Research Forum: Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham in Conversation with Yerah Tal on the Publication of His Book ‘The Science of Freedom’ – Bar-Ilan University

[Speaker A] Right under our noses, a scientific revolution is taking place with enormous implications for our lives. Neuroscience, the most heavily funded field of scientific research today, is rapidly exposing the hidden workings of the human brain. From this arise difficult, fascinating, and very complex questions about our free will, about human legal and moral responsibility, what the soul is that we’re so used to talking about, and really what a human being is, and what distinguishes a human from animals and inanimate matter, if anything. The book “The Science of Freedom” deals with the question of free will and also touches on materialism, body and soul. These are two questions that have accompanied our culture and philosophy almost since the beginning of human thought. Today on our program we are hosting the author of the book, Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham. Hello to you, Rabbi Dr. Michael Abraham. Hello, hello. My first question is: how is it possible that well-known experts and researchers claim these questions have already been solved scientifically, while the book argues that they are still open questions?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that’s a good question. I think it could also have been asked about my previous book, “God Plays Dice,” which dealt with evolution, and maybe that really is a thread connecting the two books. Because in both of these fields, they are completely scientific fields, but they are saturated with philosophical assumptions and with philosophical conclusions and considerations, and sometimes even the experts or scientists working in these fields don’t always put their finger on the sharp boundary between their scientific expertise and the interpretations, the philosophical meanings. And many times we can find people who are very talented researchers in the various scientific fields, in both of these contexts and in others, expressing positions that go beyond the findings and beyond the boundaries of their specific expertise, expressing positions on all kinds of philosophical questions adjacent to those fields, without either they or their listeners noticing that at that point they have already drifted into the realm of philosophy, interpretation, a realm in which they are really no different from me or you or anyone else. So when I hear various experts, and I hear quite a few of them from neuroscience, saying that neuroscience has shown that our world, or the human being, is basically a biological machine, a purely materialistic world with no soul and no spirit, and therefore the worldview accompanying its activity is deterministic, I immediately realize that some line has been crossed here, because many of them do not even fully know how to define the concept of free choice, and I even show that in the book. So I am not all that impressed by declarations from experts that philosophical problems have been solved by scientific tools. You should respect it, but suspect it. In other words, you have to examine it carefully before accepting such an answer.

[Speaker A] Don’t genetics, psychology, and neuroscience indicate that we are driven by material, mechanical, physical systems? Where can free will be seen? Every action and every tendency we have has a genetic explanation or a psychological explanation, so where exactly is our freedom?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This really gets to the point I also mentioned in response to the previous question. The definition of free choice, or free will, contains a few subtle points. One of them, which I think many people miss, is the difference between influence and determination. In other words, when I say that genetics influences my behavior, my character, my decisions, that is of course a scientific fact. You can’t argue with that; it’s perfectly clear today. The question is whether genetics determines my behavior, meaning that once genetics has spoken, there are no longer two possibilities standing before me. In other words, it no longer depends on my choice. That’s no longer saying genetics influences my behavior; it’s saying it determines my behavior. Now for that claim there is no evidence from any field, not neuroscience, not psychology, not genetics, almost, I would say, in principle. In one of the chapters of the book I deal with Libet’s experiments, which are a series of experiments that try, using scientific tools, to examine this question from the standpoint of neuroscience, and I try to show in a very systematic way that even if those experiments were improved in ways still far from what has been done to date, it is still completely unlikely that we will reach an answer to this question by scientific means. And therefore the definition of the concept of influence versus the concept of determination, or the distinction between the concept of influence and the concept of determination, is a critical distinction, and many people miss it. So I accept that genetics influences our behavior and our character, and likewise the brain, likewise psychology, and the environment. Anyone who denies that is simply denying facts. But I do not accept the claim that they determine our behavior. The distinction we make even in the courts between a person who is responsible for his actions and a person who is not responsible for his actions, a person overtaken by some irresistible impulse, a legal concept that leads us to exempt him from responsibility, that concept is essentially emptied of content, because where you identify influence with determination, you’re basically saying that anywhere someone is influenced by his genetic or neural system, you interpret that as though he is determined, or his actions are determined, by that system. In effect, you’ve turned him into someone not responsible for his actions. That empties of content the distinction between a person who decides, a person who is responsible for his actions, and a person who is influenced but in the end is still the one who decided, and therefore the responsibility for what he did rests on him.

[Speaker A] The main problem in the view that supports free will is the question of how it can be reconciled with the principle of causality, which says that everything has a cause. Could you please, Dr. Abraham, explain the problem to us?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, here too there is another point that is subtle on the one hand and must be understood well, and on the other hand it may really be the Achilles’ heel of the libertarian position. Libertarianism is sometimes understood in economic or social contexts, but in our context I mean the position that supports free will; I call it libertarianism. And indeed there is a point here that is definitely worth clarifying. The accepted understanding of the principle of causality is that every event in the world has a cause. Anything that happens in the world—say I suddenly hear a noise behind me—I immediately look back to see what made that noise. I don’t assume that the noise just began without something causing it, bringing it about, exactly. That assumption is almost a cornerstone of scientific thinking, although even about that I discuss in the book that I don’t think it’s a result of science but rather an assumption science makes, namely that everything has a cause. In other words, no event happens—at least no physical event, and maybe non-physical events too—without a prior cause. Now if I relate to events that are human behavior or human action, and I trace the whole causal chain backward, I roll the carpet back and say, for example, a person decided—I don’t know—to punch someone. That hand was raised; that’s a physical action. That had a cause. In other words, the muscle raised the hand. That muscle received some electrical signal that caused it to contract or stretch. That electrical signal was itself created as a result of some field that acted and moved the electrons or produced an electric current forward. And that field, too, is supposed to have had some cause; that’s also a physical thing. Where does all this begin? Everything in that chain has a prior cause. Now, in the ordinary causal picture, you really have to keep going all the way back to the Big Bang. In other words, the electric field that moved the electrons that went to the muscle that extended the hand that delivered the punch and then the person fell down, that whole chain, one thing after another, right? If you keep going back, what caused that electric field? So the causality people, or determinists, will say there was some power source, I don’t know what, that caused the electric field, and what caused that source? Something else, and so on. You spread this physical chain backward, and you have to keep going farther and farther back. It can’t stop, because the moment it stops, you’ve reached a point with no cause. That contradicts the principle of causality. So you have to go all the way back to the Big Bang. But the thing is, if you really go all the way back to the Big Bang, the meaning is that none of us ever made a decision about anything. We did not bring about anything we ever did, because everything we did is really just the endpoint of a chain that began with the Big Bang. And then the question is: where is our responsibility for our actions? Where is our choice? So the principle of causality apparently leads us directly to a deterministic view, to a view in which a person does not choose but is acted upon, acted upon by physical causes in the brain and outside the brain as well. And here lies the true Achilles’ heel of the libertarian view, because how can you believe that a person chooses freely? Free choice means that given a certain physical state of the brain, if I’m relating to the brain at the moment, there are still two possibilities before me, and both are open to me. I can do A and I can do B, whereas in the causal picture this cannot be, because if the current state dictates action A, then the laws of physics say action A will occur. How can it be that I can decide to do action B when physics dictates action A? That is the contradiction between the principle of causality and the notion of free will. Well, if I may, I can also try to explain why I think we shouldn’t be too troubled by it, but that’s the problem. You asked what the problem is—that’s the problem.

[Speaker A] The principle of causality was seriously undermined in twentieth-century physics. Seriously undermined in twentieth-century physics. So there are those who say that quantum theory and chaos open a door to bringing free will into physics. Is that really so?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Again, this is a mistake, sometimes even an embarrassing one, among physicists who are talented by all accounts.

[Speaker A] So should we just shut down our physics department?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, heaven forbid. Just know what it deals with and what it doesn’t deal with. The physicalist assumption that the whole world is really just physics, physics and its derivatives, leads people into what seems to me an absurd situation, where even when you want to defend free will, you do it within the framework of physics. You’re not willing to go beyond physics. That’s a price you’re unwilling to pay. But still, you want to be a libertarian, so show me how physics allows some freedom, the possibility of going in two directions even though the starting conditions are identical. Right, that’s what I was talking about before with the problem of causality. Now supposedly there are two areas in twentieth-century physics that allow this, and that makes certain people very happy, and they jump on it like they’ve found a great treasure. One of them is chaos, and chaos basically tells us that in many cases we cannot predict, based on the present state, what will happen in the future. Let me give you an example. Suppose you have a particle sitting on a round hill, a small ball sitting right at the top. To which side of the hill will it fall? You can’t predict it. It’ll fall to one side or the other, some wind will come, I don’t know, something will happen, it will veer to one side and fall. It won’t stay up there. We have no way of knowing to which side it will fall. Some people say: well, there you go, we have a physical model for free will. Because the initial condition is one and yet two possibilities are still open for what comes next. Exactly like in a human being, where the brain state is given and the libertarian claims that he can still do A and can still do B. In other words, the present state does not dictate a result that can be predicted. That’s the hope people place in chaos in order to explain free will. That hope is based on a misunderstanding. And it’s embarrassing sometimes to find this even among physicists, because physicists are supposed to understand what chaos is. And in chaos there is nothing non-deterministic. There is no such thing. Chaos is completely deterministic. What I cannot predict is simply due to lack of knowledge. If I knew the wind directions in the area, then of course I could know where the ball would fall, whether it would fall here or there. The reason I can’t predict it is simply because I don’t have all the information. But if I had all the information, I could predict it completely.

[Speaker A] Dr. Abraham, I want to pause for a moment and ask you something. About a week ago we heard about some doctoral student at the Technion who developed some computer program that predicts the future based on all past information, can predict the future. Doesn’t that—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know exactly what that’s about, but again I assume we need to pay attention to the distinction between influence and determination, what I talked about at the beginning. Predicting the future with probability one—I don’t believe there is such a thing. Predicting the future with high probability—definitely yes. I mean, we are constantly engaged in estimating what is going to happen in the future. I am not opposed to informed estimates of what will happen in the future. I am only arguing that it should be an informed estimate and not prophecy. Because someone who tells me he has prophecy, that he knows what will happen in the future in a deterministic way, is of course a false prophet. Yes, I think he’s a false prophet because I’m a libertarian. I do not believe in the absolute determination of the future. And again, exactly the same distinction I made before between determination and influence must be applied here. In other words, if she tells me, “I predict the future,” meaning I predict what is expected to happen, what is likely to happen—no problem. We all try to do that, with varying degrees of success. If she tells me 98 percent, whatever, as long as it’s not 100 percent, I have no principled problem with it. We need to check whether it works or not. But if it’s 100 percent, that means that in principle she is claiming there is no other possibility. If she claims there is no other possibility, then I disagree with her. Now here, if I continue for a moment about chaos, chaos is an example of inability to predict the future not because the future was not determined in advance, but because I don’t have enough information. That is not free will; that is absolute determinism. So what if I don’t have enough information? If I don’t know whether my wife has given birth to a boy or a girl, say I’m abroad and my wife gave birth, and I don’t know whether I have a boy or a girl, does that mean it hasn’t yet been determined whether it’s a boy or a girl? Of course it has been determined. It’s entirely deterministic. It’s fixed. I just don’t know it, that’s all. Therefore chaos cannot help in this context at all, categorically. It’s simply a conceptual mistake to mix chaos into this issue. As for quantum theory, that’s much more subtle. I also explain in the book why quantum theory can’t help us here either. Just yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with a man named Dr. Doron Ledwin, who tries to argue that one can indeed offer such an explanation. I’m not sure I accept it, but it’s more complex; for that you’d need to do some reading.

[Speaker A] So how do you claim that a libertarian view can nevertheless be reconciled with the principle of causality?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, we really are in a difficult spot here. On the one hand, I said that the principle of causality is accepted by most people, by our common sense, by our scientific thinking. I’m not willing to deny it; that’s not a price I’m willing to pay in order to remain a libertarian. On the other hand, I said that it contradicts libertarianism. I can’t hold both things. And on a third hand, chaos and quantum theory won’t help me here. So I keep shooting myself in the foot. So how can I still remain a libertarian? Here it really requires a broader philosophical discussion, which I do in the book. I’ll put it in one sentence; the rest you’ll have to read. One has to distinguish between the principle of causality and what Leibniz would call the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason exists even with respect to free choice. The principle of causality is indeed undermined there, and that too has to be defined more precisely, but I do that in the book.

[Speaker A] Could you give us examples of the implications that the question of determinism has for life? Does it affect morality? Does it prevent assigning moral responsibility to a person who sinned? What distinguishes a human being from an animal, if anything?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, that’s really a good question,

[Speaker A] It needs a few hours.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I’ll try to summarize it too. First of all, regarding the assignment of moral responsibility: you ask a determinist, and that’s always the first question people ask a determinist, if a human being is a biological machine, then what justification is there to judge him, to condemn him, to praise him morally or legally? Why do I see him as responsible for his actions? The answer the determinist will give is simply that the judge is also compelled to judge. Just as the sinner or criminal is compelled to commit the offense, the judge is compelled to judge. And therefore there really is no justification for condemning or praising someone for an action he performed, but the world of justifications does not exist in the deterministic picture. We are not looking for justification; we simply perform actions. And indeed in this picture, it seems to me that what distinguishes a human from an animal does not exist, because all in all we are just a more complex biological machine, that’s all. But still, the discourse between us is an imagined discourse; there is nothing behind it. I say what I must say, you answer what you must answer, I do what I must do, you judge me for what I must do because you must judge. But not because you decided, or because I decided to sin, or because you decided to condemn me. So in that sense there is no practical effect, no practical consequence to this dispute. But there is a very important consequence regarding how we see the human being. Is the human being a machine, or is the human being really responsible for his actions? Do we really judge him? Are there really wicked people and righteous people? On the deterministic side, there is no such thing; these are words, empty of content. Now as for additional implications, let me give just one example because it’s an amusing anecdote. Jean Buridan was a French scholar in the 14th century at the Sorbonne in Paris. Yes, he’s well known, mainly thanks to his donkey. Yes, Buridan’s donkey is a donkey standing between two feeding troughs at equal distance, and according to Buridan it is supposed to die of hunger, because it has no way to decide which trough is preferable to which, so it stands in front of two troughs full of food and dies of hunger, with no way to decide. Now I ask the question—in the last chapter of the book I ask the reader to ask himself—this is a question for self-examination, a diagnostic question: what do you think would happen if a human being stood in such a situation? Not a donkey. A human being stood in such a situation. In a deterministic picture, the person would die of hunger, necessarily. I can prove it mathematically. In a deterministic picture, a person in such a situation would die of hunger exactly like a donkey. Now a determinist can tell me: correct, that’s indeed the conclusion, and I accept it. I can’t argue with him—fine, then he is consistent with his position. I only ask the reader whether you really think that. Do you really think that a person who stands in such a situation would die of hunger? If so, then you are entitled to hold a deterministic position. But if not, then know that you are not a determinist. That’s one example of an implication of this debate.

[Speaker A] One last question, Dr. Abraham. Professor Sompolinsky, whom you thank at the beginning of the book, explains in lectures and various interviews that as a believing and commandment-observant person, he supports materialism and determinism. Usually people think there is a contradiction here. Is it really possible to reconcile these views with faith?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, I’ve had quite a few arguments with Haim Sompolinsky. He was my teacher; I studied with him here at Bar-Ilan before he moved to Jerusalem, and afterward I also took a course with him in Jerusalem. He is an outstanding physicist, really a very smart and talented man; no one disputes his scientific abilities. But I disagree somewhat with his philosophy. Both in terms of the deterministic and materialistic view he holds—I don’t agree with it—but also with his claim that it can be reconciled with a religious, believing worldview. Yes, I don’t think it can be reconciled. Now that doesn’t mean you have to abandon it. You can say, okay, I hold this view and I really won’t be a believing Jew. But it seems to me that you cannot reconcile the two. An appendix in the book deals with this; the book itself is not about religion, it is about philosophy and science. There is an appendix in the book that deals with this point. And maybe I can place just one question here: this whole materialist conclusion, which says there is nothing beyond matter, basically stems from the assumption—certainly in his case, because I know this from our conversations—that matter cannot interact with what is non-material. And therefore it also cannot detect it, it cannot know of its existence. That is basically the foundation of his materialist position. And now I ask: how does he interact with God and know of His existence?

[Speaker A] God—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He too is a non-material being. So if you cannot know about the existence of a soul or the existence of any other non-material entity, I don’t understand how you can remain a believing person. In other words, how do you carry out that interaction? Beyond that, there are all kinds of details regarding our tradition, Jewish law.

[Speaker A] And what does he answer you?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The last time I heard this, his son asked him that question at the end of the course he gave at the Hebrew University.

[Speaker A] Interesting. What did he answer him?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my opinion, he didn’t answer there. I mean, yes, he said something, but I don’t think it amounted to an answer.

[Speaker A] Leibowitz, Leibowitz though—did he have answers to these things?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he asks the questions well. He doesn’t have answers to these things.

[Speaker A] Leibowitz says science is one thing and faith is another, and that solves the problem. Solves the problem.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s a solution, or it’s turning the question mark into an exclamation mark. I don’t like that kind of answer. We need to grapple with it.

[Speaker A] Dr. Michael Abraham, this was fascinating, and as they say, just the tip of the iceberg. And anyone who wants to expand and learn more, we recommend reading the book. The book really is fascinating. I enjoyed it very much, and now even more. Thank you very much, Dr. Michael Abraham, and to you listeners, goodbye and shalom. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.