Q&A: Ontic and Epistemic Doubt in Free Choice
Ontic and Epistemic Doubt in Free Choice
Question
Hello Rabbi.
In the comments on part 5, you argued that a state of free choice is not an ontic doubt, because there is no ambiguity in reality.
If we quote one of the comments:
“I answered the questioner above you about this. In my opinion, this is not an ontic gap. The question of what you will choose in the future has one clear answer out of two, except that right now it is unknown. The criterion of ‘it is revealed before Heaven’ indeed does not hold here (at least in my opinion that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance what will be chosen), but this is not a state of ambiguity. A state of ambiguity is a state in which the world is now in a combination of two states. In choice, I do not know what will happen, but in the world itself there is no ambiguity.”
However, in part 1 of the posts about ontic and epistemic doubts, the definition was as follows:
“Epistemic doubt and ontic doubt
What is the reason for the gap between inability to predict and freedom? … Reality itself is fixed in a univocal way, meaning that for every given state there is one and only one outcome that is well defined on the basis of the current state. The lacuna is with us, human beings.
From here on I will say that this is cognitive doubt (= lack of information), and in philosophical terminology this is epistemic doubt… We should remember that a libertarian view that advocates the existence of free will (as opposed to determinism) holds that reality itself is not univocal. Even given a certain set of circumstances and complete information about it, a person can still freely choose whether to do X or Y. If so, this is not a matter of a lack of information on our part (an inability to predict), but of a reality that is itself not univocal. In such a situation, the point is not that we do not have the correct answer, but that there is no single answer at all. We will call such a situation here ontic doubt.”
So I wondered whether elsewhere in the series (rather demanding, it should be said) there was a different definition.
If I may be so bold, I might perhaps argue in a different direction: quantum doubt is a doubt of ambiguity, but it is not as sharp an ontic doubt as free choice.
In a state of quantum doubt, both options are present in reality, but in the end there is collapse only into one single state. By contrast, in a state of free choice, as you defined it in part 1 of the series, there is a non-ambiguous reality, and yet it still does not lead in a single, univocal way to another state of reality—that is, what exists in reality cannot provide the answer to the doubt, and therefore in such a case the ontic doubt is actually sharper.
Answer
I don’t understand why open a new thread on this. You could continue the discussion where it belongs. Besides, I already answered this there.
I explained that with quantum doubt, it is not only a question of what will arise later, but the current state is ambiguous (a superposition). Maybe that is what you wrote here.