Q&A: Professor Haim Sompolinsky’s Position
Professor Haim Sompolinsky’s Position
Question
Professor Haim Sompolinsky, probably one of the greatest minds Jews have ever produced, says that any decent person who knows the data and the research on nature must admit two things:
A. There is no divine intervention.
B. Human beings have no real free choice. None at all.
I can bring a direct quote:
“A scientist and an honest person cannot combine religious-traditional faith of that sort with his scientific worldview.”
He means the two views presented above.
I have a scientific worldview, and at the same time I accept both of these traditional beliefs, which fit together with everything even though I don’t know how.
In your view, am I a decent person, half-decent, or not decent at all?
Answer
You remind me of Leibowitz’s catchphrases, when he made declarations like that about Maimonides. You have no way to determine such a thing.
Sompolinsky is indeed a very talented person, no doubt. I know him as a student who studied physics with him (and sweated a lot), and later as an interlocutor during the course I heard from him at a much older age, and afterward as well (and we also met from time to time through a mutual friend). My book The Science of Freedom was actually written against him (after hearing a course he gave at the Hebrew University to research students on neuroscience and free choice, about ten years ago), and I mention him there and criticize him.
His assertions on this topic strike me as unsupported nonsense, unscientific, and even less than that, philosophical. Which proves once again that an excellent scientist is not necessarily a great philosopher, and therefore the ad hominem declaration with which you opened—even if it were true—has nothing whatsoever to do with the substance of the discussion.
From this you can understand that there is no point in getting into the question of whether you are a decent person, since the assumptions of the discussion are not agreed upon. Science does not say what Sompolinsky puts in its mouth. He presents his philosophical conclusions as though they were a scientific finding or a scientific assumption, and they are not.
By the way, in the course itself, in the concluding lecture, one of his sons asked him (two of them were sitting in the audience) how he accepts the existence of God, an obviously non-material entity that cannot be observed scientifically. I have to say that his answer was an embarrassingly muddled evasion, and from what I could tell, others there got the same impression.
Discussion on Answer
You’re pulling me into issues that were presented in great detail in the book The Science of Freedom. There I showed that he is mistaken, and that others who think like him—and there are indeed such people, philosophers or scientists—are also mistaken. It is not true that we do not find choice. Of course we find it, in our everyday experience. It’s like saying that we don’t find trees in the world. We see trees, and therefore we think there are trees. We experience choice, and therefore there is choice. There is no scientific place to insert the soul into the story because it is not part of science. That is Sompolinsky’s great mistake, and that of his like-minded colleagues. I think I explained this in the article too, but certainly in the book in great detail.
And finally, when I say that Sompolinsky is philosophically mistaken, I do not mean by that that all philosophers think against him. They too are philosophically mistaken. The expression “against philosophy” is not identical to the expression “against what philosophers say.”
I don’t think you explained enough how dualism can fit with matter from a scientific standpoint (not a conceptual one), for example:
– How matter and spirit can communicate, at the level of electrons and so on.
This violates the closure of the physical world and conservation laws.
– Likewise, with all the illnesses involving consciousness that changes, like split personality, we see in them that brain damage causes two consciousnesses, but then a soul does not solve the unity of consciousness.
– How it is possible to estimate statistically what people will do.
All this was explained in great detail in the book, and more briefly in the article. It’s hard to get into all of it here.
I’ll only say that there is no closure of the physical world and no conservation laws when one is dealing with interaction with will. Physics does not determine, and cannot determine, that there is closure, nor that there is always conservation. It only says that if one is dealing with events within the framework of the laws of nature, then there are conservation laws. This is a property of the laws of nature, not of nature itself. Therefore, if there is something that intervenes and violates the laws, there is no reason to assume that conservation laws will still hold.
Your other questions require a longer discussion, and I dealt with them at great length in the book.
As far as I remember, you write that we do not find an external entity getting involved when planes crash, or when one looks for involvement scientifically.
You wrote something in the style of: “Whenever you look for Him, you never find Him.”
So in the case of free choice, from a purely scientific standpoint, it’s even more clear-cut. Because in addition to the fact that we don’t find free choice (call it a soul), the studies also show that there’s no room for it at all. That there simply cannot be free choice at all (as opposed to intervention by an external entity in the case of a plane crash, where the cause of the crash is simply an anomaly).
By the way, there are also plenty of philosophers who think there is no soul. It’s not as though Professor Sompolinsky is against philosophy. He really isn’t against it. You’ve certainly heard of Daniel Dennett, and he has solid philosophical backing. But it may well be that Professor Sompolinsky needs to work on his ability to explain things philosophically (hopefully it’s all well arranged in his head, though it’s not clear how).
So I’ll just sum up by saying that after reading your article “A Systematic Look at Freedom of the Will,” it really was more convincing than most. But it would convince people only if alongside it there were also some scientific place to insert the soul into the story, even if only a negligible place. But again, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t even one scientific study that leaves room for free choice or thinks it’s possible.
And I’m writing all this as a dualist.
It’s just that this is merely a belief, a feeling (call it intuition), and following the tradition of my forefathers (with a negligible and not very serious rational “support” from various philosophical arguments, as you demonstrated nicely).
Thanks for the response.