[Avodah] animals and bechira??

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 09:56:09AM -0500, David Riceman wrote:
> On 1/24/2012 9:44 AM, Lisa Liel wrote:
>> How so?  If someone tries to train a lion and gets et, maybe they were  
>> just bad at it.

> That's not what the mishna says.  It says the machlokes is whether lions  
> are "bnei tarbus", not whether one should make a gezeirah because of  
> incompetent lion trainers.

The machloqes is whether domesticated (Rashi: benei tarbus - that someone
raised them in their home) wolves, lions, bears, leopards, "bardelas"es
(translation?) and snakes are mu'adin are not.

It could be a question of the "shiur" in probability for defining mu'ad
-- does the number of times trained lions break training still qualify
them as mu'adin? It could be any of a large number of questions.

But animals being both trainable and unpredictable does not require
assuming free will. It's easy enough to make a computer program that is
unpredictable, but the odds of various outputs change with "training".
Tic-tac-toe playing programs that "learn" from past losses, for example.
(C.f. http://mindthegap.googlecode.com/files/Introduction.pdf )

As I said earlier, see the Meshekh Chokhmah on tzelem E-lokim. He insists
bechirah is the very tzelem which makes human beings human.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             A person lives with himself for seventy years,
micha at aishdas.org        and after it is all over, he still does not
http://www.aishdas.org   know himself.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter