Q&A: Free Choice and Providence
Free Choice and Providence
Question
Hello and blessings,
A. During the intermediate days of the festival I read the Rabbi’s article on free will, and ever since I’ve been very upset. The Rabbi believes that the will (which is a spiritual concept) can generate force fields that move particles in the brain—even though that goes against our intuition, and even though this is a classic example of Russell’s teapot—but doesn’t believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, can do that?!
B. The Rabbi wrote that the randomness in quantum theory gets “smeared out” on large scales. I thought the whole idea of Schrödinger’s cat was to show that, in principle, weird quantum phenomena can affect “our” world. What am I missing? Is there a difference (in this context) between randomness and superposition?
C. Suppose for a moment that quantum randomness solves the problem of free choice. That would mean that from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, anyone who was honest with himself had to conclude that there is no free choice (and that Judaism is not true, etc.). Could the Holy One, blessed be He, allow such a thing?
(True, regarding quantum theory this is a theoretical question, but it seems to me relevant in many cases in the area of archaeology and Judaism as well…)
D. And a slightly provocative question: what does the Rabbi think about during the Priestly Blessing? That it’s just a ritual? 🙂
By the way, the article is excellently written.
Thank you very much, and happy holiday!
Answer
B, hello.
A. I didn’t write that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create force fields. After all, He is the one who created them in the creation of the world. What I wrote is that it seems that nowadays He does not actually do so. By the way, as far as I understand, none of this has anything whatsoever to do with Russell’s teapot.
B. You’re not missing anything. But Schrödinger’s cat is a controlled experiment that requires working very hard in order to carry it out. The difficulty is precisely in trying to elevate quantum phenomena to the macroscopic level. Naturally, that does not happen. There is no connection between randomness and superposition. The randomness is in the outcome of the measurement, and the superposition is the state before the measurement.
C. Don’t assume it, and don’t ask. Quantum theory does not solve the problem. But even if it did solve it, one can believe in free choice because I experience it, even if I do not know how to explain it. Before Newton, did people not believe in gravity?
D. Usually I think about the last Talmudic passage I studied, or about some other matter that is bothering me.