[Avodah] Free Will vs. Physics

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Micha Berger wrote:

> Let's posit some internal cause as a third possibility.
> The person can be blamed for stealing the diamond because
> his decision was caused by some factor, a taavah for
> wealth (or women, or...) not just external, or initial
> causes, nor random causelessness. But then we must ask
> where that taavah comes from. ...
> I think this is the question RAM is asking, in a very
> different form. Not a question about the decision itself,
> but about where the shift occurs.
>   From: a conflict of desires/goals the baby was either
>   wired for or forced into by experience plus wiring
>   To:  a conflict including a desire the person can be
>   held accountable for having

Yes! Thank you! If those two toddlers made different free-willed choices, what were those choices based on? To say that they had different desires, of different taavos, is just circular logic.

R' David Guttmann asked:
> But are not his past experiences a consequences of earlier
> bechirot he did and the same goes for his personality? Why
> limit Bechirah to this particular act without taking into
> the sum total of all past decisions and actions?

Ein hachi nami. That's why I am trying to simplify the question, by going all the way back to his very first choice. If we can do that, then there *aren't* any "earlier bechirot", and the "sum total of all past decisions" will be zero.

Of all the conflicted choices in a person's life, one of them had been the very first. Imagine two toddlers, with identical histories and predispositions - whether genetic, environmental, yichusdik, whatever. They are in a certain situation, and one will choose to obey his parent and the other willl choose to respond "No!"

How does this happen? How CAN it happen? If they had identical experiences in the past, won't they make identical decisions in the present? Clearly, they must have some sort of desire for this or for that which had not been pre-programmed, because if everything *was* pre-programmed, then what happens to responsibility? How can he be given praise or censure for decisions that were pre-programmed?

Finding two toddlers whose histories are totally identical will never happen in our universe. But it is the very definition of a multiverse of parallel worlds. I was tempted to resolve this problem by suggesting that at the moment this choice is made, two quantum child-universes are created, one of which has the toddler who chose this, and the other has the toddler who chose that. But this answer is false, because there's still no way to assign responsibility for the choices. There's really no choice being made at all.

I may have some tiny seeds of an answer, but it will need a LOT of help from people more learned than me.

We have come up against something which we can't explain. Unexplainable things are often categorized as "miracle". I think we are dealing here with a miracle of the highest order: A person really does have desires. He wants this and doesn't want that, and he truly cannot explain why.

Up to now, our logic tells us that the reason a person wants something is because that thing has shown various benefits in the past. But I'm suggesting that there's something more. He wants it, but NOT because of his past experiences, and also NOT because his personality was pre-programmed to want it. Rather, he wants it because HaShem gave him the Bechira Chafshis to choose, and he DID CHOOSE to want it.

But HOW? Our logic has reached an impasse. Man must have free will, but our logic can't find room for free will to fit into the picture. The answer is Tzelem Elokim. We've long accepted the idea that there is something Godly about humans, and that this Godliness is connected to free will. Perhaps we've come full circle.

We know that G-d is above nature. We know that man's free will is Godly. Do the math: Free will is above nature. We really do make choices, and they are based on what we WANT, not on what we've experienced, or our past choices. (Not totally, at any rate.)

A toddler has gotten to his first real choice in life. He can do this, or he can do that. He knows, based on past experience, what the likely outcomes of each choice are. But he pauses. He has to think about it. Why? Because he truly has a desire. He knows that he *ought* to do this, but he *wants* to do that. He has a conflict. If he was a deterministic automaton the conflict would be over in a second, but he is still struggling over what to do.

And that, my friends, is a miracle.

Akiva Miller

PS: In case it's not obvious enough, I'd like to suggest that this entire discussion can be easily modified into a question about Adam and Chava: Prior to their sin, they had a very specific set of experiences and knowledge, all of which had been easily set up in advance. So when they took from the tree, was it truly a free-will choice, or maybe it was just a pre-ordained reaction to the experiences they'd had up to that point. My suggested answer is the same, both for today's toddler and that one-day-old Man: Their Tzelem Elokim, that little bit of G-d within them, truly does give them the ability to have desires and to make choices, based on what they *want*.


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