Q&A: Free Will – Soul
Free Will – Soul
Question
Have a good week,
You wrote in your book The Science of Freedom that the very existence of will requires a soul, since matter is deterministic or random, and there is no room in it for free choice.
But my question is: insofar as will is a creation ex nihilo—having no prior cause—why assume that it rests on the medium of a soul –> which activates free will? Why not instead assume that there exists a creation ex nihilo of will that itself moves matter?
That is, why is there a need for some prior entity—a soul—that activates the will, instead of assuming that the will is created entirely anew and does not need to rest on some prior medium (a soul)?
Answer
Call it whatever you want. There has to be something non-material beyond the body. If you want to say that this is the will itself—fine. As long as I haven’t said anything about what the soul is, there’s no point getting into those questions. You just have to note that beyond will, we also have other mental functions within us (emotions, thought).
Discussion on Answer
To Asaf,
1. See here: https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%94%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%9E%D7%9C%D7%92%D7%99%D7%AA-%D7%99%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%AA-%D7%99%D7%A9-%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%99%D7%9F/
David, thank you very much, I had indeed assumed something similar.
Could the Rabbi answer point 2 at least?
It’s hard for me to get back into a discussion with gaps like this. In any case, I don’t see panpsychism as anything more than a slogan. If you assume that every particle has awareness/consciousness, then you’ve solved the whole problem. The only drawback is that it’s probably just not true. This is a common fallacy: choosing an easy and implausible solution and backing it up with Occam’s razor. By that logic, Newtonian physics would be preferable to relativity or quantum theory because it is simpler. Its only drawback is that it isn’t true. Occam’s razor is meant to choose between theories that are equally plausible and have equal explanatory power. When you have an implausible theory, even if it is simpler in the Occam sense, there is no reason to accept it.
Thanks, but why is this theory less plausible?
After all, we have cases in which it is proven to us that Newtonian physics does not work, and therefore we needed the more complicated theory of quanta, because there was no choice.
That is not the case here, where we have no proof whatsoever against the idea that every particle has consciousness, and it also explains why we have consciousness, and simplifies the problem of the connection between matter and consciousness.
A. The question is whether there can be a true creation ex nihilo as a complete entity—will.
Or is it preferable to stick with what is more familiar and argue that there can be a creation of a state without a prior cause—will—but that what brought it about is an entity capable of acting forward (a soul).
That way I minimize creation ex nihilo: instead of a whole entity, only a new state.
B. You wrote that there are other mental functions within us, and so there must be some entity that is not physical/natural that can contain them. Otherwise we run into the fallacy of emergentism, where something appears at the macro level that does not exist at the micro level.
But wouldn’t it be preferable to assume that at the micro level there really is mental consciousness in every single particle in nature—for example, each quark and every quark? (Panpsychism.) And the unity of our consciousness is because we are only one particle out of the whole brain / all the particles, with the capacity to join together into a single sensation. Does the Rabbi see panpsychism as a sufficient explanation for mental consciousness? After all, in the end it saves us from having to insist on the unfamiliar.