Isn’t purposiveness also considered a cause? Doesn’t the soul have a desire to realize the purposiveness that drives it?

No. The soul “wants” means it decides on some value. There is no cause that brings it to that decision. Will is a unique human faculty, whose main role is to turn purposes into causes. After I have decided in favor of some value, the will activates a causal chain that leads to the realization of that value.

In my opinion, the Rabbi’s examples on purposive physics (that physics can be interpreted in both the causal and purposive ways, like Snell’s law) are especially helpful for atheists in understanding the a priori assumption as opposed to causality.

I understand the explanations, but I find them hard to formulate. You say, “There is no cause that brings it to that decision,” and the mind automatically flags “randomness.” So souls basically violate the principle of causality and yet they are not random? On what basis did you decide in favor of some value? That’s what people keep asking me again and again, and I can’t explain it.

By the way, another question on the topic that I won’t open a new thread for because I don’t want to trouble you: how does a non-physical soul affect the physical brain? There has to be some kind of mass or energy here in order to affect the brain or the body so that it carries out the decision, no?
Thanks.

I’ll repeat myself one last time. The fact that there is no cause does not mean randomness. When you ask, “On what basis did I choose some value,” you are assuming there has to be a cause for it. But the libertarian claims that there does not.

It turns out that a non-physical entity can affect the physical brain. The will moves an electron, and in that way a causal chain begins. The libertarian must accept this reservation from the physicalist picture.

“The will moves an electron” — that’s exactly the question. How does it move an electron? Will is not physical, and neither is a soul. So how does it affect something material? How does it move an electron if it has no electric charge, so to speak?

This is a question that stems from a misunderstanding. Can you explain to me how an electric field moves an electron? It simply moves it because that is the power of an electric field. The claim of the libertarians is that the will has a similar power/field.
Are you expecting a physical explanation of how the will works? There isn’t one. That’s the whole idea: that this is a non-physical mechanism that generates physical phenomena. You assume that only physical entities can perform physical actions, but that is not so. The Holy One, blessed be He, also created the world, and He too is not a physical entity.

Okay. Accepted. Let’s assume there is a non-physical way to affect something physical.
But how is it that we have never observed this phenomenon? After all, the will is not physical energy. Why haven’t we seen atoms in the brain moving again and again without any known cause? (I assume the scientists wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s the soul moving it,” but would try to look for some new energetic law that explains the movement.)
Do you think the reason is technical (the technology is not advanced enough), or more principled (it is impossible to observe it for some reason no matter what)?
Thanks again for the answers.

The answer is twofold. The electron that moves by the power of the will is one out of billions upon billions surging through the process, and the process in question is one out of billions upon billions of processes that are in fact deterministic. There is simply no chance of observing such an event. And I would add that even if something like this happened before the astonished eyes of the neuroscience researcher, he would immediately assume that some force had acted here (as you yourself wrote, and that is the answer to your question embedded in your own words). He has no way of knowing that this is not the case.

On what basis did you determine that it is one electron out of all the billions? Maybe the will moves a series of electrons. Maybe even a series of atoms, not to mention molecules.
If the will moved at least a series of atoms, we should have seen series of atoms moving without any known cause. I assume we would see studies reporting repeated unclear movements of parts of the brain.

This is insistence that leads nowhere. You want to argue against my position that the will moves an electron. So argue against me, not against a position you are putting in my mouth. I claim that this is an extremely rare case and there is no chance of seeing it. It is also perfectly clear that this is the case in the libertarian conception. Do you want to build a straw man and attack other conceptions? Be my guest. But what do you want from me?

Maybe I’ll sharpen it a bit more. My assumption is that physics is deterministic. The will is the exception. Therefore it is very plausible that even if the will moves an electron, it will only be the first electron, from which point onward the process will continue in the usual physical-causal way. There is no reason at all to assume that the will would move a large series of electrons (by the way, even a million electrons is a negligible joke. There is no chance of seeing that). Moreover, acts of choice themselves are very rare, even according to the libertarian. Most of our actions are deterministic. Everything that does not involve conscious deliberation and value-based decision.

I don’t understand what straw man there is here; all I did was ask how you arrived at the idea that the will moves specifically an electron, because that’s what you wrote.
There is no need to move more than one electron, so that is the assumption.
A good answer in any case.

That is exactly the definition of a straw man. I claim that the will moves a single electron in rare cases. Therefore there is no difficulty in the fact that researchers do not encounter such cases. Now you argue, but the will would have to move many electrons, so why don’t we see that? But I claimed it was not many, and you are claiming the opposite without explaining why one should assume that. That is, you put in my mouth a position that the will moves many electrons and then attacked it (why don’t researchers encounter such cases). But I did not claim that. In other words, you set up a straw man and attacked it.
By the way, beyond what I wrote, I will mention another point I wrote above. Even if there were many such cases, researchers still have no way to verify that some electron moved without a physical force acting on it. Therefore it simply is not measurable.

I never put in your mouth the position that the will moves many electrons. I also never claimed that.
Apparently you did not understand me correctly.
The only thing I did on this issue was ask why you think it moves one electron. And you answered that (there is no need for more). That’s all. A good answer, which I accepted.