Q&A: Free Will Conference 2024
Free Will Conference 2024
Question
Good afternoon. In the past I corresponded with you about free will. Earlier I watched a small part of the lectures from the conference you participated in this year, and I wanted to ask what you think about Professor Amos Courchin's lecture, in which he says that free will is an illusion and gives the example that God hardened Pharaoh's heart in Egypt… and if they had asked Pharaoh, he would have said that he felt it was his free will, and therefore it supposedly makes sense, in his view, that the feeling of free will is an illusion created in us after the fact.
(He gave the example of Pharaoh in the lecture at the previous conference.)
Thank you very much!
Answer
Hello Michal.
First, I am not sure what Pharaoh would have said. There is a begging-the-question assumption here, of course. He assumes that Pharaoh had illusions, and therefore interprets it that way.
As for the claim itself, this is not an argument but a declaration. I have nothing to do with declarations.
As I understand it, each of us has an immediate experience of free will. Therefore, in my opinion, whoever disputes that bears the burden of proof.
The debate over whether or not we have free will takes place on several levels, and the question of whether our feeling is an illusion or not is a result of that debate, not an argument within it. To show that this experience is an illusion, he would have had to show that there is no free will and then declare that our experience of it is an illusion. But he did not show that, and he also cannot show it. Anyone can make declarations. By the same token, I can declare that our vision is an illusion and that in fact there is no world. So I said it.
By the way, even if someone were to show us that there are situations in which free will is an illusion, even that would prove nothing. There are also situations in which sight deceives us (a mirage). Do we therefore assume that every time we see, it is an illusion?
Discussion on Answer
And one more question, if I may. In Professor Saul Smilansky's lecture, he talks about absolute determinism, monism, and the absence of moral responsibility, and then at some point later on he says that we are rational creatures and therefore choose what will advance us, or what will keep us from being punished, etc. In my opinion, that too is a contradiction to determinism. I would be glad to hear your view.
I should mention that I do believe in free will, or at the very least some combination of the two. And I really cannot understand how a person lives peacefully with the thought that everything is an illusion; it genuinely makes me feel mentally unsettled, to that extent… just the idea itself, because it basically changes my whole sensible and intuitive reality.
Those who advocate determinism always talk about a person's “choice,” but they give it a different meaning. In their view, it is the result of cost-benefit calculations. See my column 646 on this.
If a person lives with it peacefully or not has no bearing on the question of whether we have free will. What we want and what helps us are not a measure of what is true.
Thank you. In my opinion he contradicted himself in the lecture, because right at the beginning of his remarks he said that even when we know that a certain area in the brain is responsible for moving the hand, it is not what causes it, but rather there is something else that causes it, namely the “self” — and in the end somehow his conclusion was that the will is an illusion created in retrospect, and that a person is not aware of the processes that caused his decision.