Question

Hello and blessings,
I heard your lecture today on free choice, and thank you very much for it.
You argued that in a deterministic world there is no meaning to the claim that the world is deterministic, since that claim itself is forced upon us, and it is like a computer that produces random results. This argument also appears in your book The Science of Freedom.
 
Now let us say that the question really is a question—so what is the solution? After all, if there is choice, then we could also have thought differently, so what gives our thought any validity?
 
Your claim can be understood as a psychological argument, that is: we have already been debating epistemology for hundreds of years, and the answer that ultimately came out of it (as far as I know) is that this is our thought, and we have no other thought by which we could judge it (and we said this answer by means of our own thought, and so on in a circle).
Kant and company may have held otherwise, but that is roughly what you wrote in Two Carts, and that is what I think about the matter (it does not seem to me that the precise formulation of the theory of knowledge matters right now).
Now a person sits and says to himself: so what? So everything is nonsense, and I am inside a box with no way out? To this comes the answer that there is identification with our thought—we do not feel bad about what we think, and we are comfortable with it.
As an ontological argument, I do not see room for this claim.
At the end of your remarks you said that perhaps one can define the concept of judgment differently (for example, as I will demonstrate later in my remarks), and then there is no proof in favor of choice (from this consideration).
I would add: you already explained at length in your book that there is not choice regarding everything, but only regarding matters of judgment. So I now ask: does a person have judgment about whether to think what he thinks or not? My understanding is no, and if so, it turns out that if the question is a real question, then the solution is not a solution.
]The medieval authorities disagreed about whether there is a commandment of belief, and some of them argued that there cannot be a commandment regarding something that is not in a person’s control.
Those who hold that there is a commandment concerning beliefs, I understand the commandment to be to bring up the relevant sides for discussion; that is, since this is an important subject—faith / belief—you must make an effort and think seriously about it, and not exempt yourself from thinking about it.
Rabbi Hasdai in Light of the Lord wrote that a person has no choice over his thoughts, and if there is a commandment and reward regarding beliefs, it is for the joy in those beliefs or the distress over them. When Rabbi Hasdai says that there is no choice over thoughts, the intention is that even the “possible in itself” does not apply to thoughts, and therefore his answer that the nature of the possible is “possible in itself and necessary in terms of its causes” applies to actions but not to thoughts, and regarding beliefs he needed a new answer.
Many have struggled to understand Rabbi Hasdai’s double formulation—at one point he answers that the nature of the possible is possible in itself and necessary in terms of its causes, and at another point he answers in terms of joy in the commandments—and there are scholars who said that these are two layers in Light of the Lord.
There are those who quoted Rabbi Hasdai as saying that his answer is that the reward is not for the act of the commandment but for the joy in it. As stated, this is a mistake. He does not give this answer regarding acts of the commandments, but regarding commandments that depend on beliefs.
I have gone on about all this in order to demonstrate and clarify that regarding the thought itself—that is, what the conclusion is given data A and B—there is no choice {even if the conclusion is reached intuitively rather than logically, I do not think one can choose the intuition. Perhaps one can choose whether to decide according to intuition or according to logic—when they conflict}.]
Regarding the question (if thought is forced upon us, then why believe it), I am not all that troubled by it. As I wrote—this is my only thought, and I have no way to examine it from the outside, and that same thought that teaches me about the world teaches me that it is true—that is, that in our reality one can ‘rely’ on it.