Answer

Thank you for the comments. I am very glad to receive responses of all kinds to my books.
First, regarding your opening paragraph: randomness too exists only at the microscopic level. At larger scales there is decoherence, which erases or smears out the quantum characteristics (except in liquids or conductors, and even that not at our temperatures). So quantum theory cannot help even before the distinction between randomness and choice. I explained this in the book in the chapter on quantum theory.
Now I’ll respond according to your numbering.

1. As I explained in the book, there is a non-physical interaction here between the will and the brain. The will creates a field or moves an electron. When you ask how this happens, you are basically expecting a scientific or physical answer, but this is a non-physical process. I have no way to describe it (and I don’t think anyone else does either). By the way, even the most hardline materialist does not even have the language to describe how the mental emerges from the material. True, for him this is not an interaction, since in his view the mental is a property of the material whole and not another substance, but there is still a causal relation here that he has no scientific way to describe. I noted in the book that what is broken is the laws of mechanics, but energy can still be conserved in this process—if we see the will as mediating between the energy we accumulate from food and sleep and the energy we expend in action. I don’t know how to say anything more concrete than that.
In any case, if you are not a determinist, there is no escape from assuming the possibility of such an interaction.

2. The sentences here are not clear to me. I don’t really understand what it means to be part of God. Is my soul not something separate from Him when it is in the body? So if so, what happens afterward? Does God undergo a change? I also do not feel bound to one Orthodox conception or another. None of us has any idea what happens to the soul after death, if indeed anything happens to it at all. My impression is that the Sages, and the wise men of all generations as well, had no idea about this either, and their words are speculation worth about as much as my own speculations.
[By the way, I prefer to write “God” in the ordinary way, since that is not the Divine Name. Following my book on evolution, whose Hebrew title is “God Plays Dice,” I took quite a bit of abuse for using the Divine Name, from various righteous people who did not understand that this spelling is not the Name. But when one writes it in the other way, as you did here, that is the Divine Name, and then erasing it becomes a problem.]

3. To the best of my understanding, there is no such experiment. In the chapter on Libet’s experiments I tried to explain why I do not see how they could do this even in the future. I have some contact with people in neural computation in Jerusalem, and one of them told me they are working on a Libet experiment that would examine the RP before an action involving a real dilemma (as I explained in the book). But as I argued there, even if they succeed—and that is not easy at all—it will not be evidence. If they succeed with the Blue Brain-type project, namely building a complete full human brain that can perform a real simulation of a person’s brain, then perhaps one could test whether, given a certain neural state of a person, the computer would henceforth behave exactly like the person whose neural state that is. But even there there is noise and averaging, and in my opinion there is no real possibility on the horizon of testing this empirically.

4. This question is identical to the previous one. If there were a formulation that confirmed or refuted determinism, it would also refute or confirm libertarianism.

5. The halting problem is related to the Church-Turing hypothesis, that is, to the question whether the human mind is Gödelian (built like a Turing machine). But that is a stronger question than the question of determinism, because in principle there could be a deterministic machine that is not a Turing machine (like an axiomatic system that is not equivalent to number theory, that is, stronger than it, and therefore not subject to Gödel’s theorem). Such a machine would not encounter the halting problem, but it would still be deterministic.

6. Theoretically that could happen, but it is hard to hang one incomprehensible thing on another incomprehensible thing. By that logic one could also speak about an assembly line for fairies or demons. There are sometimes psychokinetic phenomena that have even been examined somewhat scientifically (there are fierce debates about this), and they reflect an interaction between one person’s spirit and another’s, and through that of course also with the other’s body. Perhaps there is room to say that our ability to feel that someone is looking at us or passing behind us is related to this, although I am really not sure there is not some ordinary physical influence here. And if you like, you can connect to this recognition of a lost object by visual familiarity rather than by identifying marks. This is basically shape or object recognition. Though even there I tend to think it is a combination of a whole set of small and not unequivocal signs, but still it is ordinary perception and not a mystical connection as people tend to think.

7. As far as I remember, he does not cite him. But when I meet him (we know each other a bit; at the Weizmann Institute we sat in neighboring offices), I’ll scold him.

8. I completely accept the comment, and in general I am truly happy about every comment. The problem is that this “module” is a person—that is, an editor. I can’t manage to find someone who will do high-level editing for my books (that is, editing that enters into questions of structure in the book). I have already written about thirty books. Some received no editing at all; others were edited, but not to much effect. At Yedioth Books there actually was a good editor whom I was happy with, but even she did not make substantive changes, although I very much asked for them. This is probably a very hard job, and ordinary editors do not really do it (at least not those I met, and not with the budgets allocated for the matter). My books are fairly difficult for the average reader, and editors who deal with language mostly do language editing. The better ones make local comments on wording or even on an argument (that happens very rarely). Nobody really does truly high-level editing. Apparently they do not feel confident enough to engage the content in a significant way. And seating a whole team of editors is beyond my means.

Again, thank you for the comments, and goodbye,
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Questioner:
Hello Michi,
Again, thank you for the detailed response.
I would like to focus on the area of section 1, ask a few questions, and share two directions I’ve been thinking about over the last few days:

1. How can free choice emerge from deterministic development?
Both for the fetus, which clearly does not possess choice (“against your will you are formed”), and at some point acquires it,
and also from an evolutionary perspective on the human species, when in the early stages of life there clearly
was no choice. (And by the way, the two angles connect according to the claim that the fetus goes through the stages of evolution.)

2. Continuing the previous section—Is choice something binary, or perhaps something continuous?
If continuous, can it somehow be defined as a magnitude?
Does an incompetent person have free choice? A minor? A clever chimpanzee?

3. When we look at light as a reality, it is legitimate to describe it both as a wave and as a particle, even though these are clearly
contradictory descriptions. Can’t we apply something similar to the reality of the human being and say that his physical part is deterministic
and his mental part possesses choice?

And now to the thoughts:
1. We tend to attribute our consciousness to ourselves as separate entities.
Some people in the world manage to reach a consciousness in which they are united to some degree with what surrounds them.
This happens among gurus, sometimes under the influence of drugs, sometimes through meditation. In my estimation it also exists in the areas of Hasidism,
in the experience of the shedding of physicality / nullification of the self.
In the book you are unwilling to cast a strict skeptical doubt on our experiences (philosopher Moore with his two hands), and I’m with you on that,
but if so, perhaps there is room to broaden the concept of consciousness so that it includes not only the individual person.
In other words, I would say that the spectrum of our conscious states also includes consciousness that goes beyond
the boundaries of the self.
Attached is something I wrote quite a while ago about multi-state consciousness, where I argue that consciousness can be built from a superposition
of basic conscious states:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwJAdMjYRm7IeFNTVlFMR0x5T1k
If we accept this expansion, what effect, if any, would the conscious state that goes beyond the boundaries of the self have on the free
choice that is “attached” to the limited self?

2. I want to start with an image: N people are traveling on trains with well-defined tracks,
without the ability to move from one train to another, because they are chained to their seats with a lock.
Somehow, one of them manages to free himself, thereby enabling himself to move from train to train,
and thus to free other people from their locks so that they too can jump from train to train,
and possess free choice.
Could it be, following question 1 above about the fetus, that somehow we receive the freedom to choose by means of
someone / something external to us?
(I don’t remember where in the book you talk about three components of free choice; maybe this is connected to one of them.)
If we go in that direction, then one could describe choice as a singular event—similar to the Big Bang, which happened
once, to someone, and from there rolled onward and made possible, for countless creatures from the beginning of creation, free choice as well.

In general, I feel I don’t have enough knowledge and concepts on the subject, and these musings may not be worth much…

And by the way, one last thing: in the experiment with the optical crossing and the person with the twitch / smile in the mouth,
I tried looking at him only with my right eye, and the right image still looked happier.
(You could make a pilpulistic argument and say that even when we see with the right eye alone, there is “induction” by means of the imagination completing
reality, so that even the closed left eye is somehow activated.)
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Rabbi:
I’m changing the order so that there will be a logical order.

2. I think the concept of choice is binary in its essence. Either you have it or you don’t. That is because I define a creature as possessing choice when it has the principled possibility of deviating from the influence of circumstances and the outcome they dictate. Even if it does not always make use of this possibility, and even if it never does, it still has choice. As for an incompetent person, I assume it depends what kind of incompetent person. Perhaps there is an incompetent person who has lost the ability to choose, like any other organic or mental defect, but in the simple sense an incompetent person is a human being with choice, except that his choices are not correct or not responsible. He has the ability to deviate from circumstances (he is not an animal), but he does so in the wrong directions.
1. From this it follows that there is no point in speaking about an evolutionary development of the will (because there are no intermediate degrees). At some stage in the process this capacity to choose entered the human being. The Sages describe that the good inclination enters us at age 13, and perhaps that is the intent. But I tend to think it was always in us; it is just that as an infant I am in the category of a total incompetent who cannot make use of the capacity to choose, and as a child it is already better (like an incompetent person), and as an adult it reaches full development and formation. But the development is in understanding (from the category of an incompetent person to a responsible and thoughtful person), not in the very ability to choose, which is a binary trait and therefore probably inherent in us.
3. It seems to me that quite apart from quantum theory, it is clear that, if anything, only our mental part is what chooses, whereas the physical part is deterministic like the rest of reality. The question is what the connection is between the two. If the mental influences the physical, then indirectly there is a non-physical influence upon it. And again, I don’t see how quantum theory will help us understand this. Body and soul are not two alternative “pictures” (like the momentum and position pictures for orthogonal quantities), but two aspects that exist in us simultaneously (like position and energy, or time and momentum).
As a general point, I must say that there is no logical contradiction in quantum theory, nor in any other physical theory. If there were, a basic law of logic states that one could derive from it (as from any axiomatic system that contains a contradiction) any conclusion whatsoever; that is, it would be devoid of empirical content. But quantum theory has predictions, meaning it predicts certain physical behaviors and rules out others. From this it follows that it contains no contradiction.
For our purposes, light (and the electron too—there is no difference) is not “both particle and wave” but “neither this nor that.” It is a wave function, which sometimes involves uncertainty in position (and then it behaves like what we call a wave) and sometimes in momentum (and then it is what we call a particle). Wave and particle are not entities but properties or descriptions of entities. The entities are the wave functions. Now you can see that in quantum theory there is no logical contradiction, no “unity of opposites,” and no other empty expressions of that sort. There are surprising phenomena in quantum theory, of course, but in no way contradictions.

Regarding the thoughts:
1. I didn’t understand the first sentence. What is separate from what? In light of what follows, it sounds as though I am separate from the environment. Is that the intention? If so, then there is no need to resort to mystical experiences. Even in philosophy one can ask what creates the individuation of entities. (At a conference I attended yesterday I had an argument with someone about whether conjoined twins are one person with two heads or two people, and what would determine the answer to that question.) In the same way one can ask whether a “people” is a kind of entity or a fiction that is really composed of nothing more than an aggregate of individuals (“One morning a man rises and feels that he is a people”—I have an article on the site with that title that touches on this point from a non-philosophical angle). So too regarding an individual person one can ask whether he is an aggregate of cells or a person. And of course a cell too is an aggregate of molecules, each of which is an aggregate of particles, and so on down to quarks and beyond. This is the problem of the Ship of Theseus (if you don’t know it, see Wikipedia). It is a philosophical question with no simple answer, beyond the initial intuitive understanding we have that a person is an individual entity and not a collection of cells. But that is ontology, meaning cognition, and not experience.
By contrast, as I understand it, the question of “union” (with another, or with one’s surroundings, or with God) is a question of subjective experience and not an ontic-metaphysical question (that is, the definition of entities—what exists in reality and what does not). Even if I have an experience of union with all my surroundings, like any self-respecting Zen sage who has reached nirvana, that does not mean I am not a separate individual person. It is an experience, and not necessarily one that reflects reality.
This Hasidic talk (starting with the notion that contraction is “not literal,” from which everything flows) sounds empty to me, and I attribute most of it to confusion that stems from a lack of systematic and clear definition of the concepts. Alternatively, it is dealing with experience and not with reality itself, and I do not argue with experiences. To each his own experiences, but precisely for that reason I think experiences do not say much on the philosophical plane.
And here it is important to note another point of yours. In my book I am unwilling to cast doubt on our cognitions (such as that we have hands), but I do cast doubt on our experiences (such as union and the like). That is a very important distinction. Experiences are subjective matters that do not necessarily say anything about the world, and therefore skepticism is not really relevant to them. Our cognitions, by contrast, obviously deal with claims about the world. Skepticism is directed toward them, and I (like Moore) am not a skeptic.
This reminds me of an article by Adi Tzemach, in a collection edited by Marcelo Dascal, on the just and the unjust, where he tries to ground the moral obligation to another person on the idea that concern for myself at the next moment is also concern for some kind of “other.” In my opinion that is empty dialectics (beyond the logical-ethical problems it involves—for concern for myself is not an obligation but an instinct, and the fact is that I do not have an instinct to care for another).

2. I did not fully understand the proposal. In general, the moment there is an influence on my choices, those are not choices. If my freedom is fed by others (=that person chooses for me), then I am not free (and perhaps I do not exist as an individual, and therefore the discussion becomes meaningless). And certainly if we are talking about a “Big Bang,” then we have no choice in the ongoing present. So then what responsibility do we bear for our actions, when we were not yet born and they were not planned when we “chose”?

Regarding the article and the poem.

First, I liked the poem very much.

Second, as for the substance of what you wrote (and also the poem), I return to my distinction between experience and cognition. The question is whether the superposition you are talking about is an experience or a cognition. You relate to it as cognition, and I am not sure it is not really an experience. As I said, I am very suspicious of drawing ontological and metaphysical conclusions from experiences.

And third, just one more technical comment. Fourier decomposition is not superposition. Long before quantum theory, and independently of it, we knew that any function can be represented as a sum of functions in a complete space (such as sine and cosine, or delta functions in the position representation, and the like), meaning that one can describe a particle as a collection of waves. The concept of superposition is an interpretation of this wave-combination, and that interpretation was given only after the birth of quantum theory. That interpretation sees the particle as a collection of waves into any one of which it can collapse (with probabilities determined by the wave function). That is, it is really composed of those options, and they are not merely a different mode of presentation. Only after that interpretation does Fourier decomposition describe a superposition. In other words: in quantum theory, the different waves in a Fourier decomposition are viewed as alternative states of the particle, and not merely as its formal mathematical composition.
Think about the Fourier decomposition of light and not of an electron. There is a beam of light that is also composed in some spectral way. If it passes through two slits in the classical manner (this is Young’s experiment, which was done with light), that is not superposition but an ordinary classical diffraction phenomenon. It became superposition only when the experiment was performed with electrons and they found interference of an electron with itself.
Surely you do not mean to say that every filter that screens frequencies of some light source operates within the framework of quantum-theory decomposition. There are no quantum phenomena there at all. It is an entirely classical optical phenomenon, and it should not be seen as a phenomenon of superposition, but simply as an ordinary Fourier decomposition of a light wave.
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Questioner:
Have a good week,
I’ll respond to some of your points.
It’s starting to become a bit hard to manage, because the dialogue is turning into branches and branches of branches.

First, regarding free choice as a binary or continuous magnitude:
I tend to think in the continuous direction—your presentation of things turns it into something rather mystical,
that at age 13 jumps and enters a person, something reminiscent of the Kuzari’s notion of Israel’s special quality,
and this is also your approach to the previous question itself, of how choice works,
when you try to describe energies and so on, and basically again this is something without explanation,
miraculous in my language.
A continuous magnitude could be something that, following your description of the topographical map in the book (based on genetics, environment, and psychology), could theoretically be defined according to a person’s ability to climb up the mountain,
just as one can rank mountain climbers according to whether they can make it to Everest, or Hermon, or only manage to get onto a chair…
I prefer that perspective, because then there are no discontinuous transitions.
And by the way, Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, describes our mental component in a similar way (as a continuous magnitude).

Regarding the thoughts:
1. (The experience of unity) I didn’t completely understand the distinction you are making between experience and cognition.
If there is a person who experiences consciousness of unity most of the time, why is that in your eyes a more doubtful experience than our experience of ourselves as separate entities?

2. It seems to me you completely didn’t understand me, but before I explain more what I meant, I’ll quote
a sentence of yours from the response:
"

If my freedom is fed by others (=that person chooses for me), then I am not free."
And if so, our freedom is fed by God (thanks for that comment), does that mean we have no freedom? Isn’t there another version here of the fool’s loop by means of which you reject determinism?

And now I’ll explain what I meant:
On page 40 of the book (The Science of Freedom) you speak about 3 components of choice:
– The two options exist
– They are realizable
– There is no external coercive factor
(By the way, at the top of page 47 you refer to the 3 components, and it seems to me that by mistake
you speak about the nonexistence of the first requirement, when really it should be the second requirement.)

I am focusing on the second requirement—the possibility of realizing the choice—and constructing a scenario in which the opening of the second requirement is performed by someone from outside.
The people traveling locked in the trains are lacking the second requirement.
It is enough that once in history somewhere, someone frees someone else from the lock and thereby
enables him free choice, since the second requirement now exists again, and from there by a process of chain reaction choice becomes possible for all those freed from the trains.
In this thought experiment there was an entire world of people lacking choice,
and it was enough that one person, one single time, should make it possible from that point onward,
and hence my association to the Big Bang.
It seems to me one could think of similar scenarios for the first and third requirements as well.
I hope the thought is better explained this time.
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
Have a good week.
I didn’t write that people begin choosing at age 13. I wrote the opposite: that a person has the ability to choose from the moment he is born (it is in his nature), but at age 13 one begins to be responsible and to understand the implications and significance, and only then does choice acquire significance. I proposed that picture precisely because of the difficulty you raised.
I simply do not understand the continuous matter. Either there is choice or there isn’t. As I said—the principled ability to choose either exists or does not. The degree of its realization is of course continuous, but that is not very significant.

1. Experience is a kind of feeling or sensation. When I see something, I do not define that as an experience. It is a cognition. Of course that cognition occurs within me, but in my opinion it is not correct to call it an experience.
2. Our freedom was implanted in us by God, in that He created us with the ability to choose. That is not called someone else operating freedom within me. The choices are mine and mine alone. Perhaps I did not understand what you meant by saying that someone else generates freedom in me. If he merely removes impediments, as you now explained, I do not see what that solves.

———————————————-

Questioner:
Thought experiment:
Does an egg cell have a soul?
And a sperm cell?
Suppose we created in a lab a copy of an egg cell and a sperm cell, fertilized them, and a human developed—
does he have a soul and free choice?
Have a good week.
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Rabbi:

This is completely parallel to the question of when in the evolutionary process soul and choice entered the human being. At some stage it happens. I assume the same applies here as well.
If I add a conjecture, it happens from the beginning but in the following way: when the egg is fertilized, a creature is formed that, when it develops, will have choice and a soul. In other words, the potential for this is there from the beginning, and at some stage it is realized. This is what the Sages say when they say that at age 13 the good inclination enters a person, and the author of the Tanya writes that the divine soul enters him (and not the good inclination), meaning that from birth he has both inclinations and is acted upon by them. From the age of commandments onward, the ability enters him to act and decide independently of the inclinations (to choose). This is as opposed to the animal soul, which acts according to the inclinations.
To sharpen this further, let us look at an example. It seems to me that all of us—materialists and libertarians alike—would agree that a fertilized egg has no consciousness and no emotions. But at a later stage they appear (emerge). How would the materialist explain that? That it develops from the potential that was there from the beginning. So that is what happens with our capacity for choice as well. We can plainly see that children are acted upon by their environment, and as they grow up they learn to resist—to varying degrees.
According to the explanation I suggested, the question of continuity is solved.
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Questioner:

1. Again, there is hocus-pocus here of something from nothing, similar to the miracle I mentioned in the existence of free choice, which enables change in the material world.

2. My main question concerns the ability to produce free choice by human hands.
Both the egg cell and the sperm cell in the thought experiment were created by a person.
Can a person create an object that has a soul and free choice?
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Rabbi:

A human being cannot create something from nothing. He can make use of the laws of nature and try to achieve results through them. After all, even the materialists can be asked: can a human being create a human being? No. He can fertilize an egg and rely on the laws of nature to produce a human from that. The laws of nature are such that a fertilized human egg produces a human being. The question is what a human being is. If you are a libertarian, then you believe that a human being is a creature that has free choice. From this it follows that what is produced from a fertilized egg is an entity that has the potential for free choice. Can a person create a plant from a seed? No. He can plant it in the soil, and a plant will grow because of the laws of nature.
In short, I do not see in this any greater wonder than the creation of a human being as such (cognitions and consciousness and emotions and the like), nor any greater difficulty for the libertarian than for the materialist.

—————————————–
Questioner:

I have no difficulties with the materialist, because for him things are deterministic.
My question is about the dualist approach.
It is not clear to me how a human being, by his actions and by means of the laws of nature, can create
something that goes beyond the laws of nature and grants free choice.

And I’ll take my question one step further—if a human being, by means of the laws of nature,
can create an entity with free choice, why couldn’t he do
so also by means of silicon crystals??

I have some sense that we’re talking on different frequencies, and that happens too…

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Rabbi:
I disagree.
The laws of nature determine that what comes out of a fertilized egg has (or has enter into it) a soul with free will. That is part of the laws of nature. The fact that free will itself is not explained within a physical framework (because it is part of the soul) does not contradict that. The laws of nature only say that a soul becomes connected to a body in such a way. The soul as such is not physics.
For example, those who are not reductionists do not reduce biology to physics. So now they must explain: how does a biological creature come out of the physics of molecules? The laws of nature say that if you assemble molecules in a way that creates a living cell, it will have vital properties, even though according to the non-reductionist assumption the living cell is not explained in physical terms. That does not contradict the fact that the laws of nature determine that biology emerges from the assembly of physical parts.
I do not understand why he should be able to do that with silicon. The laws of nature do not allow creating a creature with choice from silicon. That is exactly what I said: the human being acts within the limits of the laws of nature.

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Questioner:
How can you speak about laws of nature while using concepts like choice and soul that go beyond nature?
It sounds like mixing unlike kinds, and why, on your view, couldn’t I claim that there are laws of nature that would allow producing a soul on silicon wafers in a supercomputer? Is it just a fixed decree?
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Rabbi:
Eli, we really are probably on different frequencies 🙂

I am claiming that there is a law of nature such that when a human being is formed, the potential for choice enters into him and is realized. This is a property of that creature, and in that sense it is a law of nature (though not a law in physics). Just as a seed planted in the ground has a potential for growth that is realized. That does not necessarily mean that the soul that enters into him is part of physics, just as biology is not necessarily part of physics. What is the problem with this picture?
I asked whether you know how to explain to me how consciousness or emotions are created from a fertilized egg (that is, from biology). Do you also deny their existence because you do not understand the process of their formation? The fact that I do not know how X is formed from Y does not mean I must deny the fact that it is indeed formed. If there is a fact I observe, I accept it. Afterward I can try to look for an explanation. I see that from a fertilized egg there arises a human being who has free will (as well as emotions and consciousness). Therefore, for me, that is one of the laws of nature. I do not know how it happens, but we do not know how emotions and consciousness happen either. So does that mean they do not exist?

If you succeed in producing a soul from silicon wafers, then it will turn out that there is another law of nature according to which silicon wafers too receive a soul from somewhere. Who said that is impossible? At present it does not happen. That is, it may be possible, but it is not true. Not everything possible is also true. But we know very well that a human being is indeed formed from an egg. Therefore the creation of a human being is one of the laws of nature, whereas creating a human being from silicon is not.