Brothers in Dispute #6 with Dr. Michael (Miki) Abraham, 4.2.25 – Arnon Shahar

[Speaker A] Hello and welcome to the sixth episode of Brothers in Dispute. In today’s episode I’m meeting again with Dr. Michael Abraham, Miki, who agreed once again to be a guest here, and we’re talking about determinism and free will. So you’re invited to listen. There’s some nice addition to the structure we’re using today, so I think it came out well. I’d be happy to hear your comments—please also point out critical things, especially criticism of me, of how I do this and how I interrupt him in the middle. Please write in YouTube, I want to hear your voices, your opinion. It only adds. So have a great day, see you, enjoy listening. Bye.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, that’s it.

[Speaker A] Excellent. So first of all, thanks again for being willing to do this podcast with me. I’ll say that relatively speaking this is the fifth episode I’ve done of this podcast—well, now it’s the sixth—and until now the previous episode we did was the most watched episode, and I have no doubt that’s thanks to you, so thank you for that. And I want to note—I wanted to say something. I got a lot of reactions to the way I do this podcast, this idea of stopping the speaker. A lot of people saw it as disrespectful and not nice and things like that. I want to say about that—first of all I understand, I understand that the accepted thing is to let a person finish saying what he wants to say. I just—this is the main intention of this podcast for me: to offer another way of looking at this thing. And I want to say that it’s not that I’m less respectful—at least that’s how I see it—but rather that I’m shifting the emphasis of respect from the speaker to the listener. In this way, where it’s possible to stop the speaker at any moment, I’m relating to the pain of the listener, who has some problem and wants to say something, and when we insist on respecting the speaker by letting him finish what he wants to say, then the listener’s pain stays inside him. And I want to make room for the listener’s pain, and that allows the listener to express it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just a comment on that matter—I also thought about it a bit בעקבות the previous meeting. First of all, I don’t see even a drop of offense to anyone’s dignity or anything like that here; that’s not the relevant plane. The question is how to manage the conversation most effectively. It’s not a question of respect—I think the sides here respect one another, and that’s not the relevant plane of discussion at all. But regarding the form of the conversation, I don’t have experience with it—you have more experience with it. After the one time we had, I felt that this form has disadvantages. Meaning, again, we can keep trying because I haven’t really experimented with it until now, but it has disadvantages, because when you’re trying to develop some idea and the other person stops you in the middle because there’s some point he wants to comment on, you no longer get back to what you originally wanted to continue saying. Now, you wanted to say something complete, and when we stop along the way, usually—or often—you don’t remember the line of thought well enough to return to it afterward and keep developing the issue. And that makes the discussion a bit more chaotic, because it keeps taking directions simply according to the interruption, and then it continues developing from there. And in that sense I think the conversation, certainly from the listeners’ perspective, becomes less meaningful, because they won’t get a picture. They’ll simply follow some conversation that runs in what I’d call an almost accidental way, in random directions, and they won’t see any continuous line of thought—neither yours nor mine—and I think from the listeners’ point of view that’s a disadvantage. We can keep trying to do it because, again, this is still a new experience for me, but I’m just noting that this is one insight I had following the previous time.

[Speaker A] Great, thank you. My answer to that is that I think there’s more value—I’ll say two things. One, there’s what the speaker wants to say, the idea he wants to convey, and there’s what’s in the listener’s consciousness. And I want to argue, in my view, two things. First, I think what’s in the listener’s consciousness is more important. Did he understand what was said, did he not understand, does he agree with what was said or not agree with it. In my opinion that’s the main thing in a conversation, more than what the speaker wants to say. And another claim is that every time there’s this interruption—when I stop you or you stop me—it basically lets us go down to our starting assumptions, the assumptions on which our position is based. When I listen to you and identify some problem, some point of disagreement, I stop you and point out my difficulty with something you said so far, and that lets us go one level deeper into a certain issue. It’s true that it doesn’t allow each person to present his whole idea, but what it does do is each time take us to one of the underlying assumptions and we dig into it, and then you stop me and we examine another underlying assumption. So the conversation—it’s true it isn’t orderly in the sense that people hear the whole idea and the whole argument—but it does stay and dig into each other’s assumptions and examine them. Basically, we’re examining each other’s basic assumptions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure about that, because even when we begin to discuss a basic assumption, it’ll be interrupted in the same way. Meaning, we won’t exhaust that either. Because these things are fairly circular. Our thinking usually isn’t built the way we imagine it is—as if there are assumptions, on top of which we build conclusions, and then move on. Many times these are circles, where assumptions depend on other assumptions, assumptions can lead back to conclusions, and what happens is that even the discussion of the assumption itself won’t be exhausted for exactly the same reason—because it too will be interrupted.

[Speaker A] Exactly. So that’s exactly what I’m claiming. The structure of our assumptions and of the justifications in our system of thought has a somewhat chaotic structure, and the chaotic conversation tracks the structure of our justifications. Every time we stop, we examine something else, right? And it really is a bit chaotic, but that’s how we actually examine the whole system of assumptions that build the… we don’t exhaust it—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, and that really brings us back to the point I made earlier: the question is who is at the center. Meaning, if we’re conducting a discussion between ourselves, then some of your arguments make sense to me. But when we’re filming this and doing it for listeners, then I think it’s less right, because they’ll follow our chaotic conversation—but when a person comes to listen to a conversation like this, he wants to come away with some kind of picture—mine, yours, doesn’t matter—but to form for himself a picture of free choice, say, of what we discussed. He won’t come away with that. Meaning, he won’t receive such a picture. Between ourselves we’ll talk, and maybe this chaos tracks the chaos within us. I’m not fully sure even about that. But the purpose of a conversation aimed at listeners is to try to arrange that chaos, to bring it into some coherent structure so that they can see that structure and form a position about it. Now one more sentence: I think maybe all these gains can be achieved in a slightly different way. Think about it—again, you set the format, and that’s completely fine with me—but if you said, look, for a certain amount of time each person will speak without interruption, and if you have some point, write it down for yourself—this and this I didn’t agree with, this and this I want to comment on—and afterward we can get to any point we want. It seems to me that would work better. But again, up to you. Yes.

[Speaker A] With your permission, for now I’d be glad if we kept discussing this idea, this principle of attentive speech with interruption, and as we meet a few more times we’ll keep practicing it. I believe that in the end you’ll be convinced, but that’s fine, and I thank you for being willing to do this even though—sorry—I thank you for being willing to do this even though you’re not convinced this is the right way. To me it’s pretty clear that this is the right way, but I suggest we keep discussing it later. I do have another request, another structure I want to put on our conversation, on this podcast, and that’s the Socratic structure, according to which one of us will be the questioner or attacker, and one of us will be the one under attack, the one whose position is being challenged, or the respondent. I think that will help tighten our discussion a bit and make it clearer and more orderly. What do you think about that?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We can try. I’m here to try. Meaning, if that’s what you think, let’s go with it and see what comes out.

[Speaker A] Excellent, wonderful. So I’ll ask you: which role would you prefer—as the questioner or attacker, or as the one under attack, the respondent?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, maybe the respondent. Respondent.

[Speaker A] Okay, excellent. So as the respondent, I’m going to ask you questions with the goal of trying to show you—to show you and the viewers—that you’re wrong, by either leading you to see that you hold some problematic opinion or assumption, or that you contradict yourself in some way. In the process it may turn out that I’m the one who’s wrong and contradicts himself or holds some problematic view, and next time we’ll switch roles—or maybe even in the middle today we’ll switch roles, we’ll see how it works. And feel free at any point—again, feel free to stop me if you think some question is problematic in some way, whatever, it’s your full right to say “I think you’re wrong,” or whatever you want. You’re completely free. It’s just different roles, different intentions. Okay, so let’s begin, all right? Okay.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay.

[Speaker A] So we’re continuing the discussion on determinism and free will, and I’d ask you, Miki, if you could say how you see this dispute, how you understand determinism, how you understand free will, and how you understand the contradiction between them or their incompatibility, and I’ll stop you the moment I identify something I don’t agree with, if I identify such a thing, okay? Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, determinism is easier to explain. It’s based on a relation of causality between events, and the principle of causality says that every event is supposed to have a cause. And because of that, basically the determinist says that our world—the happenings in our world, and also in each person in particular—are happenings that stem from ongoing relations of cause and effect. Meaning, each time a given state brings about the next stage. Say if we discretize the time axis, then it brings about the next state necessarily. In other words, a given existing state dictates a single state—the state that comes after it. That is the deterministic view. In the view—yes.

[Speaker A] Wait, what’s the connection between this causality—and sorry, go on.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And opposite that stands the libertarian view, a view that believes in free will, and with regard to it there’s quite a bit of vagueness and interpretations and mistakes—in my view mistakes—and therefore here we need to clarify the picture a bit. Yes.

[Speaker A] Wait, I just remembered—if you could, please, a friend asked me—if you could speak a little more slowly, try to speak a bit more slowly and in a way that even a high-school student would understand, or someone who doesn’t understand philosophy and physics, so that he’d understand you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I’ll try. I’m not sure how much I’ll succeed in controlling my usual way of speaking. In any case, I’m saying that in the libertarian picture there are all kinds of mistakes, ambiguities, misunderstandings that lead to difficulties, and therefore it’s very important to clarify what exactly this thing means before starting to discuss it. So I want to present it as follows. I want to say: suppose you’re looking at some topographical outline. Mountains, hills, valleys, ravines, and so on. On this topographical outline, let’s say, there rolls around or moves a little ball. That little ball will go where the topographical outline takes it. Usually from a high place it will go down to a low place. Okay? In another analogy you can take some stream of water. The stream of water will flow along this outline; the outline will dictate the result. The outline will dictate where the little ball goes or where the stream of water goes. Now in contrast, if on that same outline there stands a person—and a person too is a physical creature—then if I’m standing on top of the mountain or on some slope, I too feel the force of gravity pulling me downward. In that sense I’m like the little ball and like the stream of water. But I can also decide to resist the force pulling me downward and decide to climb the mountain. Right? If I decide to climb the mountain, then I’ll go upward. In that sense, although I’m exposed to all the influences of the topographical outline exactly like the little ball, exactly like water—in that sense the libertarian also agrees with the determinist. Meaning, the forces exist, and I too am exposed to their influence. The only difference on which I disagree with the determinist is that I won’t necessarily do what their influence directs me to do. In other words, they influence me, but they do not determine what I will do. That’s the point. And many times libertarianism is presented as if there’s no influence at all, as if you act in a vacuum. That’s a mistake. Obviously I don’t act in a vacuum. The claim is that the outline around me influences me, tries to influence me to do things, because I’m a physical object—but it does not determine what I will do. Now what this basically means is that in the moral of the analogy—that’s the analogy—in the moral I’m saying that the topographical outline is really the collection of all the influences the determinist talks about: genetics, environment, nature, nurture, whatever you want, upbringing, everything, drives, brain, brain processes, neurons, and so on. All that, from my point of view, is the topographical outline. In my worldview as a libertarian, I claim that this topographical outline is the environment in which I act. It is not me. The determinist says this topographical outline is me. Meaning, at most there’s some little ball on it, but the little ball will go where the topographical outline takes it. De facto, the topographical outline describes me. Whereas I, as a libertarian, say the topographical outline describes the environment in which I act. But within that environment I can decide to climb a mountain. Now the mountain is a metaphor for something that is hard for me to do because of nature and nurture and everything. Let’s say you hit me. Now it’s very hard for me to stop myself from hitting you back. So that means that in the direction of refraining from hitting back, there’s a mountain for me—it’s hard for me to climb it. In the direction of hitting back, there’s a valley—it’s easy for me, it’s natural to hit you back. A little ball would hit you back because those are the circumstances; the circumstances dictate. I, as a libertarian, say that although I have an impulse to hit you, if I have free choice I can also stop myself and say no, I won’t hit you, I will restrain myself. In other words, I will climb the mountain. And in that sense, if I need some nutshell description of the libertarian picture, it seems to me this picture reflects the matter well. Just one more important point has to be added here. There are situations in which even the libertarian agrees that the slope is too steep. Meaning, I have no chance of climbing the mountain even if I decide to try and do it. And those are situations that we often call an unconquerable impulse, or some kind of thing you simply can’t cope with, and there really you basically don’t have real choice. You may want to do otherwise, but you won’t succeed in realizing it. I have no choice to fly. I can’t—I don’t have that ability. So therefore it’s not correct—another common mistake regarding libertarianism—it’s not correct that we always have free choice. It’s not correct that the choice is total, because there is a topographical outline, and it’s also not correct that choice exists all the time. It doesn’t exist all the time; there are situations where it doesn’t. The libertarian claim, in its essence, says that there are situations where it does. In other words, not all situations are situations devoid of choice. That’s the claim. Therefore if someone brings examples of situations where a person doesn’t choose, that proves nothing. The libertarian also agrees there are such situations. The argument has to be about whether there are other situations. Yes.

[Speaker A] A question. In your opinion, how does the determinist see this situation that the libertarian identifies as situations of choice? How does the determinist—why does the determinist think that everything is fixed, everything is predetermined, and that we don’t have this supposedly free choice of the libertarian? How does he analyze this supposed free choice of the libertarian?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You asked two questions there: how he sees that situation, and why he thinks that. That’s not the same thing.

[Speaker A] Explain the two questions to me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One question is: how does he see situations like these, which I identify as situations of choice? How does he view them—what interpretation does he give to the matter? The second question is: why does he choose that interpretation and not my interpretation? That’s another question. In other words, the question of why probably usually stems from the principle of causality. That is, the determinist says: everything that happens has to have a cause. We are part of the world, our body certainly is material, it’s not clear there’s anything else beyond the body, but even if there is, the body is something material, and therefore it is subject to the principle of causality, to the laws of nature, to all the usual influences. And therefore he is not willing to accept a situation in which a person acts against natural influences, because that essentially contradicts the laws of physics, contradicts the principle of causality. That is the reason why he chooses to see these pictures differently. How does he see these pictures? That second question is a different one. Here, when I identify within myself that I freely choose to do this and not to do that, he will tell me that I’m living in an illusion. Basically there are mechanisms inside me that brought me to do it in a deterministic way, only for some reason I’m in some illusion as if I chose it freely. That’s how he sees the situation. Yes.

[Speaker A] Could you describe for me hypothetically the deterministic point of view in this context? Say, could you give me an example that you see as a legitimate example of free choice, and how a determinist would analyze that event of choice?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll take an example used by Sartre, yes? The well-known French philosopher. He says that a student of his in occupied Paris during World War II came to him with a dilemma. He’s there with his mother, his older brother is collaborating with the Nazis I think, and his father was killed, and his mother is elderly, sick, needs help, and so on. Now he would like to escape and join de Gaulle’s Free French army, to fight against the Nazis. On the other hand, he’d be leaving his mother alone. So he’s in a dilemma: should he fight evil, which is one value, or help his mother, which is also a value? Now the question is which value takes precedence. Now aside from the answer and how one analyzes such a thing and so on, but from my perspective there is some element of choice here. He has to decide which value stands higher in his scale of values: fighting evil or helping his mother, in a very simplistic way. Okay? So from my perspective, when he makes a decision in such a question, he basically chose freely. He could have made either one of the two decisions, and he chooses one of them. The determinist who looks at this would say as follows: if I had been tracking his brain processes, I could have told you what he would choose, because basically this is a result of the existing structure, of the current state in his brain, even before he chose. Basically I could have—if I had a computer big enough, like Laplace, yes? Laplace’s thesis. If I had enough computational power and the full data set regarding that person and his environment, I could tell you exactly what he would do with certainty. In other words, that is the deterministic picture. Why does that person, that student, think for a second that he has free choice? He’s simply living in an illusion. He has some epiphenomenon, some accompanying illusory phenomenon, as though he is choosing, but that’s an illusion. Okay.

[Speaker A] My difficulty with your presentation of the deterministic point of view is that you identify it as based on some materialism or physicalism. Am I right that you identify the deterministic point of view as a physicalist point of view, that everything is matter?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Conceptually it doesn’t have to go together, but in practice, with most people, it seems to me that that is the motivation for being a determinist. Conceptually, you can be a determinist even if you’re a dualist, even if you think a person has a soul—still it could be that the whole thing operates in a deterministic way. Meaning, it doesn’t have to be accompanied by physicalism. Factually, it seems to me that most of the people I’ve met and read who hold a deterministic position do so because of a physicalist picture, yes.

[Speaker A] Okay. So I’ll say that I’m not—maybe a kind of physicalist, but not exactly. I pretty much accept Popper’s point of view, that he’s a multi-world thinker, a pluralist, not a dualist but a pluralist. Do you know Popper’s metaphysics? No. I’ll say it briefly. He speaks of at least three worlds that are all equally real. He talks about the physical world, the standard ordinary one. He talks about the world of sensory perceptions, feelings, thoughts in the subjective sense of the word—that’s world two. And he talks about world three, and world three is the world of ideas, thoughts, and things like that, which he says is the world of thoughts and ideas in themselves, fully objective. For example, he talks about mathematics as an example of the reality of that world in itself. He says: we invented numbers, but after we invented numbers, we discovered even and odd numbers and prime numbers. In other words, we discovered all kinds of objective qualities within that world that we ourselves did not put into it. So that’s world three. And he says that this third world, the world of thoughts in themselves, emerged out of world two, the world of experiences and sensations and so on, and world two emerged out of world one, out of the physical world. So that’s a little anecdote about Popper’s view.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And if I understand correctly, then you’re really talking about physicalism, except that from within it there is emergence, yes? There is emergence of additional things—mental phenomena, and afterward maybe also the world of mathematical truths, where I identify some contradiction in your words, but that’s not our topic at the moment—or in Popper’s, I don’t know whether in your words or his—but in the end, if I understand correctly, it’s physicalism. Meaning, the fact that there are phenomena that emerge out of this physical whole—okay, so what? But they don’t have existence as an additional substance. They’re simply properties of the physical whole. Yes.

[Speaker A] You’re raising an excellent point, one I largely agree with. Popper wouldn’t have agreed with it, but I do agree with it. And in this context I go with two other thinkers who probably liked Popper less—at least his ideas—Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who talk about something they call hierarchical reductionism. They say—they don’t talk about the world of thoughts—from physics, from the laws of physics, on the basis of which everything operates, they would say, well, we have another ten minutes, let’s make use of the time as much as we can, and I apologize that this is so short, I’d be happy to continue with you more, I hope we’ll get to do that later. So they say that everything operates on the basis of the laws of physics, but out of physics emerged chemistry, and chemistry is a more complex system than physics, and it has more complex structures that emerged from the laws of physics, and the laws of physics apply to the laws of chemistry, but there are more complex structures there that have been added on top of the laws of physics. From chemistry there emerged, there was created, biology—biological systems, life—which are also subject to the laws of physics, but in a more complex way. Meaning, if you look at a biological system, you can analyze it chemically, but that would be very complex, and you can analyze it physically. If you look closely at a biological system, you’ll see that it’s a very, very complex physical system.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s just ordinary reductionism. I’m not hearing anything else here. What does that mean? It means materialism. In other words, okay, you’re just describing reductionism, which is a very widespread approach, but I don’t see how that advances us in the discussion about choice.

[Speaker A] Because the claim is that the biological system behaves—and out of the biological system emerged the psychological system, which is even more complex. Consciousness—that out of that emerged human consciousness, which is perhaps the peak of this hierarchy. So if we look for a moment at the biological system, the animal, then the claim is that the animal, the biological system, is totally subject to the physical system—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But—

[Speaker A] —but to someone looking from the side it looks as though it isn’t. Right? Water flows in a purely physical way, say, but an animal that climbs the mountain and doesn’t flow down with it—supposedly it isn’t subject to the physical system, to physical laws. But in fact, what this hierarchical reductionism claims is that thanks to all kinds of constraints and complexities of the physical system, the biological system appears as though it isn’t operating according to the laws of physics, but it actually is also operating according to the laws of physics.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but in the end, if I summarize what you said, it’s just a more detailed version of what I said earlier. You’re basically saying that causality, at its root, is causality because of the laws of physics, which in turn generate chemistry and biology and psychology and, if you want, also the sociology of society—but in the end this is physicalist causality. And why does it appear to us like free choice or like something that doesn’t obey the laws of physics? It’s an illusion. An illusion—never mind now, you said illusion, it’s like vitalism in biology, it doesn’t matter. But you’re basically saying that the determinist sees free choice as a kind of illusion, and what leads him to be a determinist is physicalist causality, which is exactly the two answers to the two questions I posed earlier, yes.

[Speaker A] Right, so what I want to say is that we don’t have to go to physics in order to support determinism. Let’s go back to the example of the Frenchman who has the question of what to do—whether to help his mother or join the resistance—and the deterministic point of view, as I understand it, says that… what determines for that person the choice he ultimately makes—it matters less whether it’s physicalist or not, the physical processes in his brain and so on. What matters more is that what determines his choice is his history. His history, meaning the combination of his genetics and his psychology and his experiences. Everything that happened before that moment of choice in his life is what determines the choice he ultimately makes. No—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s the same thing. The claim is—after all, where did the brain structure come from, because of which the currents flow in such a way that he’ll choose option A or option B? It was shaped by nature and nurture, that is, by his history. Yes, that’s obvious. But in the end, what he does is a product of those brain currents, which are themselves a result of his whole history having shaped his brain in a certain way. And therefore in the end this is exactly physical determinism, where that physics is of course shaped by other phenomena whose influence on it is also a physical influence. Even what you call history, as you said before with reductionism—even that is physics. Meaning, in the end everything is physics. So the whole question is at what level of integration you’re looking at the problem. But when you look at it on the micro level, everything is physics. And therefore you are indeed describing the same picture I presented earlier in the name of the determinist, who says that basically everything is physics, and of course we have different levels of looking at it, but everything is physics—and therefore you’re saying that someone, a libertarian, who sees a certain situation as a choice, is living in an illusion. That is basically the claim. Yes.

[Speaker A] But I want to check with you—what I’m trying to say is that the physicalist point of view is not necessary in order to explain what I mean when I talk about determinism. Even if the world is not physical, physics doesn’t interest me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Conceptually there’s no dependence. I said that earlier too: conceptually there’s no dependence. What I said is that usually most people do start from physicalism, and I think it’s no accident that you began your description with the reductionism of Dennett and Dawkins, since in the end you too needed it. Conceptually it doesn’t have to be so. Conceptually you can be a determinist even without being a physicalist, as I said before. I agree.