Artificial Intelligence – Lesson 1 – Rabbi Michael Avraham

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Good. First of all, hello. The saga of probability and doubt has come to an end. I think it accompanied us for about a year and change, a year and a half, I don’t know, something like that. So, hadran alakh probability and doubt, and hadran alan. As I told you, I want to deal with the subject of artificial intelligence. As I also wrote in the announcement, at the end of the announcement there was not only a notice but also a confession. And the confession is that, to my shame, I am only a very minor expert in this field — that’s an understatement — and therefore I’m already offering an apology in advance that I can’t promise that everything I say is completely verified on the professional level. I hope it’s right. I know the subject; it isn’t foreign to me, but I’m not an expert. So check me, and I’m sure there are people here in the audience who know this topic, and I’ll definitely be happy to hear comments and criticism, both during the lecture and afterward, and I’ll also be happy to correct things if they need correcting. But it seems to me that the topic has become so hot and so current in recent years — in the last few years — that it’s almost impossible to ignore it. I’ve written about it on my website from various angles, and here I want to try to do it in a relatively orderly way, to try to build a relatively orderly structure for how I at least approach this issue. Each of you will decide for himself, of course, what of this he adopts and what not, and that’s my goal in this series.

Now, this series — its goal is not professional treatment. This is not a course in artificial intelligence. I’m not up to that. I can’t give a course in artificial intelligence. But I’m also not going to ignore the technical aspects. Meaning, I will try to present what it is, not just discuss it and talk about it from above. In that sense, there will also be points where I really go into the question of what a computer is, what artificial intelligence is, what a neural network is, and talk a bit about the technical aspects of how this whole business works. And although, as I said, that isn’t my goal here — to give a course in artificial intelligence, and I also can’t — I don’t think you can talk about it seriously without really understanding the essence of the matter, meaning how this story works. Because my feeling is that quite a few people who talk about this topic somehow talk about it from above, and it seems to me that if you don’t understand how this system actually works and what the connection is between it and the processes we call thinking in human beings, then everything remains up in the air. It’s hard to be precise; it’s easy to miss nuances. And in that sense, at least, it seems to me that I can fill in that gap. Not the details, not all that, but yes — how the story works in broad terms, what its significance is — I think I can talk about that in a relatively responsible way. And still, with all the reservations, I invite and request comments and corrections and all the rest.

Now, when we want to talk about artificial intelligence, the first thing we need to do is define for ourselves what intelligence is. Not artificial intelligence — human intelligence. Meaning, what does it mean that a human being is an intelligent creature? Intelligent, thinking, wise, wisdom, understanding, thinking — all these… intelligence — all these concepts are concepts that I think themselves require some clarification. I’m careful not to say “definition,” and I’ll explain later why. But they do require some sort of clarification before we get into their artificial aspects or their artificial manifestations. Meaning, if I don’t know what intelligence is, then are we prepared to define what it does as intelligence? If yes, then that is artificial intelligence, okay? Of course, regarding what follows, there are further discussions here: is this thing ultimately a human being in some senses? If it has consciousness? There are all kinds of discussions that are related, but they are not exactly the same thing. They too require concepts first and foremost. You can speak in general terms about whether this thing is or isn’t a human being, but in order to justify that, you have to explain what a human being is in your eyes, and whether those criteria actually exist in the golem or do not exist in the golem.

Yes, I’m unconsciously adopting my in-law’s custom. I once saw a certain fellow, definitely a high-tech person, very involved in this stuff, a kind of serial startup entrepreneur, and I once saw him speaking quite rudely to the golem — to GPT. I said to him, tell me, why are you talking to it in such a rude way? I was almost offended on its behalf. So he said, “It’s ideological with me.” He said, “I make a point of talking to it that way so that I won’t forget that it’s not a human being.” Meaning, to preserve that difference. Because once you begin to create some sort of relationship with it, at a certain point you really do start talking to it politely; you start relating to it as an agent, as a person standing opposite you, and you develop a relationship with it. Anyone who saw the film Her, I think, could get the impression — and that was before the age of artificial intelligence, when this was still hardly even in its infancy, and LLMs didn’t really exist yet, I think — and still, people were already starting to understand that this was a completely realistic matter. They began to understand that a person could really conduct human relationships in the full sense of the word with this golem. There it was about a man who fell in love with a computer; the computer was some sort of female entity for some reason, and he fell in love with her. Meaning, he really carried on a kind of relationship with her, you could say a romance, and it sounded a bit absurd, but it seems to me that in recent years I definitely see it as much less absurd. And therefore I can understand what my in-law does — I’m not sure I agree, but I can understand why he feels the need…

[Speaker B] Maybe to remind it of its place. What? You have to remind the computer of its place?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Remind us of its place, not remind it. Meaning, remind us of its place. Whether you need to remind it of its place is a very interesting question, and it relates to the last column I posted — the question whether the computer knows its place in the sense that it has consciousness, meaning that it understands that it is some other agent speaking on my behalf, or whether it simply speaks on my behalf without that dimension of an agent behind its phenomenal appearance.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, doesn’t the groom’s attitude toward AI go against, at least, the spirit of the Sages, with Moses’s gratitude toward the Nile and toward the sand?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That doesn’t mean…

[Speaker D] But there’s something there…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I don’t think so. You can say — by the way, I have another friend, AI with Chat…

[Speaker D] GPT helped him, and he answers it rudely instead of politely — that’s not gratitude.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I told another friend of mine, he really said, listen, from the point of view of self-education — he’s not religious, it doesn’t matter — but it’s the same claim you’re making here: from the point of view of self-education, I think you should speak to it politely, just so I get used to behaving like a human being. But that’s not completely precise because… what do you mean? The inference is not completely necessary. You can accept that position, but that position is by no means necessary. Because if you show gratitude to the Nile, that’s fine as long as there isn’t the opposite concern, that you’ll start relating to the Nile like a human being. And it may be that in a place where some concern arises — and today it does exist, unlike with the Nile — that this thing will suddenly start receiving some sort of human standing, today in the world people are already talking about rights for agents, for LLMs.

[Speaker B] We can’t hear.

[Speaker E] Rabbi, no one heard you for the last minute.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah, can you hear now?

[Speaker B] Now.

[Speaker E] Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. I’m saying that even if we say that one should show gratitude to the Nile in order to educate oneself to be grateful, that’s true on the principled level, but where there is an opposing consideration — meaning, yes, there is value in educating myself, true, but there is also value in preserving the distinction between human beings and other things. That too is a value. And in a place where that value may be significantly harmed, one can certainly consider being strict about the other value even at the price of some damage to my education toward polite, human behavior and the like. So it isn’t necessary.

All right, but I don’t want to get into manners and etiquette here; maybe in the next course. Hannah of Babylon — we’ll talk about Hannah of Babylon in the next course.

[Speaker D] It’s just that this is an essential part of the subject. The Rabbi presented it exactly that way — what should our attitude be toward the world? Whom exactly are we honoring? If you honor the Nile or honor something in the world, it isn’t necessarily clear that this is only for self-education. It could be that there is a fact that good was done in the world, and we as believing people in general — but also someone who doesn’t know how to formulate it that way — it has a deep meaning and not only a matter of self-education. This isn’t behaviorism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t see it that way. Fine, okay, maybe you have such a view. I don’t agree; I don’t see it that way. Maybe one could talk about gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He, through these events — perhaps, I don’t know. But toward the Nile itself, I don’t know what there is to be grateful for. The Nile itself is a golem. Fine, never mind, that’s another discussion. I don’t want to get into those questions here, at least not right now.

So in short, what I want to say is that the order of work, more or less — at least as I currently understand it, and things may still change — is that I want to talk a bit about the question of what a human being is and what thinking is. To talk basically about the concepts of intelligence or understanding that are not artificial, meaning first to see what these things are. After that I’ll want us to get to know the computer a little — what is a computer? In what sense does it think? An ordinary, classical computer. After that, artificial intelligence systems, neural networks, and so on. Then, after we’ve gotten to know those systems, we’ll be able to go back and compare them to a human being and ask whether they think and whether they are human beings, if we want to go even further. And after that, to examine certain additional philosophical meanings of this phenomenon of artificial intelligence — and you can see it or examine it from very many angles, but that will become clearer later, to me too, as we go on.

So at the first stage, I actually want to talk about things that are not connected to artificial intelligence, but rather I want to focus more on the question of what a human being is and what thinking is. Intelligence, understanding, thinking, yes, all those things. To talk about that a bit because I think it’s necessary background for the discussion.

[Speaker F] Does the Rabbi distinguish between thinking and consciousness?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What is the connection between them at all?

[Speaker F] No, yes, no — like, thinking is… okay, we’ll see later.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is thinking and there is consciousness; those are two different things. It may be that putting them together is not just a combination of two foreign things, but creates something that goes beyond its two components. Fine. But I think thinking and consciousness are really two different things. By the way, that’s probably the subject of my next column, but we’ll see.

[Speaker F] In any case, what people usually say is that a computer has thinking but no consciousness. Is that a true sentence? Seemingly, seemingly it’s true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s not show our cards right at the beginning. Let me develop the issue, and we’ll get exactly to those questions. But I want to present it in a more systematic way, and not with slogans of one kind or another — “Oy, what will happen,” “heaven forbid,” “the moral consequences.” The moral consequences don’t interest me. I want to clarify what the truth is. And if the moral consequences are catastrophic, we’ll have to deal with that. But the question is: what is the truth? Meaning, what is correct?

In fact, just yesterday I told… I had some debate with a philosopher, Jeremy Fogel from Tel Aviv University. We’ve been old friends for quite a while. So as we were talking, I remembered something, and on the way back I told him that we had been talking about David Hume and about pragmatism. And I remembered that David Hume and pragmatism together fit into an insight I once had. There’s Hume’s famous fallacy: you can’t derive the ought from the is. Meaning, “ought” is what is proper, the norm, what is right, how one ought and should act; and “is” is what exists, the facts. And you can’t derive the ought from the is, right? You can’t derive from the fact that, say, if I hit someone, it hurts him — from the fact that it hurts him, you can’t derive that it’s wrong. Because the fact that it hurts him is a fact, and the claim that it’s wrong is a normative judgment. A normative judgment is never derived from facts. Whoever derives such a thing has made a leap here, a leap across an essential gap. In order to derive it, you need to add some further assumption, for example that causing pain is problematic, or causing suffering is problematic. If you add that assumption, then you can derive the conclusion that hitting someone is problematic or immoral.

That’s the naturalistic fallacy, as it’s sometimes called. Hume’s is-ought fallacy. So you can’t derive the ought from the is. Pragmatism is an approach that derives the is from the ought. The pragmatic fallacy — in my view pragmatism is a fallacy, so I call it the pragmatist fallacy. There are people who regard pragmatism as a philosophical method; in my eyes it’s a joke. Pragmatism is just one big fallacy, and the main fallacy is the other side of the coin of Hume’s naturalistic fallacy. Just as you can’t derive the ought from the is, you can’t derive the is from the ought. “Come believe in God, keep the commandments, because look at the Sabbath table and what a wonderful family we have.” Even if that’s true, the factual assumption that there’s a wonderful family here and a Sabbath table and so on — so what? I don’t derive from those positive states, in my eyes, some type of judgment or normative judgment, the “is,” that God exists. Meaning, I can’t derive the fact that God exists from the fact that if I serve Him, then I don’t know, good things will happen. And pragmatism goes with that. Among Americans, pragmatism became an ideology. Not pragmatism in life — I’m in favor of pragmatism in life. I’m against pragmatism as a philosophical method. You can’t derive the is from the ought. The fact that something is useful, or brings positive results, does not mean that it is true. To check whether it is true, you have to check it with the tools of true and false, not with the tools of useful and not useful, good or not good.

[Speaker D] How does the Rabbi distinguish between pragmatism and utilitarianism? I don’t quite understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Utilitarianism is usually a moral view. Pragmatism is exactly the opposite. Pragmatism is a view that derives conclusions about the is from what ought to be. For example, someone who says, “Look, you have to believe in God, because if you don’t believe in God you won’t be moral.” That’s a pragmatist argument. Why? Because maybe without believing in God I won’t be moral. You can argue about that, but let’s say it’s true — so what? Does that mean there is a God? At most it means that if I don’t believe in Him then I won’t be moral. Okay, what can I do? I can’t subordinate the factual claim that there is a God — the is — to the normative claim that one should behave morally — the ought. Okay? So that’s an example of a pragmatist argument. There are many examples. Again, in the United States, in America, this is a philosophical method — pragmatism. I think it reflects a kind of despair behind it regarding the regular philosophical tools for arriving at conclusions. They say, okay, I have no way to reach truth and falsehood, so let’s choose what is useful or what leads to something better or things like that. In my eyes, that expresses a certain kind of despair. But fine. What else?

[Speaker G] I have a question even before we enter the matter itself. The Rabbi presented several points he’s going to speak about. I didn’t see there a point creating some relation between the topic you’re talking about — artificial intelligence and so on — and Judaism, Jewish law. Do they have anything to say about the subject? Do they not?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll talk about those things too. If they have something to say on the matter — you know my approach — Judaism, for me, is only Jewish law. Everything else is nonsense. What do I mean by nonsense? It may be true, but it’s not Judaism. Meaning, if it’s true, it’s true; if it isn’t true, it isn’t true. I don’t judge it in terms of whether it’s Judaism or not Judaism. So philosophy has something to say about the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, and in that sense a Jew should say the same things, but those are philosophical claims, not Jewish claims. The halakhic aspects are a fairly narrow perspective. I’ll touch on those perspectives too, but we’ll talk about that later.

[Speaker H] As of today it functions as a layer in Jewish law.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?

[Speaker H] In all sorts of matters connected to the Sabbath and various rulings and labors done by devices based on artificial intelligence?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Devices that operate on the Sabbath have existed for a long time already. Devices with artificial intelligence are a relatively new phenomenon, but the phenomenon of devices on the Sabbath is not new. Fine.

[Speaker H] No, I’m speaking specifically about artificial intelligence that carries out sequences of various actions — for example, how Jewish law would relate to that. I once reminded the Rabbi that we talked about this regarding slaughtering, in a case where if tomorrow, right, there is some device that through artificial intelligence knows exactly how to operate and work and so on, maybe in the future this whole issue will disappear — how will Jewish law relate to it? We once talked about it, if you remember, also in conversation. What will the artificial intelligence do? It will slaughter? Right, the whole array and so on that it will manage by itself through artificial intelligence. What’s the question?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Whether it’s valid kosher slaughter? Yes. And what’s the difference between that and a machine that slaughters? Not artificial intelligence — without artificial intelligence.

[Speaker H] The whole system and so on, such that the whole subject of the commandments will disappear.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that isn’t related to slaughtering.

[Speaker H] Fine, we’ll get to it in a moment.

[Speaker D] But for example, if in the future, in some messianic scenario, AI certainly reaches a much higher level than all halakhic decisors, ordinary halakhic decisors supposedly, and there will be a Sanhedrin, and the Sanhedrin will say they don’t need to work — there will be a computer Sanhedrin. It will issue rulings, it will innovate laws. Will that count? Will it not count?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so about that I will speak. Meaning, about the standing of artificial intelligence in halakhic rulings, I will speak about that. But that will probably be toward the end. First we need to understand what we’re talking about. So in short, what I really want to say is that the progression is: start with what a human being is, what thinking is, what these machines are, whether the machines think, whether in the end they are human beings, and then all the philosophical and halakhic implications and the other things. That’s the general progression.

So I want to begin by really engaging a bit with the question of what a human being is. First of all, I want to distinguish between several levels of reference. The question “what is a human being?” can be divided into several levels. First of all there is, of course, the question what exists in a human being, what is a human being made of? Is there also spirit in him, or is he entirely matter — materialism, dualism — that’s one question. But even if I’m a dualist, it’s clear that to say that a creature that has spirit in addition to matter is necessarily a human being — that assumption is too weak. Because one can certainly also speak of some spiritual dimension that exists in animals. Therefore, the fact that this is a dualistic creature in itself does not seem to me sufficient; it is not a sufficient condition to define that creature as a human being. I don’t know what there is in animals, but on the principled level I think that’s at least possible; it would not exclude them from being animals if they had a spiritual dimension. So that isn’t enough. In order to define the concept of a human being, we need to enter more deeply into the question of what is found within his spiritual dimension, if he has a spiritual dimension — what is the nature of that spiritual dimension? What is in it? Thought, will, emotions, things of that kind — those are already things that begin to circle around the question of what a human being is. In that context I’ll explain later that I’m actually not really interested in those matters, at least not in our context, and I’ll detach those questions from our issue. But I just want to define the move here a bit more precisely.

There was a scientific question not so many years ago, and it is the question of vitalism. The vitalist approach basically says — “vitalism” in literal translation is “life-force” or “livingness.” The question of vitalism is basically a scientific question. And it asks whether biological matter is essentially different from inanimate matter, physical or chemical matter. Okay? And whether there is in biological matter something beyond what exists in inanimate entities, beyond the matter that composes inanimate entities. Against vitalism a very fierce campaign has been waged — or was waged — in the world of the life sciences. Biologists react very strongly if you express a vitalist position, and it is accepted, at least today, in the biological world that at least there is no need for the hypothesis of vitalism. Biological phenomena can be explained without resorting to a vitalist assumption.

Now the vitalist assumption — and that’s why I’m going into this a bit — is not related to dualism. It’s a different issue. Because the vitalist assumption asks what the nature of biological matter is, of living matter, okay? But that is still within the materialist world. Within the materialist world, the question is whether there is inanimate matter and living matter and these are two types of matter, or not. So the accepted view today is that no — meaning, there is only one kind of matter, and biological systems too are composed of the same type of matter as inanimate systems. Okay? That’s the claim against vitalism.

Let me add one more remark on this level before I move on. This is true, and here I’m not so inclined to agree with the biologists, because I feel that the biologists here are turning a useful methodological working assumption into a claim about the world. And that is a very common fallacy in scientific communities. Meaning, it’s quite clear that the assumption that biological matter is composed of the same matter as inanimate matter is a far more fruitful assumption than the vitalist assumption. No question about it. In scientific research it led to breakthroughs, to progress, to much better understandings than prevailed in the period when people believed in vitalism, or among those who believed in vitalism. So on the methodological level this has proven to be a very fruitful direction. That’s clear.

More than that — think about, say, Aristotle. He viewed nature as operating teleologically. The stone strives to return to its source. Their explanations for how a stone behaves were not causal explanations, as we have today, but teleological explanations. The stone doesn’t fall downward because there is a force pulling it down; rather it strives to return to its source. It doesn’t move downward because of something, but for the sake of something or in order to achieve something. So that is a teleological view. Today people think that’s outdated, foolish. Clearly the causal conception is the correct one. And here too, exactly as I say about biology, here it’s in physics; what I said before was in biology. In both cases I make the same remark. It’s true that the causal outlook gave us a very strong boost in scientific progress. It’s a methodological assumption that has proven highly effective and fruitful, no question. But does that mean that in the world things really operate causally and not teleologically? Absolutely not. That is already a claim about the world; it is not a methodological assumption. And the claim about the world is a claim on the philosophical level. Meaning, what advances me in scientific research is one question; what is true is another question. Someone may come and say that if it advances me, then it is probably also true. Maybe yes, maybe no, but that isn’t necessary. Those are two different questions.

Therefore, for example, I personally do not rule out the possibility that there is vital matter. I don’t think it is useful in the scientific context to speak about it — on the contrary, it is very useful to assume there is no such thing. But that does not mean that vital matter is factually false. It is very useful, for example, on the scientific level as well, to assume that there is no God. That is a super-fruitful and super-useful assumption in scientific research, because if you bring God in every place where you don’t understand something, you won’t look for explanations. I don’t understand something? It’s God of the gaps. I don’t understand something? There’s God. That means there is God because we don’t understand. Many believers go with arguments of that type. There is something we don’t understand? Wonderful — that proves there is a God. Wait a little; maybe we’ll understand more later. That’s the kind of God-of-the-gaps argument, the God of the gaps. You prove the existence of God from a gap.

And therefore the scientific assumption that says there is no God is a very motivating assumption for scientific research, and a rewarding one, because if you don’t assume there is a God, then everything you don’t understand demands explanation. Meaning, you look for the theory, the law, that explains that thing, and that’s how science advances. If in every place I bring God as a universal stopgap, plugging every hole I have, I’ll never close those holes. Does that mean there is no God? I, for example, think there is. Okay? But I completely agree that the assumption that there is no God has contributed a very important contribution to the progress of science — and still does, by the way. To this day. I think the assumption that there is a God is unfortunately an assumption that greatly hinders the progress of science, because people cling to God when they don’t understand something instead of continuing to think, continuing to investigate. Okay? But of course that’s a psychological bug; it doesn’t have to be that way. You can believe in God and continue investigating with full energy and full creativity. It isn’t necessary, but that’s how it often works.

Now, the claim that the absence of God is a fruitful, blessed, useful methodological claim does not mean that there really is no God. That is already a claim about the world — whether there is or isn’t a God — not a methodological assumption. So it’s important to make that distinction. The same thing with causality and teleology in physics, and the same thing with vitalism in biology. There too, it is a very useful assumption for scientific research, one that pushes us to seek explanations in terms of physics and chemistry, but that does not mean it is true. It does not mean that there is no different component in the world of biology. It may be that we will discover it later when scientific research gets stuck under the assumption that there is no additional component; and it may be that we can explain everything without it, and that still won’t mean it does not exist. Perhaps Ockham’s razor could be brought in here, but even so, on the logical level that still doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

So that’s regarding… yes.

[Speaker D] How does the Rabbi understand Aristotle’s approach that the stone “strives”? What does it mean that the stone strives? What does it feel?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll say this in two sentences because it’s not our topic, but many people get this wrong. People mock Aristotle: the stone doesn’t strive for anything, what, does it have mental dimensions? Does it have feelings and aspirations and things like that? That’s nonsense; it’s a misunderstanding. Obviously Aristotle did not mean to say that the stone thinks and strives and yearns and loves and feels or thinks. That’s not… it also doesn’t calculate the trajectory of its movement. He only wants to claim that the motion of the stone can be described according to a teleological law — as if, if the stone had feelings, it would strive downward. It has no feelings, so it does not strive, but it is constituted in such a way — it is constituted in such a way that causes it to strive to return to its source. That is perhaps the correct formulation.

[Speaker D] But what is that constitution? Aristotle doesn’t say. He acts as if it has that. Fine, so you agree it doesn’t, so what does it have? That I don’t know, and he also says he doesn’t know.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It has a tendency to return to its source. What does it mean that it has mass that is attracted by another mass through gravitation? What does that mean? It has a tendency to return to its source, that’s all. What’s the problem?

[Speaker D] There is a force pulling it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not force. He doesn’t speak the language of causes and force — that’s exactly the point. No, he speaks in teleological language. It strives to return to its source.

All right, I don’t want to get into this because this is a topic one can speak about at length. One more sentence — you came armed, impossible to resist. The claim is that I once gave a seminar on this at Bar-Ilan. I came from Yeruham while teaching in the yeshiva — I’d left Bar-Ilan for a bit — and I came to give a seminar in the physics department and showed them that the idea that causality replaced teleology is a myth. In today’s physics there are very broad fields that have only a teleological description, no causal description at all. Not only are there both descriptions and now you can decide which is right. There is only a teleological description and no causal description — in quantum theory, for example. Quantum theory is only a teleological description. Okay? That’s why, for some reason, people are still stuck in the idea that modern science has already freed us from teleology, that we understand that everything works causally. Utter nonsense. Maybe it’s true that everything is causal, but modern science is not there. Modern science has taken us completely back to teleology. All right, but that really is a subject for another discussion. In any case, that’s regarding…

[Speaker J] Rabbi, could you explain what is meant by a different type of matter? I didn’t really understand what it means for matter to be vital.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Another type of matter — I don’t know. It has additional things operating in it besides the four fundamental forces of physics. It has components that respond to other mechanisms; I don’t know exactly what. Inanimate matter does not respond that way.

[Speaker J] Mechanisms that are specifically not physical, you mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Meaning, what is accepted in the life sciences today is that biology is just very complex physics and chemistry, that’s all. Meaning, you can’t describe living matter in terms of forces and mechanics, fields in physics — you can’t describe it because it’s super-complex, it’s an enormous number of particles, a terribly complex system, there’s no chance to describe it — but basically it’s all there, it’s just physics and nothing more than that. Just very complex physics.

By way of analogy — and this connects to the previous series we just finished — when we throw a die, okay? We usually analyze it in probabilistic language, right? Suppose it’s a fair die, so there’s a one-sixth chance it lands on each face, okay? There is nothing random in throwing a die. Nothing random. What is probability doing there? People will say because it’s random. No, mistake. It’s completely deterministic. Give me the initial conditions, the force, the direction, the shape of the die, air density, everything needed, and I’ll tell you exactly what it will land on — or one could tell you exactly what it will land on. It’s a complicated calculation, but such a calculation exists. That calculation will tell you where it lands. So why do we use probability? People say because it’s random. No — it’s completely deterministic, it’s just very complicated determinism. And often the complexity forces us to develop different tools, but that doesn’t reflect the fact that this domain is constructed differently from the microscopic domain, from the domain out of which you built it. No. It’s simply that the complexity forced us to develop different tools.

So all the laws of biology, according to that approach, are basically abbreviations. Instead of using ten to the hundredth power Newton equations — Newton’s second law — to describe all the particle motions, instead of that we speak of chemical processes or biological processes. Intermediate concepts. We develop all kinds of concepts and forces and things there that are in the end just an integration over a huge number of physical processes. That’s all. So in this reductionist conception, the claim is that everything is physics and chemistry. But if there is no reduction — not just that it’s complex, and I have no way to describe it using physics and chemistry because it is truly complex — rather, the claim of vitalism is that it isn’t a matter of complexity. There is simply something else here. It isn’t a huge amount of very complex physics — no, it’s simply something else. Physics cannot fully describe it. Okay? That’s the claim of vitalism.

[Speaker J] Do you maybe have a theoretical example of something that is really non-physical that could affect biological matter, so I understand what plane you’re talking about?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Biological matter is living matter. Right? So what is life? Again, a question with all sorts of different and non-agreed-upon definitions. It could be plants, yes. But some process that we call a process of life, whatever — some kind of cybernetics of a cell, whatever, a living system, branching, each person ties it to something else. It doesn’t matter what. These phenomena — the claim of the vitalists is that these phenomena are not complex physics; they’re something else. Inanimate matter will never end up functioning as an organism, as a living cell. Okay? That’s basically the claim. You won’t be able, by means of the laws of physics, to explain how a cell operates. You won’t succeed, even if you have a supercomputer, infinite computational power, infinite memory, whatever you want, no limits. You won’t succeed in describing a living cell. That was the claim of the vitalists, okay? Today we’re already getting close to that. Not there yet, but from what I’ve read, we are certainly approaching it. There are already simulations getting close to a real description of a living cell, which is insane complexity.

In any case, that’s regarding vitalism. Now, what I said is that the question of vitalism and the question of dualism are different questions. Because the question of dualism basically deals with whether there is in us something else besides matter. No matter whether vital or non-vital. Something else. Spirit, soul — call it psyche, whatever — something else. Now, of course these are just names. What do you mean, something else? So call vital matter something else too. What does that mean?

[Speaker D] But Rabbi, vitalism includes plants too, doesn’t it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? Yes, plants too.

[Speaker D] Anything with a living cell. So it doesn’t overlap, right? That’s why body and soul doesn’t belong here; it doesn’t overlap, because body and soul isn’t talking about plants.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, obviously not. No — what do you mean, obviously not? You can also speak about the soul of plants. Quite a few people speak about soul in relation to plants.

[Speaker D] Ah, but that’s not… there’s the mystery of plants…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What’s the name of that fellow who wrote all those books saying if you play music to them they grow this way or that way?

[Speaker D] No, but most dualists don’t think plants have…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so they don’t think so. But some do.

[Speaker D] So that’s why it doesn’t overlap. No, I’m saying, I support the Rabbi that it doesn’t overlap with vitalism, because vitalism…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, fine. It doesn’t overlap regardless, I think, of that question. Even if it were true regarding plants, I’d still say it doesn’t overlap. The claim is that there is another substance here, another type — let’s not call it matter — but another sort of entity besides the material entity. Okay?

Now, phenomenologically — the phenomena we associate with those entities really are different phenomena. With the vital dimension, if it existed — I don’t know whether it exists — but if it exists, one associates with it our physiological behavior, our aliveness, the activity of a cell or an organism. Okay? With the spiritual, soulful, psychic dimension, one associates our mental functions: thinking, will, emotions, things of that kind. That is something else. Okay? So we need to pay close attention: this is a different question. The question whether there is vital matter in us is a question of how to explain biological phenomena. The dualist question — whether there is also psyche or soul in us — is a question of how to explain mental, psychological phenomena: thought, will, emotions, and so on. Okay? So that is a completely different level of discussion. So that is basically the question of dualism.

Now, of course vitalism is certainly…

[Speaker K] Regarding what the Rabbi said about quantum mechanics, there were works by physicists like Ehrenfest and Feynman who did not accept the teleological character of quantum theory and looked for causal descriptions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Feynman — I’m not familiar with Ehrenfest — but Feynman I know. There’s one article of his where he tried to define the concept of force within quantum theory, and of course he did it in a very artificial way, for a very particular case. That’s also Ehrenfest. Only through measurement phenomena, not within the formalism itself. Okay? Meaning, he doesn’t really succeed in putting causality into quantum theory. And if he didn’t succeed — well, let’s just say he was a talented Jew.

[Speaker K] I think Ehrenfest did it before him in that sense.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe. I don’t know him, so I don’t know what to say. I know Feynman’s article. Never mind — in quantum theory, at least in the simple form, there isn’t… everything is teleological. Even in Schrödinger’s equation, for example, what appears is a potential, not a force. Potential is a teleological description.

[Speaker K] Right, and then Ehrenfest defines a force operator.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. So what I know from Feynman is a de facto definition. Meaning, he creates the observational value of force and derives it in order to generate potential from it. Exactly. And that’s the same work. Fine, okay, an operator. In any case, yes, yes, it doesn’t matter — that’s a side remark that isn’t important for our purposes. I don’t want to get into it.

So the claim I want to make is that all these things, assuming they exist or don’t exist, if I want to use them to define what a human being is, then one has to pay close attention. Vitalism — even if you’re a vitalist — is clearly not what defines a human being, because vitalism explains how a living cell operates. There are living cells in plants and animals too. So at most that is a necessary condition, but certainly not a sufficient condition, for defining a human being. If you are a vital creature, that means you belong to the world of life and not to the world of the inanimate, not just to physics and chemistry. But a human being is a subset of the world of life. Inanimate, vegetative, animate, speaking — the ladder of the Kuzari. And I’m saying this before we get to racism.

The second stage, the stage of dualism, already gets closer. Some would say that if you are a dualist, then it is natural to define a human being as someone who has a spiritual dimension beyond matter — biological or not biological — but beyond matter. And as I said before, even that is at most a necessary condition, but not sufficient. And certainly if you are not a dualist but a materialist, then of course you won’t define a human being that way, because you don’t believe that human beings have a spiritual, soulful dimension. But even if you are a dualist, it isn’t enough. It is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. In order to define a human being, I need to explain what, within or what nature of the creature’s mental phenomena, gives it that quality called human. And then, after we understand that, we can begin to ask ourselves whether that also exists in artificial systems or in other systems, and so on. That is basically the ladder — the ladder that somehow reaches the point where one can begin to speak about a human being.

Now, what are the special dimensions within the human mental world that define him as human? Some will tie it to thought, to emotion, to will. But that really is a very difficult question, because the question of which of those things also exists in animals — I don’t know how to answer that, and I’m not sure I categorically rule out the possibility that all these things also exist in animals. Meaning, that’s not something I know how to rule out categorically. I have no idea how one would test it.

[Speaker D] Does the Rabbi have any doubt? Is there any doubt that the Rabbi’s dog has emotion? What — of course it does, and the dog the Rabbi has — it doesn’t feel? Rabbi, I know it feels, and it wants too. It very much wants things, and it also knows things.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so that brings me for a moment to the next point. There’s one more parameter, and that is consciousness, okay? And someone asked earlier whether consciousness and thinking are the same thing. When there is thinking that I am also conscious of, or a will that I am also conscious of, that already begins to come closer to the human. But even with consciousness, people today speak about different levels of consciousness, and there are also claims regarding animals that they have consciousness.

By the way, in my opinion there is no empirical way to test that question, although there are many scientific works and articles that try to claim they do succeed in doing so. I don’t know them all, but what I have seen really does not hold up on the philosophical level. There are problems there with the philosophical definition of the issue.

[Speaker L] Empirically there’s also no way to test this in another human being besides ourselves. This gets into solipsism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. The problem of other souls, yes, other minds. Consciousness meaning… what?

[Speaker D] Consciousness meaning that it has the capacity for reflection, in general that it knows that it itself exists.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, self-consciousness. Yes, that reflexivity. So the claim is that the definition of consciousness — that’s the topic of the next column, as I mentioned earlier. So consciousness… that already begins to bring us closer, together with the other functions: will, thought, perhaps emotion or something like that. And again, it really is very difficult to offer a sharp definition here. And not only because all these parameters are not open to empirical examination. You can’t really define who has it and who doesn’t, and in what degree, and therefore this question is a very vague one. Much more — not much more, but it is easier to answer the question whether the machine thinks than the question whether the machine is a human being. Okay? The concept of a human being is a very difficult concept to define. The concept of thinking — maybe, maybe it is easier to define. Therefore, the question whether the machine thinks and the question whether it is a human being, or whether one should relate to it as a human being, are two different questions, and we will deal with them differently. So we need to clarify both what a human being is and what thinking is, and then get to the machine.

[Speaker D] I didn’t understand. The Rabbi defined it very well. A human being has emotion and also self-consciousness. He reflects, he thinks about himself, he knows that he himself exists. Okay. And on our assumption most animals maybe don’t know that. If there is an animal that knows, it’s privileged — Balaam’s donkey. It seems she actually had self-consciousness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You’re offering a suggestion. Maybe you’re right and maybe you’re not. What do you want me to do with that?

[Speaker D] What is defective in that suggestion? What’s defective?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nothing is defective, except that it has no basis.

[Speaker D] What does the Rabbi think? That they have consciousness?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. I have no idea. I really have no idea. What? They once did the mirror test… there are all sorts of experiments. They put them in front of a mirror. There are all kinds of experiments trying to examine consciousness in animals. I don’t think any of those experiments really…

[Speaker D] If they have self-consciousness, how is it that culture did not arise among them?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. Who said self-consciousness is a sufficient condition for being human with all that that implies? That’s exactly the point.

[Speaker D] Basic intuition says that culture arose because of consciousness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure that intuition is correct. Really not sure that it’s correct. I think consciousness together with high-level thinking could mean many things. I really don’t see the necessity here. Okay.

[Speaker H] As of today, Rabbi, as of today we see clusters of peoples with severe regression despite the fact that they have consciousness.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And therefore, what does that mean?

[Speaker H] No, I’m saying it’s exactly the opposite. It’s not consciousness… you can’t derive any proof from that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the fact that there are regressions doesn’t mean that. They are still at some level of development very far from groups of animals. It’s not that there are local regressions — okay, so there’s some modulation of the process of progress. Such modulation means there are local ups and downs.

[Speaker D] Fine. Maimonides too, right? Maimonides doesn’t present all human beings as equal, right? There are human beings whom he explicitly compares to animals. He writes that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes.

[Speaker H] Because Judaism also isn’t dualist.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know what Judaism is — nothing. I don’t accept statements like that at all. “Judaism is…” Whatever comes after that, I reject the sentence. No matter what you put there. Is dualist, isn’t dualist — there’s no such thing as “Judaism is.” If you think so, then you are a Jew who thinks so.

[Speaker H] No, there is… okay, fine. I just wanted to say there’s a serious debate about it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, like everywhere. And the debate also isn’t Jewish. It’s a debate among Jews, but the debate isn’t Jewish. Because the same debate also exists among non-Jews. Right, correct, definitely. In any case… never mind what Judaism is. I want to know what is true.

[Speaker F] Why do I care what Judaism is? That’s true, but to say that Judaism is dualism — in the sense that it’s a basic assumption, otherwise it’s like a principle…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know. It’s your basic assumption, but there are Jews who don’t assume that.

[Speaker F] No, I mean Judaism, meaning the Torah.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Torah too is… there are many Jews…

[Speaker F] Like when we discussed principles. Not dualism specifically.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Principles — that’s Maimonides. Leave it alone, Maimonides is not the Holy One, blessed be He. No, yes, but what if that’s what he thought?

[Speaker F] Say, we said that there is some… I think the Rabbi did agree in the end with the author of Ikkarim that there are three principles that are correct, what the author of Ikkarim says. Not dualism. Dualism isn’t… not specifically dualism, but say if it were one of the principles, then it would be correct to say that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But first of all, duality, dualism, is not one of those principles. So the discussion doesn’t apply here. But the question regarding principles that are binding or not binding — we discussed it there. I claim that even the binding principles define some boundary of a camp, but if they are correct, they are correct also for every non-Jew. There is still no difference between a Jew and a non-Jew. If the principle that there is a God is a true principle, then every non-Jew should understand that there is a God. It isn’t a principle… yes, but it’s a principle in order to establish the Torah, as if otherwise the Torah collapses. Why do I care to establish the Torah? What establishes the Torah also includes the ability to read. And also the fact that I eat breakfast, because without that I couldn’t do anything, I’d have no energy. So what? Every person does that; there’s nothing Jewish here. Fine, let’s leave it; we’ve already dealt with that.

In any case, I now want to make another remark, one where I actually detach the rest of the discussion from what I’ve done up to now. It seems to me I may have mentioned this here sometime in the past: there was a nice Jewish man at Tel Aviv University named Professor Yosef Neumann, from the life sciences there, and he was kind of an activist — a very strong materialist, atheist, and materialist, very sharp, dealt a lot with these issues, published a lot in these areas. In my book God Plays with Dice about evolution, I quoted something from him — I don’t remember anymore — I argued with something I cited in his name.

After the book came out, a year or two later, I got a phone call from him, and we spoke, chatted. Really a nice man. We had a very long conversation, chatted about this and that, and in the course of it — and this was before I wrote The Science of Freedom; it was after God Plays with Dice on evolution. The Science of Freedom deals with free choice and dualism too, a bit, and so on. So he said to me: “Listen, I have a problem with my materialist colleagues.” What do you mean? “A lot of them claim that love is nothing but a physiological process — electrical currents in the brain, or chemical or physico-chemical processes in the brain, okay? And I’m trying,” he said to me, “to explain to them that they’re simply talking nonsense on the conceptual level. It has nothing to do with science. They’re talking nonsense conceptually, because obviously love is not electrical currents in the brain. You can say that the feeling of love is generated by electrical currents in the brain, but love is a feeling. Electrical currents in the brain are a physical phenomenon; love is a mental phenomenon.”

Now that was said by a materialist. Yosef Neumann was a materialist. Meaning, there are foolish materialists — by the way, some of them are very far from foolish, but I don’t know, they fall into this fallacy — who…

[Speaker H] Is that like hearing and seeing?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, wait, one second. Yes, everything. Meaning, all the mental phenomena — hearing and seeing are mental phenomena too. So they reduce them to physical phenomena. And that’s nonsense. Not reduction — sorry, reduction is also what he does. Identification, I mean. Not reduction but identification. Love is not caused by electrical currents; it is the electrical currents, that is love. Okay? Here he says, “Listen, I can’t understand it. I can’t get past this barrier and explain to them that they’re simply talking nonsense.” He said this as a materialist.

And then I told him that I had already started working on The Science of Freedom, and there I would deal exactly with this issue, but we didn’t have conversations afterward, so I don’t know what came of it in the end. A few years ago I heard he passed away, so apparently there won’t be any more conversations.

But in any case, the claim is that if you’re a materialist, you need to be a sophisticated materialist. What does that mean? A sophisticated materialist is someone who says there is no additional component in us, no additional substance that is non-material, not material. Soul, spirit, however you call it. But he does not deny the existence of mental phenomena. He’d have to be crazy to deny that — obviously a person feels, thinks, wants, all kinds of things like that. That’s obvious. Who denies such a thing? What’s more, it is completely obvious that these phenomena are not physical phenomena. That too is completely obvious. It’s just that the materialist, like Neumann — the sophisticated materialist — basically claims that these phenomena emerge from the material whole. Meaning, you don’t need to assume the existence of something else besides the material whole in order to explain mental phenomena. Okay? And you don’t need to assume that there exists within us another kind of entity, soul or something like that, besides matter. No — matter alone is enough.

The claim that there are phenomena — in philosophical language it’s called emergence, emergent phenomena, exactly. These are phenomena… “emerge” means it comes up out of, rises out of, something like that — these phenomena emerge from the material whole. But still, what exists in us is only matter. Wait, wait, just a second. Matter arranged in a very specific way, as in us, has a certain property such that mental phenomena somehow emerge from it. But they are characteristics of matter; they do not require the assumption of the existence of something else. These are not things that exist; they are properties. Wait, let me complete the discussion, and then you can ask.

These things are properties of… think, for example, about the speed of a car, okay? When I see a car moving, I can measure its speed; it has some speed, okay? Now the speed of the car is not an entity, right? It’s not something that exists in the world. In the world there exists the car. The speed is a property of the car or a state of the car. The speed is not an entity in its own right, okay? Is speed something subjective that exists only in my consciousness and not in the world? Of course not. It’s a completely objective phenomenon. But it isn’t an objective entity. Meaning, in the objective world entities exist, and those entities have properties. The properties are objective things. They do not exist only inside our consciousness; they exist in the world itself, but they exist in the sense that they qualify, in the sense of quality, they characterize or constitute a quality of an object. A car can travel at a speed, so the speed characterizes it, or is a state in which the car exists, but the speed is not an entity; the entity is the car. It is in a certain state.

Their claim is that mental phenomena are states of the material whole, like speed is a state of the car, okay? So a state is not a thing that exists. You don’t need to arrive at dualism in order to make that claim, because these are states, not another entity. They are states of the material entities. It turns out that when entities are complicated and arranged in a very particular way, all sorts of states appear that are surprising; they do not exist in simpler entities or different entities, but they are still states of the material whole. Not another whole or another entity.

One of the examples given — one of the examples brought up — and one of the first people to raise this thesis was a philosopher named John Searle. He writes — it’s basically a book that is a transcription of lectures he gave, three lectures he gave at Oxford or Cambridge, I don’t remember where — called something like Mind, Brain, Science, I don’t remember exactly, in the Ofakim series by Am Oved. And there he makes this claim and gives an example for his thesis. Back then they didn’t yet call it emergence, but he was basically one of the first to propose the conceptual framework that later came to be called emergence.

And he wanted to make the following claim. Think, for example, of a property like liquidity. Okay? Liquidity is a property of a set of molecules, for example water molecules. At certain temperatures they are liquid, so liquidity is a property of the water molecules, okay? Now a single water molecule is not liquid, nor is it non-liquid. The property of liquidity does not characterize an individual molecule; it characterizes only a cluster of molecules, right? Not only liquidity — every state of matter, liquid, solid, or gas, these are states of a cluster of molecules. They are never the state of an individual molecule. An individual molecule is not gas, not liquid, and not solid. Gas, liquid, and solid refer to certain relations between molecules within that whole. Okay? Meaning, those are properties of the whole that do not characterize the components making up that whole.

[Speaker F] I don’t really understand this at all, but does that mean that even in the molecules themselves there’s no thing at all that affects… some thing that affects it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course there is. But the liquid state is not a state that describes a single molecule.

[Speaker F] But is it built into the single molecule?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does “built in” mean? It has certain properties that affect those states, yes, yes, those properties definitely exist. In another moment I’ll get to that.

So Searle’s claim, basically, is that we see that there are certain wholes endowed with properties that appear only at the collective level. They are not relevant at the microscopic level. When you speak about an individual element, you cannot characterize it in terms of those properties. But a whole made of such elements, and nothing more — just a collection of such elements — can indeed be characterized by those collective properties, like a state of matter. Okay? That is his claim. And basically what he wants to say is that the same thing should describe our mental functions. Our mental functions are properties of the material whole, or if you like the neural whole, that we have. When matter is arranged in a complex way like it is in a human being, certain properties of that whole appear, collective properties, which in our case are mental phenomena — there is will, and there is thought, and there are emotions, and all kinds of things like that.

That is basically the claim of sophisticated materialism. The foolish materialism I spoke about earlier, which says that love is electrical currents, is nonsense. Love is a state — so Yosef Neumann would say — love is a state of our brain as a whole. In certain situations, that state is what is called love. Okay? Even consciousness, according to them, is only some property of the material whole and nothing beyond that — that already goes further, but that is the claim.

Therefore, when I speak about materialism, I mean sophisticated materialism. That is a materialism that does not deny the fact that we have mental functions. Okay? They too agree. And therefore, basically, even according to Yosef Neumann, as a model for the sophisticated materialist, I can ask the same questions and give the same answers that I’ll give later. Meaning, I want to detach the discussion from here on out from the metaphysical discussion of whether there is another spiritual component in us or not. There is no doubt that we have mental functions; that is clear. Now Yosef Neumann will come and say: what defines a human being is the existence of mental functions A, B, C. Okay? Are those functions properties of some other non-material whole, or are those properties of the material whole itself? That is a metaphysical question, but it does not touch our discussion. Our discussion — the question what a human being is, or whether artificial intelligence is a human being, or whether it thinks, or what thinking is — all those things do not touch the question of dualism versus materialism.

Therefore, now, after describing all that I described at the beginning, I actually want to detach this, because the discussion of artificial intelligence is not connected to that issue. I don’t think people want to claim that a soul enters artificial intelligence. At most they want to claim — and even that is some rather bizarre minority view in my opinion — what they want to claim there is that the mental function or mental functions awaken there, because the material whole in that case is iron. It’s not even a physiological whole or a living whole. But still, somehow that whole also suddenly begins to experience mental phenomena. That is basically the claim. Okay? Not the claim that a soul enters there. Usually they also don’t think that a human being has a soul, but I’m saying the whole discussion can be conducted that way too.

Therefore I want to detach the discussion we’ll have from the metaphysical question of dualism versus materialism. I’ll say one more thing — I don’t have much time, so I’ll just close this circle of emergence and then close this discussion at least for now. The claim I want to make is that the emergence claim is a very problematic claim, simply on the conceptual-philosophical level. That’s why I’m not inclined to accept it — I’m a dualist. But again, this won’t affect the discussion later. Since we’re dealing with it anyway, I just want to complete the picture.

Why? Because what are people usually trying to gain with this conceptual framework called emergence? They basically want to say that you don’t need to go beyond scientific conceptions in order to explain the human being and the phenomena appearing in the human being. Okay? You can remain within the physico-chemical world and complete reductionism, where biology and perhaps even psychology are reducible to physics and chemistry, and still live in peace with the fact that there are mental phenomena.

Now I ask the following question: can you show me, on the scientific level, that there are emergent phenomena? Because if you can’t show me there are emergent phenomena, then I don’t understand your motivation for proposing this thesis. Maybe it’s true, but what do you gain? In any case you are assuming something that has no scientific support whatsoever. So if you want to oppose dualism because it is not scientific, then you are supposed to present an alternative that is scientific. But what I claim is that you are presenting an alternative that is also not scientific. So this is just an argument between two different metaphysics, that’s all. But it is still a non-scientific alternative.

Why do I say that? Seemingly, Searle gave a scientific example: the state of matter, liquidity. A state of matter is an example of a property of a collective that does not characterize the individuals that build up the collective. Okay? So there you are — he showed us that there are emergent properties, that material wholes can suddenly display characteristics that are only characteristics of the whole, appearing only at the level of the whole. The material parts that compose that whole are not characterized by those parameters, those properties.

What I claim is that this is not a good example. Why is it not a good example? This brings me back to the question asked here earlier. Because I have a complete scientific explanation for the phenomenon of liquidity. I really don’t need to assume anything. I can perform that reduction explicitly. Not just assume there is a reduction, but I can do it — there is an explanation. If you show the field around the individual molecule, I can show you that given the field around the individual molecule, what will happen at every temperature and pressure — a phase diagram of thermodynamics — in every state of given temperature and pressure I can tell you whether it will be gas, liquid, or solid. Meaning that the collective phenomenon of a state of matter like liquidity is not a good example for our purposes, because there I can show you, from the properties of the individual molecule, the appearance of the collective property.

So the fact that a collective property characterizes only the collective — so what? In the end I can explain it in terms of the properties of the individual particles composing the collective. But in our context there is no such explanation. There isn’t even a hint in the direction of such an explanation; nobody proposes a direction of such an explanation. This is what people don’t understand. In our context no one can show me how an emotion comes out of a certain given state of the material whole. All they can show is the correlation: when there is such-and-such a state of the material whole, what we will feel is such-and-such an emotion. But the mechanism — how from that material state there emerges the phenomenon we call emotion, love, fear, and so on — there is none. There isn’t even a language to explain these things. It just doesn’t exist. There is no scientific field at all that deals with this, as far as I know.

Therefore, when you claim that here there is emergence, this is a different kind of emergence. In discussions around dualism, they invented a new concept: strong emergence and weak emergence. Liquidity is weak emergence. Why? Because while it is true that the collective feature emerges at the collective level, it is weak because I can explain it on the basis of the microscopic characteristics. So yes, it emerges, but it is only an expression of the microscopic features. But there is — and it could indeed be that there is also — strong emergence. Emergence that I cannot explain in terms of the underlying features. Give me the individual neuron — no one would imagine how a collection of neurons could suddenly produce emotion, or will, or thought, or things like that. There is simply no scientific hint of an explanation of that sort.

So what this means, basically, is that we’ve returned to the world of metaphysical speculation. Why? Because now I say, either way, what do you want to claim? That later, when we continue to investigate, science will also find examples of strong emergence, and therefore I’m offering you an alternative that is scientific — it’s preferable to your metaphysical alternative, because I’m basically offering you a scientific material alternative based on the existence of matter alone, and that’s simpler, right? Wrong. I claim this can never be a scientific alternative. Not only do we not have such an example today — there can’t be such an example. Why? Because either way: if you don’t manage to show me how the collective phenomenon comes out of the properties of the parts, then I will always say that apparently there was something else there, that it really wasn’t based only on the properties of the parts. If you do manage to show me how it comes out of the properties of the parts, then we are back to weak emergence, because we have a mechanism showing how the collective characteristics are derived from the characteristics of the parts.

So either way: if you manage to find a scientific basis for it, it becomes weak emergence. If you don’t manage to find one, then it is strong emergence only because you failed to find a scientific basis for it. But if that’s so, then your proposal is also not a scientific proposal. So why is it preferable to the dualist proposal? You are simply assuming a different metaphysical speculation. Maybe you’re right, maybe not — I don’t see why it is better.

[Speaker M] In that sense it’s even a mystical claim, no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that there are basically some sort of properties… Think of this situation, because this is the example I brought in the book. Suppose I took a glass and filled it with water. That liquid is a collection of molecules, okay? Now someone brings me this glass, and suddenly I see that the color is red. The color of the water is red. I’ll say, wow, someone put concentrate in there. Raspberry syrup, as they say. Right? Someone put in concentrate and therefore it became red. Someone else will say, what are you talking about? This is a collection of water molecules that, when they accumulate in this way, become red. But there is no additional component there responsible for the red color. Okay? It’s simply that a collection of molecules suddenly becomes red, even though each individual molecule is not red. Okay? And this also isn’t derived from the properties of the individual molecule, because we have no explanation deriving it from the properties of the individual molecule.

Why assume that the red color arose on its own, rather than say that there is something else here that caused the water to be red? It seems to me that every reasonable person would assume that, right? Again, I can’t rule out the second explanation, but I certainly don’t see it as a simple or preferable explanation compared to the first. And in exactly the same way, the moral of the story is our issue with mental phenomena. Ockham’s razor is not in favor of emergence. The claim of strong emergence is basically saying: here is a collection of neurons, and when you collect them, suddenly all kinds of mental states or mental functions are created. Okay? And I say no — if there are mental functions there, then apparently there is something else there besides the neurons, besides matter, just like the concentrate in the raspberry drink.

And I say that this explanation is at least as simple as the other explanation, if not more so. And I do not see the superiority of the supposedly scientific explanation — which by definition is not scientific, and cannot be scientific — over the metaphysical explanation. So I’m just closing the circle of the discussion about emergence and dualism, because later on we won’t need it anymore. So that closes it for now. Now we can begin asking questions. I just hope the picture is now more reasonable.

[Speaker D] Rabbi, I can’t understand what is really so… emergence and dualism seem to say things that are somewhat different, but in the end in a meaningless way. What difference does it make whether the soul is some other thing floating somewhere, or whether it is embedded in the emergence of the brain? What difference does it make? The main point here isn’t whether it floats somewhere in the air as a soul or is embedded in the emergence of the brain. The main point is — no, I want to say — the main point is the question we should really have discussed, which is what is it? If we were able to define what soul is, if we were able to define what emotions are, then maybe science at some point would find, beyond molecules, even identify this dualist soul, detect it with some special telescope and be able to define it, give it laws, and then clearly the argument would again lose its meaning. The dualist and the non-dualist are saying the same thing. Everyone has become physicalists and physicists and no more. The main point is that we don’t know what soul is, we can’t define any emotion in the world. Not color, not emotion, nothing. We’re talking about something that we can’t even define. And that’s no different between the emergentist and the dualist at all.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I completely agree. By the way, yes.

[Speaker H] I have a question here that I really didn’t understand. The example of liquidity in molecules, right? This is talking about a physical state. They want to use that as proof for things… proof? example. Proof? example. An example for mental things. But if I relate, for example, to DNA molecules — in a DNA chain I have full information about a person. But even if I divide it down to one molecule, one protein, the same information that is in the chain is also in the one. And here I’m exactly disproving what he says — that what exists in the many does not exist in the one. Here it’s the reverse: what exists in the many also exists in the one, in the individual element.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t understand. I don’t understand the claim. First of all, it’s not true that one protein has all the information.

[Speaker H] One cell has all the information.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One cell has all the information.

[Speaker H] One protein also has information.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One protein? Of course not.

[Speaker H] Yes, in the covalent bonds there, even if they are especially small…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The genetic information is in the molecules of genetics.

[Speaker H] Right, each molecule, the individual item, carries information.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, I don’t think that’s true, but that’s a dispute… from my studies too, even a single DNA molecule carries information.

[Speaker H] No, a single DNA molecule. Yes. Not a single protein. A single protein doesn’t… a molecule? Yes, of DNA.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A single molecule of…

[Speaker H] DNA in the chain that is basically…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that is certainly true. A DNA molecule contains the information. Correct. Okay. So what?

[Speaker H] Yes, so if so, that’s surprising.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But a sub-chain of the DNA does not contain the information. Fine, okay. I don’t know.

[Speaker H] Depends where you cut it. That’s not a molecule.

[Speaker D] Those are chains of molecules.

[Speaker H] Is there such a thing as trinalism… trialism? I didn’t understand. That there are three kinds of matter? I’ll explain my question. For example, according to Hasidic teaching — say, the author of the Tanya — there is life, added to that is soul, and added to that is spirit. Meaning, there are three components here, not two.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Soul, spirit, and higher soul.

[Speaker H] Right. Soul, spirit, and higher soul. Meaning there are not two components here; there are already three.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, fine, but that’s all within the soul. Meaning, for me that is all spiritual. I’m not getting into that sort of resolution now. I don’t think anyone can really understand those distinctions anyway, so I don’t see much point in discussing it. There were earlier comments too that I stopped, unless they’ve already been answered.

[Speaker B] I have a comment. Does the Rabbi think Ockham’s razor is an argument in favor of emergence? Meaning, if I say emergence exists, then basically I don’t need this additional entity…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You don’t need the additional entity, but you do need additional mechanisms. What difference does that make? Why are additional entities worse than additional mechanisms? Beyond the natural mechanisms.

[Speaker B] No, so that…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s simply the simplest explanation. In the original Ockham, Ockham’s razor was minimum entities. But on the philosophical level, what difference does that make? You make the simplest theory. Whether it is simpler in terms of the number of entities, or in terms of the number of laws — I don’t see the difference. Okay.

[Speaker H] There are many scientists who think that a human being is autonomy operating on a set of bundles of neurons, right, the neurons, that… and everything that… meaning, this is not new.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What isn’t new?

[Speaker H] This idea that a human being is nothing but a collection of neurons.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is the materialist claim. He is not a collection of neurons. The collection of neurons is his brain, but there are other things in him.

[Speaker H] Yes, obviously. They’re talking about intellect and understanding and thought. After all, that gets us to intelligence.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Any more comments or questions?

[Speaker I] In the Rabbi’s example of…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Speed?

[Speaker I] Isn’t that something that could be considered emergence? Or parallel physical quantities?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, because speed can also belong to an individual atom. Not only to a whole car. Meaning, it’s not a property that appears at the collective level. I gave it not as an example of emergence, but as an example of a property as opposed to an entity.

[Speaker I] Yes, but it’s a derived property. The division here isn’t between one and many, but it is still a property derived from some change that happens to, say, a single atom.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Derived? It describes the change itself. The property is that it is undergoing change. The property is not derived from the change. It is the description of the change.

[Speaker I] But it’s still something that doesn’t exist in one state, and then something happens in reality and suddenly this property emerges.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously. There are many properties that exist in one object, and those properties don’t exist in another object or at another time in the same object.

[Speaker I] That’s obvious, so what? I’m trying to understand the distinction from emergence. After all, here too there’s a property that appears when reality changes suddenly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does that have to do with emergence? I didn’t understand. I don’t see any connection. Speed is a property of a car, and emergence is a property of a whole. What is surprising about emergence is that a property appears at the level of the whole and is irrelevant at the level of the parts composing the whole. Meaning, the whole is nothing but the collection of parts, nothing besides that, but at the level of the parts it isn’t there and at the level of the whole it suddenly appears. There is something surprising here. But is there anything surprising in the fact that a car moves at a speed? Anything that requires explanation? What’s the problem?

[Speaker I] No, there’s nothing that requires explanation there. I’m just wondering what the distinction is. As we said, emergence can be in one and many — what is special specifically about emergence that appears from a whole? Could there be emergence that appears when…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There can be all kinds of things. You can call it emergence; call it whatever you like. But there is no connection between the two phenomena. What difference does it make? Emergence is a new phenomenon; one has to discuss it. Speed — what is there to discuss about speed? You want to call that too a different kind of emergence? Fine by me. I don’t see any practical implication. Okay.

[Speaker J] Rabbi, I just wanted to make sure: is the claim of emergence necessarily contradictory to dualism? Meaning, can dualists not accept it? Because it sounds very reasonable.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they can accept it. But those who are not dualists have to accept it.

[Speaker J] Yes, okay. Thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, goodbye, have a peaceful Sabbath.

[Speaker B] Thank you very much.