Question

Dear Rabbi Michael, a good year and a favorable final sealing.
1) I didn’t find any reference on the site to the 2019 experiment by Uri Maoz, Liad Mudrik, and others, in which they showed that there is an RP before an arbitrary decision but not before a meaningful decision. That fits your approach wonderfully, doesn’t it? And in general it’s quite an amazing experiment. What do you think of it? It seems strange to me that it didn’t make more waves… At this rate they’ll eventually manage to come up with an experiment that proves or disproves the existence of the soul…
2) One of the strongest arguments for free will is our intuition. Logically speaking, we need a strong reason to abandon our intuition. In my opinion, the problem with Libet’s experiments and the like is not that they refute free will (as you show in your book), but that they pull the rug out from under our intuition. Because the people in those experiments felt that they were “choosing.” And if the intuition has been undermined, then the determinists and the libertarians begin the argument from an equal starting point, and it may be that the weight of the evidence tilts in the deterministic direction… What do you think about that?
3) In the libertarian view, according to the topographic model you described, it is clear that there are forces directing things in a certain direction, but a person has the ability to resist them and go uphill on the “ascent” instead of downhill on the “descent.” That means there is a little person (the soul?) wandering around the topographic map of our brain, as opposed to a ball rolling freely in the deterministic view.
But regarding that little person—if he is identical in everyone, then we would expect everyone to choose in the same way given identical starting conditions. And then once again the only thing that affects it is the topographic map.
Alternatively, if the “little person” differs from one person to another (say, one has a bigger and stronger soul), then here too one could argue that Yossi sinned and Haim did not sin because Haim’s “little person” is stronger. So we have simply moved one metaphysical level higher in the debate over the existence or denial of free will. In other words, there is a strong argument for determinism even if we accept a dualistic view of the world, because how am I to blame if the Holy One, blessed be He, gave me a weaker soul than my friend?
 
Thank you very much in advance, and a wonderful year to all the Jewish people.