Michael Abraham: A Conceptual Framework for Discussing Free Will – Lecture at the Second Free Will Conference, May 2024 – Free Will

Table of Contents

• [0:02] Introduction and presentation of the lecture’s goals
• [2:32] The question of the meaning of free will
• [3:47] A positivist challenge and the need for empiricism
• [4:57] The need for empirical experiments like Libet’s
• [9:18] The donkey thought experiment and symmetry
• [10:43] Van Inwagen’s argument against free choice
• [12:51] Compatibilism and the definition of freedom
• [15:19] Brain plasticity and its connection to freedom
• [16:37] Examples of choices in different systems
• [19:37] A topographic outline and physical forces
• [21:36] The role of statistics in the study of choice
• [24:37] Criticism of Libet’s experiments and the ability to decide the issue
• [26:57] The personal basis for choosing libertarianism
• [28:11] Perforated determinism — will that is not causal

Summary

General overview

The speaker presents himself as a layman in the field of brain research and tries to build a precise conceptual framework for discussing free will, arguing that a large part of the debates suffer from conceptual confusion and imprecise use of positions. He describes a positivist challenge according to which libertarianism and determinism seem identical in concepts and behavior, yet there may still be a meaningful difference if one can formulate a decisive empirical prediction or examine the question on the level of human essence. He draws distinctions between determinism, indeterminism, and free will as non-causal purposiveness, criticizes compatibilism and the attribution of freedom to brain plasticity, and argues that most correlations and statistics are irrelevant to the question. In the end, he justifies his libertarianism through a philosophical decision between two a priori assumptions, and presents “perforated causality,” in which certain choices begin without a physical cause.

The goal and structure of the lecture

The speaker is hesitant to speak because he is not a professional and not a brain researcher, and he says he wrote a book because he noticed that a large part of the discussions about free will fail to distinguish properly between concepts and positions. He sets himself the goal of presenting a general picture and a conceptual framework within which the discussion takes place, along with side comments on Professor Kotzin’s lecture. He divides his remarks into four stages: why this is interesting, presenting a conceptual framework, Libet’s experiments and what followed them, and finally expressing a position.

The positivist challenge and the meaning of the difference between a libertarian and a determinist

The speaker declares that he is a libertarian and expresses frustration that he has difficulty finding a practical difference between himself and a determinist, because concepts like freedom, values, responsibility, punishment, choice, decision, and education can all be given both a deterministic and a libertarian meaning. He calls this a positivist challenge, and formulates a moderate version according to which if there is no empirical implication or different prediction, then there is no point in discussing the two possibilities, even though he is not a positivist. He distinguishes between the question of whether a libertarian and a determinist behave differently—which, he says, is usually answered in the negative—and the question of whether one can propose a scientific prediction that would distinguish between them and perhaps measure it in the laboratory, as Libet tried to do.

Three levels: concepts, empiricism, and human essence

The speaker argues that on the level of the use of concepts there is probably no prominent difference, and on the empirical level he tends to think that at present there is no way to decide the matter. He presents a third level in which the question matters because it touches on two ways of looking at what a human being is, and whether there is an essential difference between a human creature and a machine. He gives an example from the film Her, about falling in love with a computer program, to point to a human intuition of difference. He suggests that instead of empirical experiments one can use thought experiments, and emphasizes that thought experiments have scientific and diagnostic importance for clarifying a person’s true outlook.

Thought experiment: Buridan’s donkey and deterministic symmetry

The speaker presents Buridan’s donkey, which stands at equal distance from two feeding troughs and dies of hunger because it cannot decide, and argues that if a human being is a deterministic machine in a completely symmetrical situation, then the symmetry of the solution will be at least as great as the symmetry of the problem, and so no decision to the left or to the right will be reached. He qualifies this by saying that this is a precise hypothetical case with no spontaneous “symmetry breaking” at all, and notes that one could talk about quantum theory, but he does not go into that.

Peter van Inwagen’s argument and three possibilities for action

The speaker presents a common argument of Peter van Inwagen, according to which there is no free choice, because by the “excluded middle” either there is a cause for what I did, in which case it is determinism, or there is no cause, in which case it is arbitrary indeterminism—and choice is neither this nor that. He argues that the argument begs the question, because the answer “there is no cause” does not have to mean indeterminism. He divides that answer into two sub-possibilities: a random indeterministic action as opposed to free will. In general terms, he defines free will as an action that is not out of a cause but for the sake of a purpose, and is directed toward the future, whereas indeterminism is action without cause and without purpose. Thus there are three possibilities: action from a cause, action for the sake of a purpose, and action with neither.

Criticism of compatibilism and the definition of freedom

The speaker presents compatibilism as a popular approach that claims there is no contradiction between free will and determinism by using a different definition of freedom, according to which the will is free because nothing else controls it even though things influence it. He argues that this is wordplay and semantics, and that it does not answer the essential needs that make the discussion important in the first place, such as knowing who stands before us or grounding responsibility. He emphasizes that libertarianism requires inner freedom, so even if nothing external determines what I will want, still, if the will is a deterministic product of an internal structure, then this is not libertarianism in the sense he is after.

Brain plasticity, Ciechanover, and the parable of elections in Syria and Switzerland

The speaker cites a statement by Ciechanover that there is free choice because there is brain plasticity, and argues that this is a misunderstanding, because plasticity only means that the brain is dynamic; it does not determine whether that dynamism is deterministic or not, and certainly does not necessarily point to inner freedom. He presents a parable of elections in Syria, Switzerland, and Israel, and argues that Syria illustrates a choice in which “no one is forcing you,” yet there is only one ballot slip, so this resembles compatibilist freedom, not libertarian freedom. He describes metaphorical Switzerland as a place where there is freedom to choose, but the choice changes nothing because there are no problems, and concludes that freedom has meaning when one acts within a system of constraints and prices.

Freedom, liberty, and a topographic outline of constraints

The speaker distinguishes between freedom as the absence of limitations and liberty as choosing within a system of constraints, and argues that true libertarianism is speaking about liberty. He proposes seeing the whole set of influences—brain and its structure, genetics, environment, pressures, education—as a topographic outline of mountains and valleys within which a person acts. He argues that the determinist sees the human being as a little ball whose motion is determined by the outline, whereas the libertarian sees a person who can also act against the forces acting on him. Therefore, correlations between environment or inner structure and behavior are accepted even by a “sober” libertarian and do not decide the dispute.

Correlations, statistics, and the failure of relevance without one hundred percent prediction

The speaker argues that most arguments about high correlations are irrelevant, because only a one hundred percent correlation or a one hundred percent predictive ability could even begin to decide between determinism and libertarianism, and that does not happen in practice. He says one can do statistics on human behavior even if the human being is not deterministic, just as one can get a stable distribution from rolling a random die. In the same way, within the libertarian topographic outline, statistics will reflect the “pressures” of the outline, not the cancellation of choice.

Chaos, quanta, and emergentism

The speaker says there are attempts to fit determinism into a scientific framework through chaos and quantum theory, and he argues that this cannot be done. In particular, in quantum theory there is a distribution that limits what will happen, and violating the distribution still contradicts the laws of nature. He presents emergentism as the view that mental phenomena are global properties of the physical whole, and argues that it cannot help the libertarian, because the dynamics are determined on the microscopic level, while the macroscopic properties are only an accompanying epiphenomenon. He illustrates this in terms of statistical mechanics: many microscopic states can look like one macroscopic state such as “violence,” but the physical determination sits below, so this does not solve the problem of free will.

Libet’s experiments: the demand for one hundred percent, veto, picking and choosing, and value dilemmas

The speaker argues that he does not see any possibility on the horizon that Libet-style experiments will decide between determinism and libertarianism, because what is required is one hundred percent success, and statistical significance is not enough, since it could simply be an expression of the topographic outline. He says the question of Libet’s veto also depends on the demand for one hundred percent. He adds that Libet’s experiments are more suited to picking than to choosing, because in a random action there is no reason to resist the initial impulse to press. He notes that Mudrik and Maoz tried to deal with choosing, and raises another claim: when it comes to dilemmas between two values, the question is where the value decision was made in constructing the scale of values. He attributes to Leibowitz the position that our choice lies mainly in adopting values, so it is no surprise that preceding measures will predict behavior once the values already exist.

The justification for libertarianism: two a priori assumptions and lex specialis

The speaker presents two competing intuitions: the principle of causality, that everything has a cause, and the immediate feeling that he has free choice. He argues that experience does not provide the principle of causality, and attributes to David Hume the claim that the principle of causality does not arise from experience but is an a priori assumption. Therefore, these are two conflicting a priori assumptions with no empirical way to decide between them. He proposes a philosophical decision based on the legal rule of lex specialis, the priority of the specific: one accepts the principle of causality as a general rule, but makes an exception for actions that are the result of free choice. He calls this perforated determinism or perforated causality.

Will as non-causal and the first electron

The speaker says that a will arises in him “out of nothing,” and that it is non-causal; he assumes dualism, though he does not go into it. He argues that will does not contradict the laws of nature because it is not a material entity, but it is against causality, and afterward the will causes the action, so there is a cause for the action, but it is not a physical cause. He concludes that in libertarianism, the first electron that moves in the chain that produces a voluntary action is an electron that moves without a physical force moving it. He argues that anyone who wants to be a libertarian has to get to that point, and that this is where one must confront the difficulty of integrating a libertarian view into a scientific framework.

Hello everyone. Aside from the trauma of an hour-and-a-half drive with the radio on, which makes it a little hard for me to speak, there’s also a certain concern stemming from the fact that I’m not a professional. I’m not from this field, I’m not a brain researcher, and I don’t work professionally in any of the branches connected to brain research. But at a certain point I noticed that a great many of the discussions about free will suffer from a poor understanding of the concepts, or they don’t use the concepts correctly or precisely, they don’t properly distinguish between the different positions that we want either to attack or to support, and that’s also why I wrote the book. So I wanted to speak here about that, to present some general picture of this discussion, or the framework within which this discussion takes place. And I think that if I manage to present this framework, then there are many points where you can see that they either don’t touch the question of free will at all, or they touch it in a different way, including quite a few side comments on the fascinating lecture we just heard from Professor Kotzin. So I apologize in advance both for being a layman and for being brief, that is, because I’m trying to present a complete picture and naturally I won’t go into all kinds of specific issues in greater breadth.

So what I actually want to deal with is four stages. In the first stage I want to deal a bit with the question of why this is interesting. The second stage is to try to present the conceptual framework, which is really my main goal. In the third stage I chose Libet’s experiments and their continuation, which were also mentioned earlier, because through them I can perhaps present a little of the implications of the conceptual framework, even though I doubt how far they really are the right tool for dealing with this issue. And at the end I will nevertheless also want to express a position. That is, the beginning will only be to present the different views, to place them in context, but in the end, from a more general perspective, I’ll also want to state a position.

So let me perhaps begin with the first stage: why is this interesting? After getting a little into the issue of free will, I discovered, to my frustration—I’m a libertarian, disclosure—I discovered, to my frustration, that I really can’t find a place where there’s a difference between me and a determinist. That is, almost every concept or phenomenon I raise can be given a deterministic meaning, exactly like the libertarian meaning. And in a certain sense, yes, I brought here a list of concepts: freedom, values, responsibility, punishment, choice and decision, education, and many more concepts, all of which can exist in a deterministic world and also in a libertarian world, of course with somewhat different connotations, but they’re used in the same way. And they have the same implications, and that’s why I called this the positivist challenge. Because positivism—logical positivism at least—basically says that if you don’t have a scientific implication, if there isn’t a different prediction for the two possibilities between which you’re trying to decide, then these aren’t really two possibilities. Well, that’s already an extreme formulation, but there’s no point discussing them. Let’s put it more moderately: there’s no point discussing them, because in fact only empirical tools are relevant for deciding questions.

Now, I’m not a positivist, but still this is a troubling question: is there really a difference? Is this really just a different feeling about the same conceptual system? Across this whole semantic field that touches on free will, one can talk about free will without believing in freedom—exactly the same conceptual system, without exception. And then the question is whether this is really just about two kinds of feeling, nothing beyond that. And then what’s the point of discussing it?

But there is a question here. We need to distinguish between two different questions, or two different kinds of questions. The first question is whether a libertarian and a determinist behave differently. I think that, by and large, they do not. That’s pretty frustrating, but by and large they do not. That is, basically what a libertarian does, a determinist also does, and vice versa—and again, with the interpretive and semantic backing that I mentioned earlier—but in practice they do the same thing. So that’s what I called earlier the positivist challenge.

On the other hand, we can try to examine this not at the level of behavior and reporting—the subjective level—but as a scientific question. That is, can one propose some different prediction for the libertarian and deterministic views, and maybe even measure it in the lab, as Libet tried to do? Then, even if in terms of discourse both the libertarian and the determinist use the same conceptual system and behave in the same way, the question would still have meaning, even scientific meaning. And maybe in a certain sense, this question—contrary to what I tend to think, or tended to think—maybe this question has meaning only in the conceptual sense, because in the philosophical sense maybe it has no meaning at all. But scientifically maybe, if we find an experiment that can decide, or there is some prediction that we can test and it will decide between these two possibilities, then perhaps this question still has meaning, because I want to know the truth. Even if I continue behaving in the same way and using the same conceptual system, there is still something different there.

So this really raises the question of testability—science for confirmation or refutation. That’s what I asked earlier: is there an experiment that could decide the matter? But still the feeling is that this is the smaller question. Maybe not in this forum, but it seems to me even in this forum. This is the smaller question. People are troubled by something deeper. I don’t think we’re here in order to check whether Libet was right, or whether the readiness potential really appears before a person makes the decision or afterward. What interests us is not the physical phenomenon, what happens in the brain, but rather some two different ways of looking at what a person is, what a human being is.

Yes, I mentioned in parentheses the movie Her. Someone falls in love with a computer program. It seems to me that most of us would not fall in love with a computer program—I think so, at least. And you can say that this is only a result of our makeup, that we’re built in such a way that we don’t fall in love with computer programs, but that it’s not really something essential. But it seems to me that most people tend to think otherwise. That is, it does matter to us whether the one standing in front of us is some creature fundamentally different from a machine or not.

And that’s a third level. That is, the first level is the use of concepts. There, apparently, there’s no difference, or at least nothing prominent that I can think of. On the empirical level—we’ll see later—I also tend to think that there’s no way to decide this, at least for now, no way to decide it empirically. On the third level, however, this is still an interesting question. It’s an interesting question, and maybe a very important one for us despite all the reservations I described earlier, because we want to know whom we’re dealing with, who is standing in front of us.

So what can perhaps be done? We can do thought experiments even if not empirical experiments. Suppose I reach the conclusion that you can’t do an empirical experiment—can I do a scientific experiment? I can do a thought experiment. We know from the history of science that there are several thought experiments that changed the face of science even though they were thought experiments. Yes, from my field, physics, these are Einstein’s famous thought experiments, for example, that gave rise to special relativity. So thought experiments do matter. They matter not only in directing the stance of science, but also as a diagnostic tool. By diagnostic I don’t mean diagnosing diseases but diagnosing worldviews. That is, a person can test what his view really is. A person is not always aware of his true view. He thinks he’s a libertarian; in fact he’s a determinist, or vice versa. That can happen. And the way to become aware of this is to ask yourself various questions, give them some intuitive answer, and check what that answer actually presupposes.

I brought one example here. Yes, this drawing is a caricature about the Panama Canal, about the decision to dig the Panama Canal. But I want to talk here about Buridan’s man—Buridan’s donkey. That same donkey standing at equal distance from two troughs and dying of hunger because he has no way to decide whether to go right or left. And I want to argue that if we really are materialist determinists in the usual sense, then a person standing in such a situation would die of hunger. He would die of hunger because if a person is a deterministic machine then—yes, this is a theorem in mathematics—the symmetry of the solution is at least as great as the symmetry of the problem. And if the problem has left-right symmetry, then the result, assuming it is some computation or solution of an equation, must also have left-right symmetry. And left-right symmetry doesn’t allow approaching either the right trough—or table, in the case of human beings—or the left table. So you can stay where you are or walk forward, but in any case you will die of hunger.

And of course I’m speaking now about a very hypothetical case, where it is completely symmetrical and there’s no tiny breeze that breaks symmetry spontaneously and all sorts of such concepts from physics, which I think in this context are less relevant because this is a thought experiment. I want to speak about a hypothetical case in which nothing breaks the symmetry, that is, it is perfectly exact. One can talk a little about quantum theory, but I won’t get into that right now.

So let’s move into the conceptual framework. The conceptual framework—I actually want to begin with a very common argument in these discussions, and that is Peter van Inwagen’s argument. And he says this. He wants to argue that we do not have free choice. Why? Because there is the law of the excluded middle, right? I ask whether there is a cause for what I did. The answer is either yes or no. Right? There’s no third possibility. So if yes, that’s determinism. And if no, that’s indeterminism. That is, it’s chance, so you just operate arbitrarily. But choice is neither this nor that. Choice is not something done out of a cause, but neither is it arbitrary; it’s not something we just do out of the blue. We do it because we have some sort of judgment, whatever it may be, but it’s not an arbitrary act. He says: on the logical map there is no room for this, because the answer is either yes or no—what else could there be?

So I think he is mistaken, or he is begging the question in the usual manner of logical arguments. And the claim is: true, the answer is either yes or no, but the answer no is not necessarily indeterminism. That is, this brown line should actually be joined to the lower line. When I answer no, that there is no cause, that “no cause” divides into two sub-possibilities. One possibility is indeterminism, a meaningless action, and the second possibility is free will. What is the difference between them? Free will, one could say in generalization—I’m not sure it’s always correct, but as a generalization it gives the essence of the matter—free will is basically directed toward the future. It does not act out of a cause but for the sake of an end. It wants to achieve something. And indeterminism has neither cause nor end. So in fact there are three possibilities: action from a cause, action for the sake of an end, and action with neither this nor that. Of course the lower two have no cause. But he assumed that he had identified the answer “no cause” with indeterminism, and here he is begging the question. Because the libertarian argues that you cannot identify the two.

Now, maybe he’s right and maybe he’s not, but his argument does not prove it, because his argument assumes what it needs to prove.

So now I want to continue and add a few more qualifications to the issue of free will. There is a very popular approach in recent years called compatibilism. I assume it’s familiar. I apologize that there aren’t many innovations in what I’m saying, but I think the general picture is important for the discussion. Compatibilism, in my view, is playing a game with the concept of freedom. That is, it defines the concept of freedom differently from how we usually define it, and therefore it claims that there is no contradiction between free will and determinism. You can be a determinist and still uphold free will. Why? It’s a bit reminiscent of things Professor Kotzin said earlier: because the will is free in the sense that nothing else controls it. It influences it, by the way, but does not determine it. Many things influence it, but do not determine it. In that sense, the will is free. But to my mind this is wordplay. It’s wordplay. You can define freedom that way; that’s semantics. But for the substantial things I defined at the beginning—for example why it matters to me to know who is standing opposite me, that human need—I think this concept of freedom does not provide an answer. Or with regard to legal responsibility, though legal responsibility is a bit tricky, but there too it seems to me that we are looking for something a little different when we talk about freedom.

That is, libertarianism says there is freedom in the internal sense as well. Even if nothing external determines what I will want, still, if what I want is the deterministic outcome of some structure inside me, I do not call that libertarianism. That’s a label—you can call it libertarianism if you want—but one must always keep in mind why we are engaged in this discussion. And when we understand why we are engaged in this discussion, then we need to ask whether libertarianism for the sake of that goal—does this definition suffice? Does this definition of libertarianism suffice? Would I fall in love with someone who has free will in the compatibilist sense? Personally, I don’t think so. I haven’t tried.

So I actually want to speak about another qualification, and that is the plasticity of the brain. There was some statement by Ciechanover, never mind, he argued that we are free creatures, that we have free choice because the brain is plastic. To my mind that is a misunderstanding, with all due respect, because the plasticity of the brain only means that the brain is dynamic. But that does not tell us what the root of that dynamism is. Is the root of that dynamism some process that is itself inherently deterministic? That is, internal, not external. Externally too, by the way—brain plasticity is partly influenced by external factors as well. But as I said earlier, when I speak of libertarianism or freedom, for me this means internal freedom as well, not only external. And brain plasticity does not necessarily indicate internal freedom. It can; of course if there is internal freedom, the brain will presumably be plastic. But if there is no internal freedom, that does not mean it won’t be plastic.

Okay, so therefore in this context too it seems to me that the discussions need a bit of correction. An example I like in these contexts: think about democratic elections being conducted in three countries: Syria, Switzerland, and Israel. In Syria, a person enters the polling station and has complete freedom to choose whatever he wants from the only ballot there, Assad’s, and in the end Assad is elected, surprisingly, and it’s always 99.7 percent. That is, it’s never 100; I don’t know how that happens. There is free will, apparently. In any case, that is one kind of choice. The second kind is elections in Switzerland. Metaphorical Switzerland, yes? A country with no problems. So you are free to choose this way or that way, only it doesn’t matter what you choose. It doesn’t matter what you choose because there are no problems, so what difference does it make whether this government or that government is elected? Freedom has meaning in a place where I act within a system of constraints that probably is partly independent of me, or structurally dependent—that is, I’m born into it, genetically, environmentally, whatever. But when I act within a system of constraints and prices, there is a price to whether I choose this or that, and I choose freely among the different options—that is what I call free choice.

Syria is actually compatibilism—sorry, Syria is compatibilism in this sense. You feel free, no one from outside tells you anything, but there is only one ballot. Okay, so that is basically a parable for compatibilism. So that is freedom—nobody outside says anything to you—but it isn’t really libertarianism as I’m speaking about it here. Switzerland is some kind of freedom that I, in contrast to what happens in countries where there are problems—and we know one or two such countries—I call liberty, as distinct from freedom. Liberty is free choice within a system of constraints. Freedom is the absence of limitations. Okay? That’s something else. And I think genuine libertarianism speaks about liberty, not freedom. We are speaking within a system of limitations, and here I come to the essence of the matter.

I think that when you look at free choice—and again, without getting into whether it’s true or not, but this is the concept of free choice, and this is what must be discussed—you can look at it as a kind of topographic map of mountains, valleys, saddles, hills, and so on. A little ball placed there would of course roll down to places of minimum energy, right? That is, the terrain would dictate—or a stream of water would dictate—where it goes. Okay? When a person is on such a terrain, he can of course decide to climb the mountain. Even though in terms of forces the forces obviously push him downward, he can climb, decide to climb the mountain against the force acting on him. This is, of course, a metaphor.

What I basically want to claim is that if I take the whole system of influences that exist, including the brain and its structure, including genetics, including environment, including pressures from every direction and influences and education and whatever you want, from the libertarian perspective all that is the topographic terrain within which I act. It is not me. Now I act within that terrain. The determinist will say that I am the little ball. That is, in effect the terrain determines what I will do. The libertarian claims that I am the person, in the previous metaphor. That is, the libertarian basically says: the forces acting on the little ball act on me too; I am a physical creature. But as a person I can decide to act against the forces, and therefore very often—indeed, this is rather rare—but still, this says nothing about the question of determinism, because the question of determinism says that the determinist is basically saying that the topographic terrain determines your behavior. The libertarian also agrees that the topographic terrain influences your behavior, and therefore when there is influence or correlation between this environment, or this system of constraints, or my internal structure, and the way I behave, that too is agreed upon by the libertarian, at least the sober libertarian.

And therefore all these things that very often come up in the context of arguments between libertarians and determinists are irrelevant; they are simply irrelevant to the discussion altogether. Only if you say there is 100 percent correlation can one begin to talk. Even then I can say, with some strain: fine, I always decided to go along with the terrain. That could happen theoretically, but there it really would be harder, it seems to me, to argue that claim. But it never happens. And therefore, basically, all these discussions can in my view be erased from the stage—they are not relevant to the discussion.

One more point, further qualifications about free will: statistics. Again, one can do statistics on human behavior—psychology is built on that, at best—and that does not mean that a person is a deterministic creature. Of course statistics can also be done on actions within the topographic model I described earlier for libertarians; the statistics would reflect the distribution, the various pressures of the topographic terrain. Just like rolling dice: every die roll can land on one through six, but if you make six million rolls, then by the law of large numbers, roughly speaking, each face will come up a million times. That is, the distribution does determine the statistical properties even when the behavior is random. And the claim is that even when the behavior is chosen rather than random, even then one can do statistics, and the statistics will work. When would you be able to make a deterministic claim? If it were 100 percent—if the statistics determined it with 100 percent certainty, or if you could predict with 100 percent certainty what a person will do. That doesn’t happen; it’s entirely hypothetical. And therefore all these examples where there is high correlation or something like that are simply irrelevant to the discussion. That’s 90 percent of the discussions in this field. That’s why I say this conceptual system is an important point.

Okay, I won’t get into this now because I don’t have much time, so just in two sentences. There are attempts to place determinism within a scientific framework, mainly in chaos theory and quantum theory. I think this can’t be done. In chaos it’s obviously impossible; in quantum theory, in my opinion, also not, but that is a subject that will come up later in the conference, so I’ll allow myself to skip it. Because in quantum theory there is a distribution that basically determines what will happen, and at most you are just hitting within the distribution. That still contradicts the laws of nature. That is, even if you choose within a statistical terrain.

From that people move to emergence, which is basically some global property of the brain, or of the person, or of the genome, it doesn’t matter—that mental phenomena are some sort of overall properties of the physical whole. And this is perhaps another way to anchor free choice, supposedly, or the mental in general, and maybe free choice as well, in a purely physical world. It isn’t possible. It isn’t possible because of what I described here in one sentence. Think of capital M as a macroscopic state—I come from physics, this is statistical mechanics—and little m’s are microscopic states, all of which at the global level look like M. Suppose M is violence. Okay? Now if I have six configurations of neurons in the brain that all lead to violence—different configurations, and of course there are billions of these, not six—then there is some gap here between the microscopic state and the macroscopic state, and the claim is that the dynamics occur on the microscopic plane, but the mental properties are up above, in the macroscopic state. This solves nothing in the context of free will. Maybe it’s true and maybe not, but it solves nothing with respect to free will, because everything is determined on the microscopic plane. The macroscopic is an epiphenomenon, that is, an accompanying phenomenon. And on the microscopic level, that’s where the physics sits, and physics works according to the laws of physics—or biology, or chemistry, whatever. Therefore emergence cannot really help the libertarian. Maybe it’s true and maybe not, but it cannot help the libertarian. That is the short version.

As for Libet’s experiments—again, in one sentence—I want to say, because Libet’s experiments were described here briefly, that I at least do not see on the horizon any possibility of deciding the deterministic versus libertarian question by this kind of experiment. First, as I said earlier, you need 100 percent success. The question of Libet’s veto, yes—you need 100 percent success. Why? Because if it is not 100 percent success and is only a statistically significant phenomenon, that can simply be an expression of the topographic terrain. The libertarian also agrees that there is a topographic terrain. My topographic terrain gives rise to some readiness potential, so naturally I will press following the readiness potential. But that does not mean I have no decision in the matter; this is libertarian statistics, as I said earlier.

Second, this is Liad’s area—she’ll probably talk about it, and if not you can ask her, she knows this better than I do. There is picking and choosing. In picking, it is quite clear that Libet’s experiments will produce what they produce, because if we are doing a meaningless act, then once I have a readiness potential, I’ll do it. Why argue with my initial tendency to press? I have no reason not to press. The question is whether one can do a Libet experiment for choosing. And that is what Mudrik and Maoz tried to do.

The third comment on Libet’s line is that when we are speaking about dilemmas between two values—I have this value against that value—then the question always arises: where did I make the value decision? That is, even if you have a readiness potential that predicts what I will do, whether I’ll go with this value or that value, the question is whether when I built the scale of values, I chose there. It was mentioned earlier that Leibowitz says our choice lies mainly when we adopt values. And therefore, once we already have the values, it is no wonder that the readiness potential predicts what we will do. And of course this also applies to value-versus-impulse dilemmas—not two values, but a value against an impulse, or what I call some temporary arousal, where this is indeed something happening now and not in the future. Even so, I think one can reject this in a similar way.

One last sentence, if I may. I want to talk about something that nonetheless—from this point until now I only described what libertarianism is. I’m a libertarian, but I didn’t say why. That is, I only laid out the two positions, and whoever wants to attack me needs to attack that. Okay, now why am I really a libertarian? In one sentence: there are two intuitions standing against each other. One is causality, the principle of causality that everything has a cause, and the second is the immediate feeling that I have free choice. Now the question is how I reconcile them. They do not fit together simply. So I can go with experience, but experience gives me no causality at all, as David Hume already said; the principle of causality does not come from experience. The principle of causality is an a priori assumption of ours. And therefore, what we really have here are two a priori assumptions of ours confronting one another.

And what I think one ought to do, on the rational level, when I stand in such a situation and I have no empirical decision, as I said earlier—assuming there is no empirical decision—then one has to make a philosophical decision. And in that philosophical decision there is a legal rule called lex specialis, the priority of the specific. That is, when I have a general principle that says there is a principle of causality, everything has a cause, and I have a specific principle that says human actions are actions that occur without a cause—fine, then I say: I accept the principle of causality except for those actions that are the result of free choice. By the way, a negligible minority of our activities, even if I’m a libertarian. Clearly most of our activities are not like that. But here and there there is a certain activity of that kind, which is a hole. That is why I call it perforated determinism, or perforated causality.

And in that place, what happens is—this is where I’ll finish—what happens is that some will arises in me. I am assuming dualism here, but I’m not getting into that. A will arises in me; that will arises out of nothing, it is not causal. As I said earlier regarding Peter van Inwagen, but it does not contradict the laws of nature in that sense, because it is not a material entity. So this goes against causality but not against the laws of nature. The will causes me to perform some action. In that action, this actually does not contradict the principle of causality. There is a cause for that action; the cause is a will. It’s just that the cause is not a physical cause. So this does not contradict the principle of causality, but it does contradict the laws of physics. And the claim is that the first electron that moves—metaphorically, yes—the first electron that moves on the way to producing a chosen action is an electron that moves without a physical force moving it. That is what anyone who wants to be a libertarian must arrive at. If you object to libertarianism, fine—but that is what you must grapple with. That is where one has to end up, because within the scientific framework, it seems to me, it is very hard to fit in the libertarian view. Thank you.