[Avodah] free will

Eli Turkel eliturkel at gmail.com
Sat Nov 28 09:31:51 PST 2020


I have listened to about 10 shiurim of Rav Michael Avraham on free will
(Hebrew) which are available on his website

He analyzes determinism vs free will from just about every angle from
philosophic to chaos theory to quantum mechanics to brain experiments.

He basically comes to the conclusion that there does not exist any logic or
experiment that demonstrates determinism. All experiments have their weak
points and he doesn't believe that one could construct a better experiment
that would prove determinsim.

Given that there is no proof in either direction he founds it more
reasonable that there is a nonphysical possibility for man to make free
choices that then get translated into some action.
He stresses that free will means that at times a person can choose his
action and it is not determined by physics. That does not mean that one
always has free choice. To prove determinism one needs to prove that man
never has free will. Hence, the various Libet type experiments only show
that under some simple laboratory conditions man is controlled by physics.

The last in this series of talks will probably be this coming Friday
morning (Israel tiume) and then saved on his website

-- 
Eli Turkel
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