[Avodah] Bchirah chofshit

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 07:53:35AM -0500, Rich, R Joel sent us a link
to a NYTimes.com Science column for 1-Jan-2007 by Dennis Overby
<http://tinyurl.com/ygcfrd>.

Commenting on that column:
: I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one
: of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a
: vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge
: of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my fathers heart attack danced
: before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.
: The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt,
...

Doesn't this compare to REED's notion of bechirah point? He simply
pushed his bechirah point to the extent where this particular decision
is a foregone conclusion.

: That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
: said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that a human can very well do what he
: wants, but cannot will what he wants.

He can not will what he wants besha'as ma'aseh. But he can decide to
become a difference person and want something else. He can also spend a
relatively short time reconciliating himself with a decision. Someone
really wants that chocolate cake, but also wants to spare himself his
father's heart attack. He could choose to forgo the cake, and also talk
himself into be conciled with not getting it -- thereby changing the
losing desire.

This is how we can have mitzvos likfe "ve'ahavta es H' E-lokekha",
"lo sisna", "lo sachmod", "es imo ve'aviv tira'u", etc... 

: At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced
: and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible
: for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.

: That strikes many people as incoherent, said Dr. Silberstein, who noted
: that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out
: to be either deterministic or random. Both are bad news for free will,
: he said. So if human actions cant be caused and arent random, he said,
: It must be what some weird magical power?

"Weird magical power" shows the author's bias; he is prejudicing the
reader away from accepting the notion of soul through loaded
terminology.

I only know of one model that actually defines a middle ground
between algorithmic and random. The following is based on R' Dr
Moshe Koppel's Metahalakhah.

A random sequence is one whose next element is not predictable given
the sequence's history so far.

A sequence that can be reduced to a shorted one is the product of
algorithm. For example:
    10101010101....
Need not have every bit listed in order to reproduct the sequence. One
need only have a set of bits that mean "10, repeat" in some programming
language.

For example:
    1010...
Looks like it's the old "10, repeat". Until we get to:
    101000101...
Now it looks like
    if not a multiple of 5
        if odd  1
        if even 0
    if a multiple of 5 - 0

But then we get some more items:
    10100010111010...
So we theorize:
    if not a multiple of 5
        if odd  1
        if even 0
    if a multiple of 5
        if odd  0
        if even 1

But later on we learn:
    101000101110100010111010101011...
IOW, that the 25th item didn't obey this rule... and so on.

Sequences exist that are reducable to shorter programs, but those programs
are themselves not finite and therefore not algorithms.

: That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the
: strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to
: the foundation of reality. Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the
: University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was not a
: proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will.

... since the probability curve resolves randomly to a single value as
a result of observation.

...
: In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of
: California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an
: electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions,
: like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on
: a clock.
: Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred
: half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.

He found that the impulse to move, the readiness potential, would ashow
up 800ms before the motion. However, the conscious decision was typically
registered 500ms (1/2sec) before the motion.

Libet (a religious man) therefore concluded that man didn't have free
will as much as free won't -- the decision could stop the readiness
potential from causing actual motion.

Others proposed a simpler solution. Being self-aware means that someone
is aware of the workings of their mind. Conscious decisions are decisions
that are watched in this way. But that watching also takes time. IOW,
the people decided with free will to move their hand 800ms before the
motion, but the step of being aware of that fact took 500ms.

In any case, the notion that people convince themselves that they made
a decision ater the fact is not compelled by this experiment.

: Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such freedom.
: Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things,
: whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce
: novel phenomena.

IOW, the key isn't physivs vs soul, it's even defining what we mean by
something being neither algorithm nor random.

I recently proposed on my blog the controversial idea that the brain's
pattern is simply a lower world's shadow of the same tzurah as the
soul. See <http://tinyurl.com/y3lbsk> and <http://tinyurl.com/yxwr7h>.

I therefore embraced physicalism without denying the soul. The soul,
being that which the brain implements, determines what the brain does. By
making the spirtual as tzurah beli chomer, and the physical as chojmer
that can have elements of the same tzurah, the link between tzurah and
physical effect doesn't require defining a mechanism.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             It is harder to eat the day before Yom Kippur
micha at aishdas.org        with the proper intent than to fast on Yom
http://www.aishdas.org   Kippur with that intent.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                       - Rabbi Israel Salanter