-to-one way the behavior of human beings? The answer is no. Each one has free choice. True, the overall distribution will be biased. It won’t be fifty-fifty; it will be tilted in favor of the valley and against the mountain. That is exactly the meaning of the picture I drew here. That is why I said these chapters collect, harvest, all the fruit of everything we sowed along the way. When I described there that picture of proper libertarianism, the sober kind, not the stupid caricatured kind, I meant to answer these questions. Here I’m using what I did there. And the claim is that circumstances definitely influence. The dispute is not about that. The dispute is whether the circumstances determine what will happen. Determine, yes? The question is whether they—obviously the circumstances have influence. Nobody disputes that. The question is whether that influence dictates what will happen to me or whether I can overcome it. That’s the dispute. And the moment you say the circumstances influence, you have not shown that the circumstances determine. Those are two different things. You have shown they influence. And that is exactly the point. Now, that’s where I ended last time—with the meaning of this picture. The meaning of this picture is that basically this picture solves all the difficulties those people raise—or so it seems to me at least, all the difficulties I know of. And therefore the difference in the drawing between the caricatured picture and this picture is a dramatic difference for the discussion. Because many of those who conduct this discussion conduct it in light of the previous picture I described, this one. And then any libertarian who thinks according to this picture, the moment you show him that circumstances influence—not determine, influence—the result, you’ve knocked him out. He says, this collapses, because you see that it’s not the decision that determines, but the circumstances that determine. But if you say, no, I hold by this picture, not that one, then the fact that circumstances change behavior and decision—of course, I agree with that too. The question is whether it always happens, whether it necessarily happens, whether it happens in one hundred percent of people. That is the important question. And my claim is that it does not. And I’ve said more than once that every time they discover another gene supposedly responsible for another kind of human behavior—yes? The newspaper headlines always come out: they found the gene responsible for religious belief, the gene responsible for stinginess, the gene responsible for violence, whatever you want, anything you want, everything is in the genes. So first of all, of course they didn’t find it; these are all nonsense headlines. But beyond that, even when they do find something, what they find is something that correlates with the result. Meaning, they find something that can influence in the direction of violence, in the direction of religious belief, in the direction of aggression, or all sorts of things of that type. But nobody in the world has ever seen a gene that deterministically fixes behavior. It has not happened, and in my opinion it won’t happen either. Of course that won’t stop the newspapers from publishing it. Yes, you can find that a certain genetic structure can contribute to forming a faith-based position, to a person being religious. And another genetic structure may contribute to his not being religious. But that doesn’t mean it determines whether I am religious or secular. By the way, for some reason they ignore the fact that the same kind of genetic structure also determines that you’ll be secular. Not the same one, but another genetic structure determines in the same way that you’ll be secular. If the genes are responsible for that, just as they are responsible for the religious worldview, they are also responsible for the secular worldview. So I don’t know why people always see this as an attack on religiosity, when they say basically your religiosity is an illusion, it’s just the inspiration of a simple genetic structure, that’s all. You didn’t really form a position. But the secular person, of course, always forms a position in a way independent of and unrelated to his genes. That is one of the wonders of the strange discussion around these topics. In any case, the claim is that if they found that a certain genetic structure deterministically determines what will happen—meaning everyone who has that genetic structure is religious, and everyone who does not have that genetic structure is not religious—if that were the situation, then yes, that would really be a significant challenge. That would indeed be a significant challenge. There is no such thing. There isn’t. They have not found such a thing for any human behavior. They have found no such thing, and I also don’t see how they could find it. In order to find it, they would have to follow all human beings through all stages of their lives. It would really have to be Orwell’s Big Brother in order to run such an experiment. Okay? I don’t see how you could carry out such an experiment, and therefore all these experiments are irrelevant. They may be relevant to other things, but not to our question. This point is a very important point, because almost all the discussions around these questions of libertarianism, of free choice, fall into this fallacy. Almost all the discussions. Because people relate to—by the way, Libet too. Meaning, with Libet we saw the same thing. People think that the RP, yes? that electrical spike in the head, determines the button press, and therefore basically there is nothing in us beyond the brain signals. But that’s not correct, because they did not show that it always happens. That’s the veto Libet talked about. All they showed is that it happens, but that it happens—everyone agrees with that; the question is whether it always happens. There are more problems there besides that, but first I’m talking about the most basic problem. For Libet’s experiment to decide the matter for us, it would have to show that always, if there is an RP I press the button, and if there is no RP I do not press it—and that this happens always. In all human beings, always. Until you’ve shown that—and you can’t show that in a laboratory—you have not shown determinism. Therefore the difference between the two pictures I’m presenting here is a dramatic difference. Maybe I’ll give you—maybe, one moment—I’ll just bring this back for a second, I’ll just repeat what I said. So basically this picture has two implications, or in short: our brain can influence our decisions in two ways, or in two different modes. One is through stage two and the other through stage four. Yes? This is the input and the output. When the brain is damaged, it can do one of two things. Either it does not convey to me data about the circumstances—the processing of the data is done badly—and then what happens is that the will and intellect, which come to formulate a position, do so on the basis of incorrect data, problematic data, distorted data, biased data—a problem with the data. Okay? And then you make bad decisions because of the circumstances. The second type of disruption, if there is something problematic in the brain, if there is some defect in the brain, is at stage four. It could be that I make excellent decisions, I received the full and correct data, but those decisions need to be translated into action. And when I translate them into action, once again it passes through the brain. But if the brain is damaged—if this part of the brain is damaged—then the action carried out here will not reflect the decision of the will and intellect from here. Because the brain, whose job is to convey that decision into action, distorts it. And I brought various examples for this. I mean, for example—I didn’t bring various ones, I brought one example. What happens when someone punches me. Okay? Now I’m walking down the street, it hurts, and I’m very angry at him. Now I’m walking down the street and I see someone who seems to me to be that same person who punched me. I go up to him and punch him back. Okay? Now it turns out that it wasn’t the same person who punched me at all, it was someone else. In short, I did something immoral. I punched a person who simply didn’t deserve it, just some innocent person. Now what is this—how can this happen? Suppose the determinists claim this happens because of a defect in the brain. And I agree—or not necessarily, but it can happen. It may really be a moral problem; the person did something wrong because he chose badly. But I agree that it can also be the result of a defect in the brain, at both points, both at stage two and at stage four in this picture. At stage two, for example—how could a stage-two problem cause this? I misidentify the person. Meaning, data come to me, I see the person, I’m sure this is the person who punched me yesterday, but that’s not correct. What that means is that my input is distorted. The brain does not convey the correct data to me, and as a result I make an immoral decision. But the immoral decision is not because I’m a bad person. Morally speaking, I made the correct decision. The problem was in the distorted data that reached me—I simply received incorrect data. What can you do? On the other side, the second kind of problem that can cause this: I identified the person correctly and saw that this person is not the one who punched me yesterday. But my brain is damaged and it caused my hand to move and punch that person, even though in my decision I had decided not to punch him. Because the translation of the instruction not to punch was disrupted and it became an instruction to punch. That is a problem at stage four. Right? Conveying the instructions from the decision of the will and intellect to the action. And that too can produce an unjustified punch. Meaning that in the libertarian picture too there can be a situation in which a person is completely righteous, makes morally exalted decisions, and still punches someone who doesn’t deserve it. And there can be two reasons for this—either in the input or in the output. Either in receiving the data or in executing the decision. And therefore the libertarian does not deny this. The libertarian agrees that if something happens in the brain, then there can be problematic behaviors, or behaviors that do not fit my values. Okay? That can happen. But that does not mean that we do not have that spiritual, intellectual, volitional, mental dimension that makes decisions. I made a decision here completely freely; it was not deterministic. It absolutely was not deterministic. I just made a decision in light of problematic data, or my decision was not translated into action properly because the brain did not function properly, does not function properly. Okay? Yes.

[Speaker E] Where does stage three happen?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean where? Where in the brain? In that same brain? No. In the will and the intellect—it doesn’t happen in the body at all. After that, from here it passes to the brain. When you ask where it happens, you’re talking about stage four, not stage three.

[Speaker E] I’m asking, though—where does stage three happen?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying, no, it’s like asking: what color is virtue? Can you answer that question for me? What color is it? Or, what’s the difference between a rabbit? Can you answer that question? Lewis Carroll nonsense, right? These are questions you can’t answer. You’re asking me where something happens that has no location in reality. It isn’t located anywhere in space. So it makes no sense to ask where it happens; the concept of “where” doesn’t apply to it. What happens in space is something that happens in the brain, but this happens in the will and the intellect, not in the brain. That’s our mental part. Our mental part is something spiritual; it isn’t located anywhere. When we talked about this once in the past, the Talmud in Berakhot 5 compares the relation of the soul to the body with the relation of the Holy One, blessed be He, to the world. And one of the things—there are really five points of similarity—it says that just as the soul fills the whole body, so the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the whole world. What does it mean that it fills the whole body? It doesn’t fill the whole body; it’s not in a place at all. It’s not that it fills the whole body; that’s just borrowed language. It isn’t in any specific place in the body. It interacts with the body, but it’s not that the soul is located at some point—say, in the pineal gland. There are people who try to locate where these things are. It isn’t anywhere. And the Holy One, blessed be He, too—you know, there’s a very beautiful phrase in the Kedushah. It says: “His angels and ministers ask one another: Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him? Opposite them they praise and say”—or “Blessed…” if you use the Ashkenazi rite. What does that mean? “His ministers ask one another: Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?” But He has no place, so in what direction should we turn in order to worship Him? “Opposite them they praise and say.” Meaning: He has no place; I can’t identify Him in any specific place. So what difference does it make? I’ll do it where I am. Opposite me—where I am—that’s where I’ll do it. That place is no worse and no better than any other place. Metaphorically we say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is everywhere, but the truth is that He is nowhere. He’s not the kind of thing that exists in space, okay? Therefore—this is exactly what I think I talked about yesterday—the difference I mentioned is that people think a point has zero length. But in the simple conception, a point has no length, not that it has zero length. Length belongs to entities of at least one dimension, but a point is a zero-dimensional entity, so it has no length, not zero length. Now, in measure theory you can define length for points too, all sorts of mathematicians’ pilpulim. But in the simple conception, when you look at it, it’s more correct to say that a point has no length than that it has zero length. And likewise the volume of a two-dimensional sheet. It’s not that it has zero volume—it has no volume. The concept of volume simply doesn’t apply to two-dimensional surfaces. I told them there that it reminds me of the question: what does a person blind from birth see? Someone who has no faculty of sight. Does he constantly see darkness, blackness? Or maybe he just doesn’t see. Those aren’t the same thing. To constantly see darkness or black is actually to see a neutral image, right, to see something with nothing in it, zero-zero vision. I say: not zero vision—no vision. He doesn’t see. Not that he constantly sees black. Do you understand the difference? So here too, in our case, it’s the same thing. When you ask where the will and intellect are located, and I say “the whole earth is full of His glory,” that’s a metaphorical expression. What it really means is not that He is in every place, but that being in a place is something irrelevant in relation to Him. The same is true of the will and the intellect. So where does this begin to appear in the brain? At stage four. Because the will and intellect give an instruction to the brain, and then of course electrical currents begin in the brain and pass into execution—it moves from potential to action. And therefore these things reach the brain at the end, but they are not created there. Okay? They are actually created in our mental part. This picture, the one I described here, can actually explain within the libertarian framework all the phenomena I described last time, and many others too, and show that they have nothing to do with the discussion. All the phenomena I spoke about earlier can basically be explained here either through a problem in stage two or through a problem in stage four. Okay, maybe I’ll give you an example—the most extreme example they brought there. What happens with a person who, once his brain is damaged, becomes Republican? Or you know what—Democratic. Usually they say that if someone’s brain is damaged he becomes Republican. But then, to be politically correct, I say his brain was damaged and he became Democratic. Okay? So how can that be? Seemingly you see that the person makes decisions not really the way we think—judgment, logic, weighing different considerations and forming a position—but rather as a result of a brain state, right? This is one of the most extreme expressions of those claims that there’s nothing in us besides the brain. But here I’ll show you in this model how such a thing can happen. It’s obvious—incidentally, the experiments they did there were about Nixon. It was in the seventies, I think late sixties, and there the person suddenly shifted to supporting Nixon or opposing Nixon—I don’t remember—because his brain had been split. And then people claimed that this shows that the brain really determines our positions, and it’s not as we depict it, that we form a position for ourselves and have opinions and ideology and values, and so on. Now I want to describe this pictorially. Only a fool thinks Nixon had no advantages. Right? As they always say, if a seventeen-year-old isn’t a communist, he has no heart; and if at twenty-three he’s still a communist, he has no head. Meaning, someone who thinks Nixon had no advantages at all, or was pure deficiency, thinks in a childish, simplistic way. Obviously he also had positive sides, even without knowing him too well; that’s completely obvious. Every person has positive sides, but he also had negative sides. And now, when a person wants to form a position on whether to vote for Nixon or not, he has to weigh things. He weighs the arguments this way and that way and in the end arrives at a bottom line. When he votes for Nixon, is he saying Nixon is perfect? Absolutely not. He only thinks the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. If someone votes against Nixon, he thinks the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, so he votes against him. But nobody denies that he has both advantages and disadvantages. Now let’s assume that Nixon’s advantages belong to the right hemisphere, and the disadvantages—yes, he was right-wing, Republican—and Nixon’s disadvantages belong to the left hemisphere. Let’s say those are the things these parts of the brain process. Now, once you cut—meaning, if the brain is intact and this corpus callosum, this bridge between the two hemispheres, exists, then you take the considerations from the right hemisphere and the considerations from the left hemisphere, weigh them, and reach a conclusion. Okay? Then you have a position: for Nixon, against Nixon—some kind of position. By the way, who is this “you”? Who is the “you” that weighs the data, that connects the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere? So many people say it’s the left hemisphere. No. The left hemisphere is one of the things being weighed. But who is the weigher? That itself is an argument for dualism, for the view that there is something in us beyond the brain. That something beyond the brain weighs these two kinds of data, but let’s leave that for now. So I weigh the data and in the end reach a conclusion whether I’m against Nixon or for him. Okay? Now the brain is cut. What happens when the brain is cut? There’s no communication between the two parts of the brain. So the right-side considerations and the left-side considerations reach two conclusions. This side reaches the conclusion in favor of Nixon; that side reaches the conclusion against Nixon. And now I have no way to integrate them, because physically the brain is cut. Okay? What happens as a result? As a result, now it depends—if they ask me whether I’m Republican or not, what will I answer? The mouth, as you may recall, is operated by the left hemisphere. Right? So what does that mean? That I’ll answer that I’m against Nixon. Right, leftists are against Nixon; Nixon was right-wing. So the left hemisphere, which operates the mouth—and the right hemisphere has no connection to the mouth because the connection between the hemispheres has been cut. We talked about this last time. Okay? So what determines what I say is the left hemisphere, and the left hemisphere is against Nixon. When they ask me whether I’m for Nixon, the answer is that I’m against him. Now if I go to vote, it depends on what the actions involved in voting depend on—the movement of the hand, the walking, and all those things. It could be that I’ll vote for Nixon. Why? Not because I decided that I’m for Nixon, but because the part that determines what I actually do—you can see here, this part, the transfer of instructions—the part that determines the action is the right part of the brain, which expresses only half the decision. The decision is made up of weighing considerations this way and that way, and this part translates only half the weighing. Then the action will be an action that is not the result of the overall decision, but of half the considerations. If the action is speech, it will come from the left half; if the action is walking, it may come from the right half. And then suddenly you see a person who was a clear Democrat and becomes a Nixon supporter after his brain is split. Does that mean he has no decision-making? No. It means that part number four in his chain was damaged. The brain doesn’t transmit the actions correctly. Of course this can also come from here. Meaning, when you want to form an opinion about Nixon, you want to receive data. What did he do? What do I think about what he did? Now if I have problems in reception, then I won’t receive the relevant data in his favor, only the data against him, and because of that—or at least I’ll receive them with different intensity—therefore in the end I’ll make decisions against Nixon, even though in fact, if I had weighed everything, I might have been for him. You can see this in a nice parable for the matter. Look here—I brought a picture of a prism. A prism is basically an optical device into which white light enters and it breaks it down into colors. You see here light enters and it breaks it down into shades—blue, green, yellow, red, and so on. Okay? Now what the materialists are essentially claiming is that if you change the prism, you’ll change the colors. Right? If the prism is different, some of the colors won’t come out, or they’ll come out in other directions, depending on the structure of the prism. Does that mean there is no—does that mean there is no light? That the prism is the only thing that exists? That the prism produces the colors? Because the fact is that if you change the prism you get different colors. So apparently the prism is everything. What are you talking about? It’s obvious that all these colors are already here inside the white light. What the prism does is simply separate them and send each color in a different direction. The angle of refraction changes according to wavelength, and so each wavelength goes in a different direction. That’s how the shades are separated. But they all exist in the white light that reaches the prism. The prism merely separates them. What happens if I don’t put a prism there? I’ll see white. Does that mean there are no colors within the white? Of course there are colors. I just won’t see them. They won’t be expressed. That is exactly what happens in the brain. In my decision for Nixon, there are many shades. There are considerations in favor and considerations against, and I have to weigh them all and in the end reach a conclusion. If I don’t have the prism that breaks apart the considerations—if it sends the considerations to the left and the considerations to the right—I won’t see that this decision is one made up of many shades. I’ll see it as if it’s a simple decision: I’m Republican or I’m Democratic. But that isn’t true. A decision that I’m Republican does not mean I fail to see the advantages in the Democrats; it only means I think the Republicans’ advantages are greater. That’s all, or vice versa. That’s exactly like the parable of the prism. And to say that because of these things we have no soul at all, or no ability to make decisions and to will and to determine values, and so on—that the brain determines everything—is like saying the prism produces the colors and there is no white light hitting it at all. Or that the colors are not in the white light, but the prism creates colors out of the white light. Not true. The colors are inside the white light. The prism only brings them from potential to actualization. In that sense, the prism is an example of stage four in the chain. Stage four in the chain basically says: I have white light, and now I want to pass this information onward in the form of colors. If the prism functions, then I’ll pass all the colors, each one to its proper place. If the prism is damaged, or I replaced the prism, or something is wrong with it, then it won’t pass all the colors. Some it won’t pass, some it will send in other directions, it will do something else. That doesn’t mean anything changed in the white light. The white light looks exactly the same. But the factor mediating between the white light and what we see has changed—something got messed up there. It’s exactly the same thing: in this picture, the brain is a mediating factor. Therefore when the brain changes, of course the results will also change. But that doesn’t mean we have only a brain and there’s nothing feeding the brain, or that the brain expresses something beyond itself. And now I’m not even talking about a whole collection of much simpler phenomena. For example, people who have damage to the amygdala—people who have no empathic capacity, for instance, or people whose emotional dimension is either too suppressed or too aroused, too sensitive and too strong. Those are two different kinds of damage. What happens in such a case is that you’ll see very dramatic behavioral changes. They did studies on Vietnam veterans, and the claim was that soldiers who did apparently quite cruel and insane things were found to have damage in the amygdala—their empathy center was damaged. They don’t register the suffering they’re causing other people. Now understand the meaning of this. They can actually be morally impeccable people in the decisions they make—wonderful decisions. And decisions in the dualistic, libertarian sense: they make decisions. It isn’t that the brain caused this. What the brain did was fail to give them the relevant data. Because in order not to do such things to someone else, you need to understand what it does to that other person. You need to understand how much he suffers when you do such things to him. If you don’t understand how much he suffers because you have no empathy—again, you don’t have the faculty of empathy, not that you decided not to be empathic, but rather something is missing in your brain, this thing is broken in you—then you don’t have the ability to show empathy to people. In such a state you can behave terribly. But that doesn’t mean you have no choosing dimension. It only means your choosing dimension didn’t receive the data. Once you don’t understand that hitting a person hurts him, what would stop you from hitting him? Not because you’re a bad person. You’re not a bad person. You just don’t understand that such an act is bad, because you don’t know it causes pain. Or you don’t know that insulting someone makes him sad, because you’re some kind of autistic person, and even if people insult you it doesn’t bother you. So you can insult people completely freely, hurt them in front of all Israel, when in fact you’re not a bad person at all. You’re not a bad person—you simply don’t understand that insulting someone is something that harms him, something that hurts him.

[Speaker D] But in the final analysis, a person has no choice about that. It’s not his fault, but he has no choice, because he never receives the data.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: we have to distinguish between two things. First of all, I want to show that there is a choosing dimension in him, before the question whether he bears responsibility or not. Meaning, these phenomena do not prove that a person is nothing but mechanical matter. There is something in him that chooses. And nevertheless, bad data can affect action. That’s point number one. The second question is whether responsibility can be imposed on him. That’s a different question. In a place where he has no possibility of understanding this, he really would be exempt in judgment—I agree. That’s why I say: I have no argument with the claim that when a person doesn’t get good data, something is messed up in his head, it may be that he should be exempt from criminal responsibility. I agree with that. Every sensible person agrees with that; courts rule on that basis all the time. The question I’m asking is whether it is always like that. Meaning, does a person always sin only because that’s how he is built? He didn’t decide—he didn’t decide to be bad or good—he’s simply like that. Then there would be no point in imposing responsibility on him at all. I argue no. I argue that generally a person decides. It’s just that a person who is built incorrectly makes decisions based on faulty data. Then his decisions are mistaken, and in some cases—at least in extreme cases—you certainly can exempt him from responsibility; I’m not arguing with that. I’m only saying that from this you can’t prove that a person contains nothing besides the brain. That’s not true. Maybe I’ll give you an example that sharpens the point. Have you ever read the book or seen the movie A Beautiful Mind, Steve Nash? Steve Nash? Here we have Nash from the NBA and Nash the mathematician—I’m already forgetting. Anyway, I mean the mathematician, the Nobel Prize winner.

[Speaker F] Rami, there’s background noise—if you can mute everyone again.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just a second. So I remember reading the book, and afterward I went to see the movie. The movie begins with a man walking down the street and seeing all sorts of figures in front of him—I don’t know—Soviet agents trying to threaten him or recruit him for missions or things like that. He’s crazy; he’s walking down the street and all the time Soviet agents and people of various kinds are approaching him. He doesn’t know what to do with it. Now, the whole first part of the movie is built in an interesting way. The whole first part of the movie looks as if this is all normal, some sort of spy movie about an American whom Soviet agents are trying to recruit and all kinds of things like that. I now remember that I saw the movie before I read the book, because I didn’t know—I didn’t understand what was going on. During the intermission I wanted to leave, go home, because okay, agents are telling him this and that—it wasn’t interesting. I said, still, we paid for the tickets, let’s stay. So we stayed, and the second half was completely different from the first half. Suddenly it became clear that there were no agents and no Soviets and nothing at all—it was all hallucinations. The man was a paranoid schizophrenic and imagined all sorts of people approaching him and agents and persecutors and all sorts of things. He lived in a wildly imaginary world. Okay? And the second half dealt with the question of how he copes with this, how his surroundings cope with it, and what it looks like. Now, that was amazing. Again, I don’t know to what extent it happens like that in reality exactly, or how faithful it is to reality, but it’s thought-provoking—it’s amazing. Because what happened was that Nash ultimately learned to live with it and to identify the fictional nature of the figures and ignore what they were saying to him, and function as a healthy person. Meaning, he managed to gain control over these phenomena. By the way, that requires talent, not just willpower and perseverance. Meaning, apparently his talent also played a role in this. But he managed, first, to understand that these were fictional figures; second, to identify when a figure was fictional and when not; and third, to control himself and not respond to them, not answer them, not take them into account, and continue behaving as though they weren’t speaking to him. In the film this is illustrated so vividly, because you suddenly understand how hard it is to do. After all, from his perspective those figures are there, offering him proposals. What do you mean? Why shouldn’t he decide that when I come up to him on the street and ask him the time, maybe I too am a fictional figure? If he really sees fictional figures and real figures in the same way. So he can’t do that. Meaning, he can’t simply control the thing like that. And yet it turns out that somehow—don’t ask me how—he does manage to understand when the situation is fictional and when it is real, and with the help of his wife and so on he managed to train himself to live by responding only to the real figures and not to the fictional ones. That’s a wonderful example of a situation where you receive data at stage two—you receive problematic data, they show you fictional people, and you are constantly enveloped in appeals and interactions with people who do not exist. That is exactly a defect in stage two. Okay? Then you say to yourself: fine, now I need to process the information. And here he works very, very hard to understand when this is false information and when it isn’t. And he manages to overcome it, filter out the false information, and continue acting normally and respond like a normal person, respond as usual. This shows us, in response to what Professor Turkel said earlier, that even when the data are false data, that doesn’t always mean you have no control. Sometimes a person can receive false data but still have the tools to cope with it—not always. And a court, among other things with the help of psychiatrists, needs to assess to what extent the person before it could cope with those phenomena, with the false data or with the defects in the brain that he has. Therefore I say: in sufficiently extreme cases I completely agree that he has no criminal responsibility. There’s no reason to—maybe you need to put him in prison in order to protect against him, because after all he can harm people or even kill people, even if he isn’t guilty and so on, but you still have to protect society from him. But as far as criminal sanction is concerned, in the sense that he deserves punishment for behaving wrongly—that requires examination. If the data really were such that he could not cope with them, then he has no criminal responsibility. But I’m not speaking on that plane. I’m speaking on the metaphysical plane. Meaning: can you bring proof from here that there is no spirit, only body? So I say no, that’s not correct. There is spirit, like in the prism. All the shades are inside the white light; the prism is what separates them. If the prism is damaged, you won’t see shades, but that doesn’t mean there are no shades. It means you won’t see them; they won’t be expressed in the world. That’s all. So in the metaphysical sense, in the question whether we are monists or dualists, whether there is spirituality or only materiality, whether we have free choice or everything is deterministic—in these metaphysical questions, it seems to me that this answer is a good one. It can preserve libertarian dualism in place against all the opposing views, against all the phenomena people describe. The question of criminal responsibility is a completely different question. On the contrary, I think I mentioned this—I no longer remember—I wrote an article about it not long ago. A memorial volume came out for a friend of mine, a judge who was retiring—or who by now has already retired—and a book came out in his honor. They asked me there for an article on law and neuroscience, and I wrote there that in my view the problematic point in the materialist-determinist conception is not the question why you judge, but the question why you grant leniency to someone who is not responsible for his actions—like the examples I brought here, or an irresistible impulse, or all kinds of phenomena of that sort. Because actually all of us, according to the materialist-determinist conceptions, are always acting under impulses that are irresistible. After all, our behaviors are always dictated by our brain. So this is always happening. What is different about such a person from a regular, normative person? There is no difference at all. This one has one kind of brain and that one has another kind of brain, but whenever he did something, that proves his brain caused him to do it. But if you exempt someone because his brain caused him to do it, then there are no criminals in the world. The prisons will be empty. What is the difference between a person you exempt from criminal responsibility and a person you don’t? Indeed, very often people don’t ask the right question. People ask the materialists: why do you judge? So I explained: there are good reasons for why you judge even in a materialist-determinist world. There are good reasons to judge, insofar as reasons are needed at all, because the judge too is compelled to judge just as I am compelled to steal—he is compelled to judge. He too is a human being. So the question of how much room there is for that question at all is itself unclear. But I said there are also good answers on that front. The more interesting question, though, is why you exempt people who acted under an impulse and say they have no criminal responsibility. There is no such thing. In a deterministic world there is no difference whatsoever between that person and the normative person who stole. The normative person who stole also had some brain structure that caused him to steal. How is that different from an irresistible impulse? He is no more responsible for his actions than the person seized by a momentary madness, some kind of amok attack, it seems to me. So the claim is that if we adopt the picture I described here, then basically all the difficulties I raised in the previous lesson disappear, because this picture shows us how disturbances in the brain or injuries to the brain can be expressed in problematic behaviors. But the fact that changing the circumstances changes the results does not mean there is no decision-making in the middle. It only means that decision-making depends on data. That’s why I added the circle of circumstances on the left side of the libertarian chain, because circumstances also have an effect in the libertarian world, obviously. Anyone who says otherwise is just presenting a caricature. I’d like maybe to finish this chapter—and finish this chapter so that in the next chapter we’ll complete this whole move on free choice, and perhaps after that one more lesson on free choice in value contexts, not in the context of whether we have it or not. So, a few years ago I saw a program—psychiatrists speak about what’s called dissociative identity disorder. What does that mean? It’s what in everyday language we call split personality. It means there are people who have some brain or psychological injury, whatever it is—usually it’s a psychological injury, or often it’s psychological, not necessarily brain damage—who live in different personalities. There was a woman there, on Amnon Levy’s Real Faces program, and one episode dealt with a woman who had thirty different characters she lived as in her life. Meaning, for a few hours she could be one person, and a few hours later someone else, each time a different personality. And each time she lived the current personality completely. She didn’t know that originally she was Yankel, and now she was Berl. So now she lived as Berl. She didn’t know that originally she was really something else. Or I don’t know what “originally” means—she is all of them. Okay? So she has multiple personalities. Now usually when you see a person with multiple personalities, each personality has behavior completely different from the others. And seemingly, in the same body, in the same brain, the same person, you suddenly see completely different behavior. Notice that this is the mirror image of what I described earlier. Earlier I described how a change in the brain brings about a change in behavior, even though the soul is supposedly the same soul. And from this people proved that apparently the brain change is the important thing and there is no such thing as souls, and so on. Now I say: let’s look at the opposite case. What happens when in the same brain—not the same soul—in the same brain there is a change in the psyche? Not that in the same psyche there is a change in the brain, but in the same brain there is a change in the psyche—there is a different psyche. But if you look, if you do a brain scan, it’s the same brain, it’s the same person. And his psyche is completely different on Sunday than on Monday. Now if the previous position was evidence in favor of materialism, then this picture is evidence against materialism. Because it basically means the brain does not determine our personality. Clearly, in the same brain we have a completely different personality. I haven’t seen people address these phenomena, but in my view, if the earlier phenomena are evidence against dualism—and I said they are not evidence—then this phenomenon is evidence against materialist determinism. Now here the materialist will come and say exactly what I said before, and he’ll say to me: that’s not evidence. And he’ll be right. It really isn’t evidence. Why? Because maybe if you look at the electrical currents in the brain, not the physical structure, then you’ll see different currents, a different kind of electrical activity. Therefore it may be—the fact is we know that a person who is depressed can have that affect his neurology. Meaning, the brain looks different in some way. Okay? In other words, physical or psychological things can cause changes in the brain. Now it could be that the materialist can explain the difference between the various personalities through a brain change. No problem. But now I’ll ask a harder question. There were two phenomena in that program that caught my eye. One of the personalities of that woman knew how to play the piano. Not that she suddenly became more violent than usual or less violent. Not what we saw there with Phineas Gage, or with the split brain. Here I’m talking about a very complex skill. One of the personalities knows how to play the piano. By the way, another personality is blind—she doesn’t see—and knows how to speak in sign language, communicates in sign language. Now the woman we know, in her ordinary life, never learned piano and never sign language. Her parents know her, they lived with her, they raised her—she never learned piano or sign language. And in one of the manifestations, one of her personalities plays the piano fluently, at a good level. And the sign language is another personality, a blind one that communicates. Now here the problem is harder. Because if there really was some brain change, momentary or permanent, doesn’t matter, and as a result a person suddenly becomes someone with a different character, more violent or less violent—fine, that can happen, a random matter. There was a brain change, and whatever that brain change does, it does. It makes me less violent or more violent, but that’s something random, accidental, arbitrary, okay? But here the brain shifted into a very, very specific state. It’s a state of the skill of piano playing. To produce such a state, people study for many years. So how did it happen that in some random transition, just by chance, the brain organized itself into a state in which she has this complex skill of piano playing? How does that happen through a random process? Only if we say that there really is some kind of different psyche that entered her—same body, a dybbuk soul, yes, another soul entered her—and that soul knows how to play piano, I don’t know from where; maybe it was once in some previous body in a previous reincarnation that learned piano. I have no idea. I don’t know how to explain it. What I am claiming is simply that it requires explanation, and the materialist picture, seemingly, will not succeed in explaining such a thing. Because a random transition in the brain does not turn it into—understand, it’s like Fred Hoyle’s famous claim, the physicist, who says that if a Boeing airplane flies over a junkyard and creates a strong wind there, what are the chances that all the junk will organize itself into—or no, he put it differently: if a wind passes over a junkyard, what are the chances that all that junk will organize itself into a functioning Boeing airplane? That’s essentially what is happening here. Meaning, something that happens randomly, by chance and not by design, does not produce very, very complex structures just by accident. The same here: some change happened in the brain. Fine, I accept that—a brain change. But a brain change should have led her to a different state, not a special state but a different one. Fine, because something changed. But to teach her piano in the course of some momentary brain change, to organize her whole brain into the skill of piano playing or of speaking sign language—that sounds utterly unreasonable. Seemingly this is an indication, a counterweight to the previous indications that favored materialism. This is the opposite indication, showing us that there is something in the human being beyond matter, beyond materiality. Yes, it’s like—there was also not long ago something I saw in a Druze village, a child who speaks fluent English though he never learned English. He speaks fluent English. His parents don’t know what to do. There was a report about it on television, on one of the news programs I think, or something like that. People there were astonished. Researchers came, checked it out, investigated how it happens, and no one knows how to explain it, at least from what I read. It’s the same phenomenon. A person knows things without having learned them. Now maybe by chance he was born with a brain built exactly like the brain of a person who knows English. There is such a brain state, knowing English, right? So as if he was born that way. But that’s nonsense. A person is not born by random chance in a way that is so very complex and precise. To build complex and precise things, you have to work, you have to learn. Even a child born in England is not born knowing English; he has to learn English. So how does it happen that a person is born and completely by chance is built in exactly such a way that his brain knows how to speak English? Seemingly there is some psyche in him that knows how to speak English. And again, I haven’t said anything positive—I don’t know, I have no explanations. What I can infer is that materialism does not know how to explain such things, it seems to me. But somehow materialists always have—by the way, not only they; all sides are infected by this—but materialists always kill me with this because they are sure they are totally open-minded and weigh all the possibilities, like atheists, right? It’s the same species. It’s a fanatical church. So this church, when it sees cases of the second type, immediately of course says, fine, then everything is materialistic and there is no soul and no anything. When they see the opposite phenomena, then “requires further study,” really, we can’t understand it, it needs investigation, we can’t explain it. That’s it, everything is fine. You can remain a materialist with “requires further study.” There’s this asymmetry. By the way, dualists probably do the same thing in the opposite direction. I think generally we don’t treat considerations that run against our a priori positions in a balanced way. So that’s another lesson perhaps worth drawing from here: it’s worth discussing things in a balanced way. Okay, so I’ve more or less finished what we can call the scientific stage. I said the discussion proceeds in three stages… just one second, the discussion proceeds in four stages. The first stage was to place the players on the board: what is libertarianism? What is determinism? The second stage was the philosophical stage: philosophical considerations this way and that way. And we said that apparently remained open—though in my view it leans toward libertarianism. The third stage is the scientific stage, basically of the last generations—neuroscience and so on. There I showed that there are no gaps in the laws of nature, chaos, quantum theory and so forth, and then emergence. Then we reached neuroscience. The conclusion in the end is that neuroscience too has not fundamentally changed the picture. The question remains a philosophical question, and everyone can make his decision according to the best of his understanding. Science cannot say anything about it at this point, and philosophy probably doesn’t provide unequivocal answers either. Therefore I come to the fourth stage of the discussion—that will be next time—and that is the diagnostic stage. So what do you do in such a situation, when there are no indications in any direction? We’ll talk about that next time. Question.

[Speaker C] Yes. How can there be a case where someone is born knowing how to play the piano? His brain state is like that. But that’s something that has to be learned. Meaning, it can’t be that he has knowledge of how to play the piano in some chaotic one-in-a-billion or one-in-infinity way, just as his brain can’t suddenly be made of metal.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That answers my question—I asked that too, right? Correct. Good question.

[Speaker D] There are just a few things in the chat maybe…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not following the chat while I’m…

[Speaker D] No, T. S. Eliot.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] T. S. Eliot is fine, but I… no, this doesn’t contradict Rabbi Dessler’s point about the point of choice. My claim is that in that space Rabbi Dessler talks about as choice, there we have choice. I said: if there is an irresistible impulse, then I too exempt from criminal responsibility. That’s obvious. I didn’t say that in every… I’ve spoken about this more than once in the past. In every single case one has to examine whether the person has the ability to choose or doesn’t have the ability to choose. The materialists’ and determinists’ claim is that there is no window of choice. That nowhere does a person have choice. That is the claim… against that I argue. I am not claiming that everything a person does is the result of choice. There are things a person does that are not the result of choice.

[Speaker D] But the example of Nash seems to say that there’s always choice, that there is no point…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it says that with Nash the window of choice is higher than it usually is for people. “Always” is too sweeping a statement. I’m only saying that one has to be careful when deciding that a person had no choice. It can always be that he nevertheless did have it, but it can also be that he didn’t. That’s just the way it is. Okay, so we’ll stop here.

[Speaker B] Could you give a source for what you mentioned about people suddenly starting to play and so on? That sounds completely bizarre.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So send me an email and I’ll send it to you by email. It appears in my book The Science of Freedom.

[Speaker B] And did they research it and check that it’s really reliable?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I think so, from what I saw.

[Speaker B] Wow, really surprising.

[Speaker E] About that, Ephraim Kishon once said that it’s so surprising that even I wouldn’t have believed it had I not invented it myself.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Okay. All right, goodbye. Sabbath peace.

[Speaker E] Sabbath peace.

Free Will and Choice – Lesson 14

Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

Deterministic and materialist claims based on the dependence of behavior on the brain

The deterministic-chain model versus the caricatured libertarian model

The five-stage libertarian model and the influence of circumstances

A topographical metaphor: statistical bias without one-to-one determination

A critique of inferring determinism from genetic findings and Libet experiments

Two points of brain disruption: input (stage 2) and output (stage 4)

The question of “where” the decision takes place and the analogy to the soul and holiness

Split-brain, Nixon, and the question of integration of considerations

The prism analogy: the brain as mediator rather than producer of content

Amygdala, empathy, and criminal responsibility versus the metaphysical question

“A Beautiful Mind” (Steve Nash) as a case of faulty data and possible control

A legal critique of determinism: the question of exemption, not the question of judgment

Multiple personality as a “mirror image” and the difficulty of unlearned skills

Asymmetry in the discussion and the conclusion of the stages of the debate

Full Transcript

השאר תגובהלבטל

Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

Deterministic and materialist claims based on the dependence of behavior on the brain

The deterministic-chain model versus the caricatured libertarian model

The five-stage libertarian model and the influence of circumstances

A topographical metaphor: statistical bias without one-to-one determination

A critique of inferring determinism from genetic findings and Libet experiments

Two points of brain disruption: input (stage 2) and output (stage 4)

The question of “where” the decision takes place and the analogy to the soul and holiness

Split-brain, Nixon, and the question of integration of considerations

The prism analogy: the brain as mediator rather than producer of content

Amygdala, empathy, and criminal responsibility versus the metaphysical question

“A Beautiful Mind” (Steve Nash) as a case of faulty data and possible control

A legal critique of determinism: the question of exemption, not the question of judgment

Multiple personality as a “mirror image” and the difficulty of unlearned skills

Asymmetry in the discussion and the conclusion of the stages of the debate

Full Transcript

שתף

השאר תגובהלבטל