Panel Discussion: Closing of the First Session at the Second Free Will Conference, May 2024 – Free Will
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
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Table of Contents
- Opening round of questions and clarifications about free will
- Dualism, “whose illusion,” and subjective experience
- A principle from Roman law, ignoramus, and Neumann’s view on unsolvable problems
- Brain experiments (Libet, split-brain) and what they do or do not prove
- A thought experiment about voting, hidden control, and the ability to “do otherwise”
- Illusion, empirical tests, and the black swan
- Audience intervention: correcting concepts, van Inwagen, and the attribution to Frankfurt
- Determinism, the world of concepts, and illusion versus subjectivity
- Consilience, correcting illusions, and preferring a convergent picture
- Dualism and soul versus the problem of free will
- Short questions from the audience: both-and, directed randomness, and the role of the unconscious
- A request to clarify the concept of “soul” and a reply by way of negation
- Legal aspects of responsibility and the necessity of decision
- Closing remarks: Einstein, religion, the subconscious, and the limits of speech
Summary
General overview
The moderator thanks the speakers and opens a round of clarifying questions that develops into an ongoing discussion of free will: whether the will is free or an illusion arising from the brain, the environment, and the unconscious. Amos presents a physicalist position according to which free will is impossible within a physical framework, while other speakers place at the center the question of dualism, the status of subjective experience, and the difficulty of defining an “illusion” without presupposing who is experiencing it. Throughout the discussion it is argued that findings such as Libet’s experiments do not settle determinism, that thought experiments (Frankfurt/Fischer) illuminate the concept of freedom through the ability to “do otherwise,” and that there is currently no satisfactory solution, even though science has solved problems that once seemed insoluble. The conversation also moves to the legal implications of responsibility, to claims about the soul as something learned by negation, and to philosophical criticism of terminological mistakes and inaccurate attribution of arguments, and it ends with a call for precision and for silence where clear speech is unavailable.
Opening round of questions and clarifications about free will
The moderator asks Amos to clarify the apparent contradiction between “we have free will” and “the will is not free because it is influenced by the environment and the unconscious.” Amos places the central question in whether free will is an illusion, and gives the example of a chick choosing right or left, where brain researchers may try to explain or predict the choice from the structure of the brain, while the chick gives an introspective explanation of “that’s what I wanted.” Amos argues that within a physical framework there cannot be free will, and that if the will is determined by the brain then its freedom is an illusion.
Dualism, “whose illusion,” and subjective experience
Another speaker remarks that when one says “illusion” one has to ask “whose illusion,” and suggests that there is no escaping recognition of a non-material dimension, from which the path to free will is shorter. A story is brought about Professor Yosef Neumann of blessed memory, who criticizes the conceptual identification of love or fear with “electrical currents in the brain,” arguing that there is a difference between the currents and a collective property that arises from them. It is argued that memory too involves a distinction between information and “knowledge of the information,” and the discussion shifts to what scientific models do with subjective experience, including the distinction between measurable nociception and “I’m in pain,” which is communicated verbally.
A principle from Roman law, ignoramus, and Neumann’s view on unsolvable problems
In Neumann’s name, a principle from Roman law is cited regarding four possible verdicts: guilty, innocent, ignoramus (“we do not know”), and ignoramus et ignorabimus (“we do not know and never will know”). It is said that Neumann quotes a position according to which problems like the psychophysical problem have no solution and cannot have one, while another speaker says she is not sure a solution will not be found in the future and relates to subjective experience as a wholly physical phenomenon. It is argued that no empirical argument can prove whether the world is materialist or dualist, and that the question may remain a matter of commitment.
Brain experiments (Libet, split-brain) and what they do or do not prove
A speaker asks about an experiment that could decide between libertarianism and determinism, and is answered that Libet’s experiments and their successors were not meant to decide that question and do not decide the issue, and that her book devotes an argument to this. She argues that brain activity preceding conscious experience says nothing about determinism, but at most points to an absence of freedom at the conscious level, and that unconscious freedom does not justify legal and moral responsibility. It is said that even if conscious experience is produced by brain activity, there is no obstacle to earlier brain activity building it.
A thought experiment about voting, hidden control, and the ability to “do otherwise”
A thought experiment attributed to Fischer is presented about a brain surgeon who implants a device that allows him to predict who a person will vote for and to intervene only if the person chooses otherwise, so that the person consciously deliberates but has no real possibility of doing otherwise. It is argued that this can be defined as freedom in the sense of a decision-making process without actual intervention, but not as freedom in the sense of two possible outcomes, and that the whole issue depends on definition and context. A parallel is drawn to a question in the Talmud about an act done “willingly” under threat and its implications for responsibility, alongside the claim that the concept of “freedom” in different contexts may be misleading.
Illusion, empirical tests, and the black swan
The moderator raises a “heretical question”: in order to call free will an illusion, there has to be some way to verify that against reality, as in measuring visual illusions, and if there is no such way the claim is valueless. A response is raised that even if in 999 cases it is shown to be an illusion, one “black swan” in which free will exists is not ruled out, and one contradictory case is enough to collapse a theory. It is argued that as long as there is no such observation, the state is ignoramus, and a Talmudic example about Elijah and the prophets of Baal is brought to show that even a decisive experiment can be dismissed with the claim “it’s sorcery,” which drains the concept of illusion of evidentiary force when one can always attribute the result to an external power.
Audience intervention: correcting concepts, van Inwagen, and the attribution to Frankfurt
Peter K. David introduces himself as a professor emeritus and remarks that there is a terminological mistake in the use of “free will,” proposing instead to speak of “free action” or “free choice,” because desires are not under our control in the same way, and one may hold two desires but cannot perform two actions simultaneously. He asks Michael Abraham to repeat an argument of Peter van Inwagen, and claims that the description given is not what van Inwagen says and that he has more sophisticated arguments, and also corrects that the thought experiment about hidden control comes from Harry Frankfurt, adding that Frankfurt’s version has been “refuted.”
Determinism, the world of concepts, and illusion versus subjectivity
Amos Ariely presents the claim that the very ability to use the concept “deterministic” rests on illusory possibilities, and that our conceptualization of the physical world is itself a world of chairs, classifications, and abstractions rather than the “hardware” itself. He argues that domains such as the stock market and money cannot be explained in terms of gravitation and quanta alone, and that once a world of abstraction appears one can speak about free will. In response, it is argued that the distinction between phenomena and noumena is not the same as illusion, that illusion includes an error relative to what would appear if we knew “what’s really going on there,” and that the subjective is not illusory.
Consilience, correcting illusions, and preferring a convergent picture
A claim is heard that the decision between “illusion” and “reality” relies on consilience, meaning the convergence of many kinds of evidence into one picture, as in the example of a dream about one’s deceased mother-in-law, which does not converge with many surrounding circumstances and therefore is not reality. It is argued that illusion is identified through dissonance between “I think so” and “actually it is so,” and that where there is more consilience, there reality goes further.
Dualism and soul versus the problem of free will
Marius Shost argues that dualism does not save free will, because even if there is a non-material soul, one still has to ask why it acts this way rather than another, and if there is a determining rule then there is no freedom, and if there is no rule then it is randomness. Michael Abraham replies that dualism does not require determinism or libertarianism, but it does allow libertarianism for those who think it is impossible in a material world, and adds that he does not accept the dilemma “determinism or randomness” even in the material world and argues that there is a third option. A remark is raised that the more we know about physics, the harder it is to “fit” free will into it, and that talk of the soul returns us to an age of ignorance in which everything is open.
Short questions from the audience: both-and, directed randomness, and the role of the unconscious
Rafi Malach from the Weizmann Institute suggests that the physical world need not be only deterministic or random but “both and,” and proposes “directed randomness” as a possible model. He also argues emotionally and practically that free decisions are made at an unconscious level and that this matters for life, and the response is that the claim of lack of interest referred to justifying moral-legal responsibility, not to scientific value, and examples such as riding a bicycle are raised to challenge the assumption that control requires real-time consciousness.
A request to clarify the concept of “soul” and a reply by way of negation
Shmuel Wolfman from the University of Haifa says that the concept of “soul” is being thrown around even though it was not on the program, and asks what it is. The response is that proofs by negation work by finding difficulties in one option and concluding that it is not correct, and that even without yet knowing the details of the second option, one can argue for the existence of “something” not explained within the framework of material science, and that something can be called spirit or soul as a label only. It is argued that the main dispute is whether there really are phenomena not explained within the material framework.
Legal aspects of responsibility and the necessity of decision
Justice Rubinstein says that in law one must decide and cannot remain at ignoramus, and gives examples from the law concerning the treatment of the mentally ill, where there is tension between psychiatric conclusions and the public interest. He describes a case of a normative man who saw his wife as Satan in the form of a black pig and killed her, and afterward was “fine,” but it was impossible to guarantee that a similar state would not recur, and a compromise of ten years in prison was accepted in order to give expression to the public interest. He also describes a case of a mentally ill man who stabbed a child and killed his daughter, and in a civil suit it was ruled that he had to pay the victim unless it could be proven that he had no physical control over his hands, and he concludes with a quotation from Yehuda Halevi: “Slaves of time are slaves to slaves; only the servant of God is truly free… The Lord is my portion, my soul has sought.”
Closing remarks: Einstein, religion, the subconscious, and the limits of speech
Tova Kurtzin introduces herself and suggests that the body-soul connection might be solved through an analogy to the connection Einstein found between energy and non-tangible things, and that once the “formula” is found the problems will be solved; she also argues that a religious person must believe in duality, and adds an example of subconscious functioning that brings up a forgotten name during sleep and influences consciousness. Michael Abraham responds that a religious person has to choose to be religious, and that this is not proof that one has no free choice, and that he does not see energy as a spiritual concept because it is convertible and mathematically predictable. The discussion closes with a quote attributed to Wittgenstein about what can be said clearly and what one cannot speak about, and with the claim that it is better to remain silent about dualistic aspects that cannot be formulated clearly, or else continue over lunch.
Full Transcript
[Speaker G] Okay, so first of all thank you to the three of you for the lectures. We’ll begin — in a moment we’ll also take questions from the audience — but maybe I’ll start with clarification questions, and Professor Yuval, if you also have additional questions, you’re welcome to direct them. If not, that’s fine. What I would ask, though, is that in your answers too, if any of you has comments on things someone else said, feel free to say them. So I’ll start simply with clarification questions. So for you, Professor Kurtzin — maybe is it okay if we switch to first names? Okay. So Amos. Amos what? Amos, sorry. So Amos, there was something I didn’t understand in what you said, because it seemed that on the one hand you said, we have a will and it is free, and literally one line below that, the will is not free because it is influenced by the environment and by the unconscious and so on. So first of all I wanted to understand exactly where you stand on the spectrum between those two claims, and maybe one can.
[Speaker C] So first of all, I didn’t promise answers to those puzzles; I’m puzzling over it myself. But the main point, I think, is the question whether we have free will or whether it’s an illusion. I think that’s the main question, and I’ll bring another example in addition to the ones that came up. Suppose we take a chick that hatches from its egg and it can turn either right or left. It has no other options. And we know — there’s no reason to assume otherwise — that 50 percent of the time it will turn right and 50 percent it will turn left, why not. But it turns out in observation that it goes 70 percent right and 30 percent left, or 100 percent right and never left. Then brain researchers say: no problem, we’ll check the structure of its brain and we’ll know. But suppose we ask the chick why it turned right, and the chick says: that’s what I felt like doing, that’s what I wanted. In other words, the question of free will is the question of how much of this is not post hoc, a backward-looking choice, and in my opinion the excellent discussions we had here, and many more we’ll have, if the main question is the freedom of the will, we need to ask ourselves to what extent this thing is really the right thing, and to what extent it’s just an interpretation — an interpretation of our introspection, our desire to explain our actions and give them one justification or another.
[Speaker G] But isn’t there some dualist assumption here that maybe you specifically would connect with — namely that either the will is an illusion or it doesn’t arise from the brain? Because the fact that we managed to predict it from the brain doesn’t mean it isn’t a will, or even that it isn’t free.
[Speaker C] Right, but the illusion is also in the brain. So maybe I didn’t understand your.
[Speaker G] No, it sounded as though if we can predict the chick’s decision from its brain activity, then it isn’t free — that means it’s an illusion. Right? So that assumes that the only way the will can be free is if it’s not determined by the brain — unless I misunderstood.
[Speaker C] No, what do you mean?
[Speaker G] That if it is determined by the brain—
[Speaker C] Then its freedom is the illusion — the freedom of what we call free will, the freedom is an illusion.
[Speaker G] Meaning that within the physical framework there cannot be — there cannot be free will. Right, right. That’s the claim, I understand. Okay. Does anyone want to comment on that? You’re welcome to, and if not then.
[Speaker D] Just one comment. When we speak — in the background the question of dualism is always sitting there. And when you ask yourself whether this is an illusion, you also need to ask: whose illusion? In other words, who is the deluded agent? And here I think there’s no escape from recognizing — not free will yet — but some non-material dimension in us. And from there, the road to free will is shorter.
[Speaker G] A non-material dimension because the moment there is someone being deluded, that someone has to be non-material? It can’t be a model the brain constructs that is entirely material?
[Speaker D] Emergent — that’s another discussion, I’m not. That’s the discussion. Sure. No, I’m saying the question of dualism has to be dealt with on its own merits. I’m only saying that since it’s in the background, you need to notice that when someone speaks about an illusion, the question that arises is: whose illusion? I personally think — I’m a dualist — so I think yes, one does have to arrive at something additional. Maybe just one sentence: once I spoke with Professor Yosef Neumann of blessed memory after I published the book on evolution. So he called me and said, listen, I’m a determinist and a materialist and so on, and he said, listen, I can’t convince my determinist and materialist friends, I can’t explain to them when they say to me, listen, love or fear or whatever all these emotions are, they’re nothing but electrical currents in the brain. And I can’t explain to them that this is simply conceptual nonsense, regardless of whether you’re a materialist or not. It has to be something that is perhaps a collective property generated by the currents, but it isn’t the currents themselves. In other words, something is generated there. Whether it is a separate entity in the sense of another substance — that already has to do with biology.
[Speaker G] But look, it seems to me that when we talk about anger or love or will, it’s easier for us to go in that direction. But if memory is produced by the brain, does that mean memory is separate from the brain? In other words, the fact that we can learn, can remember — does that necessarily assume some non-material entity here?
[Speaker D] Exactly the same as fear and love, because when you speak about memory you are not speaking about the information, but about the knowing of the information.
[Speaker E] Yes, I can certainly add something. I think the question hovering over this whole discussion is the weight we give to subjective experience and what we do with it. In other words, in scientific models, including up-to-date psychological models of higher brain functions, the question of subjective experience — what the experiencer feels — often doesn’t enter, and when it does enter it gets dismissed with the statement: on that we can’t say anything. Yes, take pain or nociception. We know there is nociception, and that we can measure, and then someone says or doesn’t say, yes, I’m in pain. Right? What do we do when he says he is in pain and as far as we can measure there is no nociception? Is there no brain activity there? Presumably there is some brain activity there. The question again is what ontological weight we give to our subjective experience, to the knowing of the knower, to the illusion of the deluded one, and so on. And I think this is a discussion into which we have not sunk our teeth very well, and ahead of us there are truly at least 2,500 years of very smart people who tried to grab this hot potato from every side and didn’t manage. I’ll just say one thing I wanted to say from Professor Yosef Neumann. When he speaks in his book, The Evolution of Consciousness — which I’m happy to see you read, because not many people read it. What? I spoke with him. You spoke with him. So he wrote a book, The Evolution of Consciousness and The Advantage of Man, and there, in the context of exactly these questions of free will, he brings a principle from Roman law first formulated by Dubois-Reymond, the mathematician from the end of the nineteenth century, who was also one of the first experimental psychologists. And he talks there about four verdicts that could be given in Roman law. That is, according to Roman law judges have to determine a person’s guilt and they can issue four possible verdicts. One verdict is guilty, a second verdict is innocent, a third verdict is ignoramus, meaning we do not know. We checked all the facts, heard all the witnesses, we do not know. And a fourth verdict is ignoramus et ignorabimus, meaning we do not know and never will know. That is, according to what he says, we can say of this question that an answer is impossible. And Neumann says here — Amos mentioned my grandfather — my grandfather was among those who thought that on these problems, for example the psychophysical problem, which is of course closely connected to this one, there is no solution and cannot be one. And I personally am not sure; that is, I think we haven’t grasped it yet, but I’m not sure we never will.
[Speaker G] And even if we do grasp it, I at least belong to those — and I think there are several other people here who research subjective experience and also taught me how to research it — who treat it as a completely physical phenomenon. In other words, there may be — I think in general there is no empirical argument that could prove whether we live in a materialist or a dualist world. I don’t — and here I very much connect to the point that in the end it may just be a matter of commitment. But the very existence of subjective experience, at least according to some philosophers and certainly some researchers, does not necessarily mean that it is dualistic and that we are committed to something non-material — at least in my view. But I wanted to ask you about — it seemed to me you were talking about an experiment that could decide between libertarianism and determinism, and I wondered what it is. Okay. In a second.
[Speaker D] I said that as far as I know, and that’s also what I described in the book, both split-brain, which was discussed here, and Libet experiments including all their successors up to—
[Speaker G] But they were not even presented that way; Libet was not trying to decide between the two—
[Speaker D] Fine, but many people bring these things as some kind of option, yes, that answers the positivist problem, and here we have a prediction, we’ll do an experiment and decide this question — now it’s a scientific question, not a philosophical one. My book devotes space to arguing that no.
[Speaker G] Yes, but meanwhile what I’m trying to say is that the mere fact that there is brain activity preceding conscious experience says absolutely nothing, I think — correct me if I’m wrong — about determinism.
[Speaker D] It means, in the sense I spoke of earlier, only this: that at least at the conscious level we have no freedom. There may be something free at the unconscious level that created the readiness potential, but then that’s not interesting. That is, unconscious freedom is not a justification for assigning legal and moral responsibility, so why should I care if there is freedom there?
[Speaker G] That’s a stage in physics. But here too I come back to dualism. It assumes that if my conscious experience — in order for my conscious experience to be the cause of the action, it has to be dualistic. Because after all, if it arises — if conscious experience itself is produced by brain activity, then there is no obstacle to brain activity preceding it which itself constructs the conscious experience in which—
[Speaker D] I didn’t say there was an obstacle. No, I’m not arguing at all. No, it could be that brain activity created everything; I’m only saying that I still would not call that freedom in any case, because the freedom that matters for the things that interest us — I don’t care whether that’s deterministic or not, what difference does it make? It’s not a human being performing an action with some internal freedom; that is, it’s determined by some sort of lottery or I don’t know exactly what, but it’s not conscious deliberation. I would not assign him criminal responsibility or moral responsibility, and maybe I also wouldn’t marry him. So all the interesting questions about determinism and libertarianism in this context — for me that’s determinism.
[Speaker G] So if there is conscious deliberation, and that conscious deliberation leads you — maybe now let’s go to an example I’m sure you also know, that I learned from Marius — the thought experiment of a philosopher named Fischer, who tells a story about elections between Bush and Clinton at the time, and there’s a brilliant brain surgeon — he tells there about a brilliant brain surgeon who implants in his patient’s brain a device that lets him predict exactly who this patient is going to vote for, and that brain surgeon wants him to vote for Clinton. Then the man doesn’t know at all that he has this device in his brain, and he goes home and deliberates, and he is also very, very politically engaged, and he goes to an election rally and he reads and he deliberates, and in the end he goes and decides to vote for Bush. No one intervened in his decision, he deliberated, he had conscious reflection, but he did not have the possibility of acting otherwise, because if he had decided not to vote for Clinton — maybe I have it backwards, I don’t remember whom he votes for — if he had decided to vote for Clinton then the brain surgeon would have intervened. Is he free in your view?
[Speaker D] Obviously this is not — I didn’t get into all the qualifications, I just said it briefly — many of our actions, even in a libertarian picture, are not free. Obviously if someone controls my consciousness, then I am not acting freely.
[Speaker G] But no one intervened, no one actually controlled his consciousness. He deliberated, he made the decision consciously, he examined the options, and no one intervened.
[Speaker D] Here it’s a question — here it’s a question of what you are asking for. That is, one can define this as freedom, because in that sense he did it freely, but if you ask me whether he is free in the sense that there are two possible outcomes, then of course not. The whole question is one of definition.
[Speaker G] And therefore the question is which definition is the decisive one for you.
[Speaker D] Not the decisive definition — decisive for what? In other words, if I ask whether this is relevant to criminal responsibility — by the way, there’s a question in the Talmud. There’s a question in the Talmud whether someone who did something willingly under threat — he would have done it anyway — does he bear responsibility, does he have responsibility or not. And that’s a question, a legal question, but I don’t think we need to invoke metaphysical definitions of freedom and non-freedom here. This concept that we use in different contexts can actually confuse us, because in every context it has to be defined in a way appropriate to the relevant context.
[Speaker G] And it seems to me that what is good about this thought experiment is that it helps us understand what we mean when we talk about freedom. Because if we think this person was free, that means our definition of freedom is not connected to the ability to do otherwise. It is connected to the fact that he deliberated, that he made the decision, that no one interfered with him, and I think that does very important work in helping us understand what freedom means to us. I’m also curious to hear whether in your opinion this person is free or not.
[Speaker C] The big question is about the freedom of the will — whether the will arises from brain activity, and if so then is the question of freedom relevant here? That is, if the elements of freedom are brain activity, then the question becomes redundant, because will and free will are the same thing. And again, the serious question I referred to earlier is whether this will is nothing but an illusion. Whether all will — like the will of a baby that wants to pee — whether that will of his is the will, whether it is an expression of an illusion.
[Speaker G] Yes, I’m only realizing as I speak that I messed up the story, because the person freely decides to vote for Clinton and therefore the surgeon does not intervene, but I assume everyone understood the point.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think this thought experiment — and there are others; Sapolsky talks about inventing some implant in the brain that monitors things, and if someone is about to do something very bad it stops him. Are we for or against such a thing? How can we say we’re against something that would stop us from doing a horrible act? And if I never do a horrible act, why should I care — it’s a neutral implant. What these experiments illustrate most strongly is something I tried to talk about: the disconnect between a point action and the context of identity, of who I am, and the possibility that things derive one from another. And here it confuses us because we don’t have much to say about isolated actions. Sometimes we are very, very generous and want to be good and so on, and some person comes along almost dying of hunger and, like Rabbi Tarfon, we push him off for some reason and say come back later, and he dies. So does that say something about Rabbi Tarfon’s personality? No, not necessarily, but things get missed. And sometimes we do an enormous act of kindness even though we very much want to be evil and antisemitic and Nazis and so on. I want to say something about something from earlier. We have several fault lines that need to be distinguished. One is subjective-objective, that’s one issue — largely a matter of definition — whether the notes explain the music we experience or not. That’s a question of what our expectations are. What Professor Leibowitz of blessed memory kept repeating — there is no answer to that — to this day it’s not clear to me what exactly he meant by “answer.” There is the issue of supervenience, which may be the “ism” you mean — that there is some spirit, some non-blind clock directing things. Here I have trouble accepting such things because I do think there are gaps, things we don’t understand, dimensions we don’t know how to connect. So it tempts us to say we don’t need to connect them, one rides on top of the other in some mysterious way. But there is no such thing; that is, we contradict ourselves. Either there is a physical factor or there isn’t a physical factor. There is no factor that is non-physical. So maybe we don’t know how to explain things, but for me it doesn’t fit. It’s like speaking in two languages. Okay, all this is connected to illusion. You asked what is an illusion, and he says illusion always refers to some core of reality. That is, if most of the time I am in some context, I believe that in reality I am here at the conference as I said, then suddenly maybe there is an illusion that I see a figure passing over there. It is always relative to something. But free will, the feeling of agency, is so dominant in my personality that to call it an illusion — I have no place in the personality, neither in the experiential personality nor in any objective theory, neither in this nor in that, from which I can say this is an illusion. So to call it an illusion doesn’t say much; maybe in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, it is an illusion.
[Speaker G] Free will, not agency.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it doesn’t matter — how I perceive my agency.
[Speaker G] I think that’s a very interesting question, and in a moment we’ll try to understand whether, if it is an illusion at all, how one could prove it. But before that, you had a comment.
[Speaker E] I wanted to say that we really do contradict one another. And we contradict one another very beautifully. I think what characterizes all our positions around this question — which I called a hot potato, even though it’s already been cooking for 2,500 years — is that in general we are better at finding the holes in other people’s explanations than at grounding our own. And in that context I think we are all right. That is, as of today I think we are dealing with a problem that, within our conceptual world, we are unable to solve in a satisfactory way. At least I don’t think so, and I’m not convinced we won’t be able to do so in the future. I have not been convinced that it can’t be done, only that as of today I wouldn’t — and in fact. Look, there are lots of very smart people here who have spent whole lifetimes thinking about this issue, and I think there are real differences among us, real differences.
[Speaker G] So I want for a moment to raise a heretical question, and afterward we’ll return to audience questions too.
[Speaker E] What you’re saying, there are—
[Speaker G] thousands of—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] For years people thought about how one could fly and nothing came of it; Otto Lilienthal crashed until people flew, so that’s not exactly proof.
[Speaker E] Wait, but I agree with you. I’m saying that the fact that we haven’t managed to fly until now doesn’t mean — at least in my humble opinion — that we won’t manage tomorrow.
[Speaker G] Airplanes are a not—
[Speaker E] bad way to fly, I think, but science has a proven track record of solving problems that were thought to be unsolvable.
[Speaker G] So precisely at this point I want to raise a heretical question. We’re asking here whether free will might be an illusion, but in order to say that something is an illusion we need some way of checking it against reality. For example, when people thought the world was flat, there was a scientific experiment that discovered for us that it is round. When I see a visual illusion and the lines look crooked to me, I can measure them with a ruler and prove that they are straight. Is there, in your opinion, any empirical way to show that the will is an illusion? Because if not — if there is no way to test it against reality — then the question whether it is an illusion has no value, I would argue, I think.
[Speaker E] I want to put an asterisk there. I think Rabbi Michael will tell you that even if you show that in 999 cases it is indeed an illusion — and we can show this in many paradigms provided by research psychology, and they work excellently even without hypnosis, certainly with hypnosis — that still won’t get rid of the one black swan, the one time in which it does exist, and from his standpoint the previous 999 cases do not invalidate it, do not rule the thing out. But I’ll say one more thing in the context of illusion, and here I quote my grandfather again: how can one say that the whole idea of talking about free will as an illusion, or subjectivity as an illusion, collapses — because now you have to explain who that one is who has the illusion.
[Speaker C] So again, contrary to what you’re saying, the fact that we have observations supporting the existence of an illusion does not prove that there is an illusion, and it can’t be refuted that way. One proof to the contrary is enough to collapse the theory. It’s not that you say there’s another observation that fits and another that fits and another that fits — no, that’s not enough. It is enough that there be one contradictory claim, and that’s it.
[Speaker G] Contradictory to what? To the idea that there is an illusion? Meaning, a claim showing there is free will? Yes. But what observation would show you that?
[Speaker C] I don’t know. So as long as there isn’t one, that’s ignoramus.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think the Talmud’s philosophy of science already dealt with this. Because the Talmud says — there was a classic scientific experiment in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Elijah came and said: let the prophets of Baal make one altar, I’ll make another altar, and we’ll see who is God. So here there is a scientific question and a scientific experiment and really a scientific approach. They said: if fire comes down from heaven onto this altar, that is the true God, and if on that one, then that one is true. An experiment. Which of course sets aside the question of what if no fire comes down for either one, or for both, and so on and so on. Then Elijah prayed. When you need to work, he prayed. He also didn’t ask, what if I don’t pray, will it just fall on its own? But he did pray and said, “Answer me, Lord, answer me.” So the Talmud asks: why “answer me” twice? Just say “answer me” and perform the miracle. So the Talmud says: one, that the fire should descend — meaning that the experiment should succeed — and two, that they should not say, “It is sorcery.” So you understand that the clearest miracle can happen, the clearest scientific method, and still the whole thing can go wrong because people don’t want to believe you, so they find another excuse: it’s sorcery, and so on. And I think this statement in the Talmud actually closes the door on the whole miraculous or demonstrative religious approach in this question of illusion. Because whatever you prove, the moment you use the concept of illusion it is like sorcery, it is like supervenience as far as I’m concerned. If you can always say that really some external force intervened — Descartes’ demon, the Holy One, blessed be He, sorcery — then you prove nothing and nothing has any meaning. You can even behave like that rabbi — you know, who always knew the sex of the fetus. You know, when a woman came to the rabbi and said I’m pregnant, he would write on a note and give her a note, and also write it down and keep it with him. So if a son was born, she opens the note — son. They say, this is a great rabbi. Yes, I’m not from a Hasidic family, that’s why I’m telling this. And if a daughter was born and they came to the rabbi, the rabbi says, let’s take the note and check — and what was written in the rabbi’s note? Daughter. Exactly. So you can’t get out of these things. Therefore, if we go to questions of illusion that are not very, very clearly defined relative to a very clear basis that is not an illusion, then anything can be an illusion. Then we are in the same game of “God did it,” or “the illusion did it,” or “sorcery did it,” and we’ve left the discussion. But that is equally true even if—
[Speaker I] we are skeptics. Wait, wait, there has to be order here. Please, there has to be order. What I wanted to comment—
[Speaker G] I don’t think they can hear him.
[Speaker C] I ask, first, speak into the microphone, and second, your first words should be to introduce yourself.
[Speaker I] Okay, so my name is Peter Kar David, I am a professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University in the philosophy department, and I have worked a bit in this field of free choice. So first of all I would like to remark that there is a basic terminological mistake here in the very use of the term “free will,” okay? Instead of free will — as was said by the various speakers — our desires are not, very often, under our control. In order to change them we have to work very hard. It’s not some decision I make when I deliberate. Therefore what is right, what is right to do, is to use instead of free will: free action, free choice. A small remark on that: I can have at one and the same time two different desires, okay? But I cannot perform at one and the same time two different actions, okay? So that is one point, one point. I also have another question for Michael Abraham, but I don’t want to take over here; I’d be happy to ask it.
[Speaker G] You can ask the question.
[Speaker I] Okay, so I’d be very grateful if you could repeat what you think, or what you described as Peter van Inwagen’s argument against the possibility of free choice in a deterministic world.
[Speaker D] No, it’s not against free choice in a deterministic world, it’s against free choice. Meaning, his claim is that there are only two possibilities: either there is a cause or there is no cause for every event—or at least let’s talk about some of the events, since some events are causal even according to the libertarians. But are there events without a cause, or do all events have a cause, and therefore it’s either indeterminism or determinism. There’s no third possibility, but choice is neither this nor that.
[Speaker I] That’s his claim. Okay, so I want to note that that’s not what Peter van Inwagen says. Peter van Inwagen is a libertarian, okay? But he has difficulties with this concept, okay? But not the difficulty you’re talking about. He agrees, he agrees with the libertarian concept in the sense that there are events that are neither deterministic nor indeterministic. He explicitly agrees to that possibility. Of course he has arguments against the existence of free choice in that sense, but it’s not in such a simple form that either the event is deterministic or it is indeterministic and therefore random. That is not his argument.
[Speaker G] Okay, I’m not sure that’s what I understood either from the way things were presented by you.
[Speaker I] He has much, much more sophisticated arguments, and I invite you to look into those arguments. He has at least three such arguments. Now just in closing please, in closing. With regard to you, okay? That thought experiment you described in the name of John Martin Fischer actually comes from Harry Frankfurt.
[Speaker G] Known, fine. This isn’t a philosophy class right now, so I’d ask that we focus on the question so we can let more people ask.
[Speaker I] No, so that experiment, the thought experiment as Harry Frankfurt formulated it, has been refuted, okay? It has been refuted. Broadly speaking, okay, I can describe how it was refuted. Among others, it was also refuted by me. Okay? But I’ll leave it at these remarks, I don’t want to—one hundred percent.
[Speaker G] And if someone gives us a bit more time, I’d be happy to come back and hear the refuting argument too. Thank you very much. Amos, you wanted to speak, and after that Marius, so there’s also a microphone there. Yes. Just don’t forget to introduce yourself.
[Speaker J] My name is Amos Arieli, from the Weizmann Institute, brain research. And what I wanted to address is the issue of language—they spoke about illusion. There is no deterministic without illusory. That is, our ability to use the concept deterministic stems from there being illusory possibilities. And also this matter that everything is physical and therefore a physical world—the whole world of relating to physical things is our conceptual world. We say chair; a chair is not the metal bars of the chair, it is a world of concepts. The world of concepts is a world that exists in our spiritual life, in our capacity for abstraction, and therefore to come and say that our whole world is deterministic is also to say that our whole ability to distinguish objects, classify them, make them into things—that is not found within the world of the concepts themselves, it is in the inter—
[Speaker G] No, but the question is—of course we have a mental and conceptual world. But the question is whether there is another ontological entity that requires something non-physical in order to explain the existence of concepts, or whether all concepts rest on the brain and the way it creates within the world of physics our capacity to conceptualize. I don’t think that follows necessarily. Right? Or am I misunderstanding you.
[Speaker J] No, you understand, I’m not—this is exactly the whole subject of our conference, whether there is or there isn’t. But to come and say that from the moment we invented the concept illusion, then we also use it and so on—from the moment we invented the concept deterministic, it’s completely symmetrical. And to come and explain things like, say, the world of the stock exchange and the world of finance in terms of gravity and quanta and things like that—it doesn’t work. That is, once we arrive at a world in which there is abstraction, then maybe we can also speak about free will and things like that that arise from the fact that we created a world that is a world describing, among other things, the physical world, rests on it, would not exist without it, but whether the possibility of free will is created there is a question that the whole
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] conference
[Speaker J] is dealing with.
[Speaker D] Certainly. I think that remark doesn’t touch on the realm of illusion; I disagree. It touches on Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. That is, our relation to things is obviously a function of our conceptual system and our way of looking. But the fact that we look at things in a certain way is not the definition of illusion. The definition of illusion is when we look at something in a certain way, but if we knew what was really going on there, our way of looking would be different. It’s not a gap between our way of looking and what is happening in the world—that certainly exists, but it’s not connected to the concept of illusion. In the concept of illusion there is some kind of error. You’re talking about something subjective. Subjective is not illusory.
[Speaker J] No, no, I’m speaking even—it can be
[Speaker D] error,
[Speaker J] it can be a range of—so
[Speaker D] I don’t agree if that’s what you mean. That’s one point. Second point, regarding illusion, I just want to note: there are also visual illusions. Right. We don’t give up on the reliability of sight because there are visual illusions. Right, there are illusions. We identify that through sight. Yes, exactly. Now, and that brings me back to your question, Liad, right, in vision we can identify it perhaps through touch or through the sight of others or something like that, but once again you’re assuming a positivist assumption that says there are no illusions unless we have a way to show that they are an illusion. I don’t agree.
[Speaker G] I’m not assuming that, I’m asking what the meaning would be of the claim that free will is an illusion if we have no way—
[Speaker D] It won’t have meaning in the positivist sense, in the empirical sense, but there are still philosophical arguments, there are feelings, various intuitions, right, it won’t be decided by science.
[Speaker G] Marius, just go to the microphone please. In the meantime you can, if you want.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Just one word: I think there’s a key concept here, consilience—that things need to come together from many places. Meaning, at night I dreamed that I met my late mother-in-law. So maybe that’s reality, but when we check a lot of things—the circumstances of the dream, the fact that she passed away, the fact that we also inherited her house—it doesn’t fit together with a million things. So that’s also the problem with these thought experiments about the questions. The neurosurgeon who implanted or didn’t implant—because in the end, when you try to connect one thing to another thing to another thing to another thing, in the end you arrive at one reality. That’s probably also what Kant was leading to. And when you correct an illusion—how do you know what the illusory experience is? First of all, that there is a difference: I think this way and actually it’s that way, so how do you know what’s right? Maybe it’s the opposite? So in the end what has—true, there is an illusion? No, no, one second, first of all there is dissonance. So you say there is an illusion. Wait, but then the question arises: what exactly here is illusory? I don’t know. Wait, wait, so I’m saying: because where there is more consilience, there reality goes more strongly. That’s probably the direction. Please. Yes.
[Speaker G] Marius, just introduce yourself for a moment.
[Speaker K] Marius Shust, Tel Aviv University. The issue of dualism came up here. People tend to think that dualism can save free will for us, but I think that’s a mistake. Let’s assume we’re willing to pay the price of the interaction problem between body and soul, something Descartes in his time didn’t manage to solve and all that. The problem is that this still won’t solve the problem of free will. Suppose there is a non-material soul. Now the same question remains. We perform an action. You can ask why the soul performed this action. Maybe it acts according to some moral rule. So if it acts according to a moral rule that determines the action, then one could say the action is not free because there is a rule determining it, a metaphysical rule, whatever. Or it doesn’t act according to some rule—maybe it acts randomly. Then we’ve arrived at the same problem we had with the body, now at the level of the soul. So introducing dualism and a soul doesn’t solve the problem of free will for us. Please.
[Speaker D] I disagree. I agree in one direction. And that direction is clear. Obviously you can also be a deterministic dualist. Obviously the fact that you’re a dualist doesn’t mean determinism is false. It could be that the soul too moves in a deterministic way or acts in a deterministic way. The reason people bring up dualism in this context is in the opposite direction. That is, because if you accept that you can’t be a libertarian if you’re a materialist, since under the laws of physics everything is deterministic, assuming that’s so. No, I’m explaining why one would need to get to dualism. If you arrive at the conclusion that in the physical world you can’t be a libertarian, you have to move to dualism because it allows libertarianism—not that it compels it.
[Speaker G] Marius is arguing that it doesn’t allow it.
[Speaker D] It absolutely allows it; he also said it allows it. He said either it’s free or it’s not free, the two possibilities.
[Speaker K] No, no. In the physical world too you have the possibility of determinism and non-determinism, but even there the problem remains, because then you say either it’s random or it’s determined, and neither gives you free will. But the same can be said in the world of souls. With respect to the soul as well, either it acts according to some determinism or it acts randomly. You still remain with the same problem.
[Speaker D] That’s obvious, but there is only one difference: in the material world we know the laws that govern it better. And there there is a view—which I happen to share—that within the material world I won’t succeed in inserting libertarianism. In the spiritual world or the mental world, however you want to call it,
[Speaker G] there it’s open, maybe yes maybe no. What Marius is trying to say is that within that openness in the non-material world, still either it will be deterministic or it will be non-deterministic, and if it is non-deterministic then by definition it will be random. That’s what he’s trying to say.
[Speaker B] I don’t accept that dilemma even in the material world. I don’t accept that dilemma; there is a third option.
[Speaker G] I’m saying: in the material world we know the laws of nature. But what will cause the non-material soul to choose alternative A rather than alternative B?
[Speaker B] What kind of causality is that?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But I’m saying it’s not causal. Not the question of what will cause—if something causes. No, I think Marius, one short sentence gets at something I think you’re missing. If we had held this discussion three thousand years ago, we would have known so little about physics that we’d have had no problem inserting free will into physics. But we’ve learned a tremendous amount about the material world. Now when people talk about soul or God, we know nothing, we’ve defined nothing. So we’re simply going back to an age of innocence. But if a soul exists at all, and somebody studies it deeply, deeply, deeply—
[Speaker G] That point is clear, we have three minutes and two questions. So maybe let’s hear the two questions—three questions, four questions. Am I getting approval from the conference organizers to take a few more minutes? If you’re not leaving, we can continue. Okay, then let’s hear the questions and try to answer very briefly so we can finish.
[Speaker L] Rafi Malach from the Weizmann Institute. Two short remarks. One: all the time, Marius also suggested this, people assume the physical world is either deterministic or random. I suggest the possibility that it is both. You spoke about a loaded die; we can discuss that. There may be a third possibility in the physical world of brain research, a state in which there is directed randomness, let’s call it that. That’s one thing. The second is more emotional. You remarked that if decisions are made on the unconscious level, they’re not interesting and have no importance and aren’t interesting and there’s no need to deal with them. I personally believe that our free decisions are made on the unconscious level, and I think that’s very, very interesting and I’m very excited by it. So that’s an emotional argument, not a logical one,
[Speaker D] but it’s not interesting for this discussion; it’s scientifically interesting, of course it’s interesting.
[Speaker L] Not only scientifically, but for life too, for life as well.
[Speaker G] Take the microphone.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m riding a bicycle and my head is in the clouds, so I’m not conscious of what’s happening, but I make decisions and I can run someone over—am I not responsible? I mean, it’s just a mistaken assumption that free will or agency or control requires real-time consciousness. I mean, that’s something artificial. It’s a topic for a lecture—it wasn’t discussed, okay, okay, no, my topic here is consciousness, yes, so not necessarily. There can be very important processes that are not conscious, but I learned to ride a bicycle consciously.
[Speaker G] Let’s just say that Rafi Malach from the Weizmann Institute asked the previous question. Please introduce yourself, sir.
[Speaker F] Shmuel Wolfman, University of Haifa. There is a concept here that Marius just threw out, and I think I also heard it in Michael’s lecture or in your lecture, Yehiel, I don’t remember: soul. It’s not in the conference program and I don’t know what it is. So maybe it would be worthwhile to hold another conference on the concept of soul—what it is at all, I don’t know.
[Speaker G] Does Ran Ratzon want to answer? Yes, briefly.
[Speaker D] That’s always the nature of proofs by negation. That is, when you have one option and you find difficulties in it, you say apparently this option is not correct. Now, I still don’t know anything about the second option, but I’ve proved its existence, assuming the argument is correct. I’ve proved its existence; now you need to ask me, okay, what do I know about it, and try to investigate. But to say that the fact that I know nothing about the second option invalidates the proof by negation—that would mean that today we’d still be in the science of Adam. I’m saying: if the argument shows that certain phenomena cannot be explained within science—assuming that is so—within material science, that itself is a proof by negation that there is something not explained by material science. That something is called spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it. You can call it by any other name; it’s just a name.
[Speaker G] Now to get to know it—then we need to ask, I don’t know. And then the debate will be whether such phenomena really exist or not. I want—the Justice Rubinstein, you also had a question, you don’t need to introduce yourself.
[Speaker H] This isn’t really a question, because I admit the things here are a bit beyond me, but by the way I noticed that this hall is called William. In English history you know William the Conqueror, but in fact he had an unconquerable impulse because he did what he did. I’d like to comment in the legal context. The difference is that in law you must decide. That is, you can’t only deliberate; you can’t be an ignoramus, you have to. And there are cases where not only is the decision difficult, it’s bad in every direction, and you still decide. An example—you know this here, it came up in the discussion as well, Professor Kutchinsky and so on—the law for the treatment of the mentally ill. You know that this law says that in cases where a person cannot stand trial because of illness at the time of the legal proceedings, then he will not be tried, but if he returns to sanity then—and there is a case where the person could not, he did the act because of illness, then he needs hospitalization for a period of time and so on. I had a case, when I was Attorney General, I had a case of a man in Nazareth, here in Nazareth, in Nof HaGalil as it’s called today, Upper Nazareth, who—a normative person, lived with his wife for thirty years, got up in the morning and saw his wife as a devil in the form of a black pig. Just listen to this—and he killed her. And afterward psychiatrists argued heatedly, and in the end it was possible to assume that when he did it he was not—he was psychotic and could not be put on trial. That’s how it seemed. They came to me with this matter, because it—yet as everything unfolded, now he’s fine, in quotation marks fine. That is, he should be outside and so on, and maybe tomorrow morning too he’ll see someone else as a black devil in the form of a pig. The prosecution came to me; I said we are not going to any solution in which this man receives no punishment at all. It can’t be, simply from the standpoint of the public interest. So here you have public interest against another interest, and someone can say what? This person after all was—but there was no answer from any psychiatrist to say that’s it, the matter is over, from here on out everything is fine. So since we insisted and so on, in the end there was a compromise that he would go to prison for ten years, which at least gave some expression to the public interest that such a person should not be walking around. I truly do not know—that was many years ago. Or another case, and this also raises the dilemma. One man went out and was mentally ill, and he was walking with his daughter in a public garden and saw some child. First of all he stabbed the child and afterward killed his own daughter. And they said no, he was psychotic, he cannot stand trial. The child filed—that is, the child’s parents filed a civil suit. And then suddenly the question arises: after all they said he was unfit, so maybe in a civil suit too not—how do you solve that? And then the question of the victim arises, meaning which interest, what stands against what? And then in law it was decided—I was, I wrote, I was among the writers of the ruling—we said yes, in such a case a person does have to pay, because the victim is a victim, unless it is proven physically—which is not simple at all—that physically he had no control over his hands and over the fact that he was holding a knife, and not merely that he was psychotic. So why did I bring these two cases—and there are many others? Because this is the dilemma of the decision-maker. And I had, I want to stop because I had a few more things but I won’t say them. Maybe just to mention the poem of Yehuda Halevi that you all know, a wonderful poem that I always kind of remember. “The servants of time are servants of servants; the servant of God alone is free. Therefore when every mortal comes to seek his portion, my portion is the Lord, my soul has sought.” Meaning only there is there a solution. Okay.
[Speaker G] Thank you very much, and I assume we’ll hear more of this later today as well. There was one last question, please. But just go to the microphone. Yes, yes.
[Speaker M] I’m not from any university, I’m the wife of—
[Speaker G] You can still say your name. Tova Kurtzin.
[Speaker M] The truth is that the free will of—actually my will tells me, keep quiet. There are so many smart people here discussing this problem, and you—but my daughter, if she were here, would say you had no free will; your nature is to speak and say what you think and there is no question of free will here at all, so I act as I think. Rabbi Abraham, I understand that you’re also a physicist. And all the time when I hear about body and soul, I think there’s a very simple solution to it. Basically because we are speaking here about something very material and something very spiritual. The material thing is the body and the soul is of course some kind of substance that cannot be quantified, that one cannot say what it is, and we don’t know whether it is molecules or electrical voltage, we don’t know what it is. And you also mentioned Einstein; I think he found the connection between energy, between something that indeed can be measured but that is time, which can also be measured but is something very intangible, and he found the connection between the spiritual things and the material ones. And I think that once that formula is found, then we will solve all the problems. That’s one remark. A second remark is that in fact a religious person has no free choice; he must believe in duality, because otherwise what is religion? He really has to decide. And another remark—I don’t know—it seems to me that my consciousness is very connected to my subconscious. I want to remember something and I can’t remember the name, and then I go to sleep and in the middle of the night I wake up, my subconscious has been working and the name pops into consciousness. So I think the subconscious is interesting because it’s not something disconnected from consciousness; it is constantly operating in the subconscious and very much influences my consciousness.
[Speaker G] That connects very much to what Rafi Malach told us earlier. So do you just want to answer in conclusion?
[Speaker D] First of all, a religious person needs to decide to be religious. Okay, after he has decided to be religious, maybe part of that was that he was a dualist. So to assume that there is no choice from the middle of the road onward—that’s true of all of us. After we’ve decided on our path, supposedly it is absolute, but that’s a tautology. And most people are also born secular and remain secular, there’s no difference. That’s the first thing. Second, I’m not referring to energies, and Einstein of course did not invent the concept of energy, but I do not refer to all these concepts including light or energy or all kinds of things like that as spiritual concepts. Precisely because they are transformed into material things and there are formulas that we know very well and can predict what will happen with them. Today.
[Speaker G] We know them very well today. Yes, no, of course. But we didn’t know them before, and then those were perhaps phenomena that physics did not know how to explain, and you would say the possible explanation by negation is the soul.
[Speaker D] Very true, of course. I’m only saying that as of—I live today. Meaning, according to the information I have today, that is not what I mean when I speak about the soul or spirit.
[Speaker G] Clearly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A sentence—
[Speaker G] One final concluding sentence from each of you, and with that we’ll part.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wittgenstein said two things. That what can be said can and should be said clearly. And he also said that what one cannot speak about, one should not speak about. Russell said that to many people—it’s true—and people still thumb their noses at it. So everything about the soul, about this whole dualistic side here, I don’t think it’s something we can speak about clearly, and I think it would be better if we kept quiet about it.
[Speaker G] Or talk about it over lunch. So thank you very much, goodbye, and we’ll meet again afterward.