BH's website, with photo of the printed magazine, and my article listed, but w/o the article content: https://borhatorah.wordpress.com/physics/
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"Free will": (see the article with that as title, 1987 in B'ohrHatorah [English], a peer reviewed journal, re the universe's emergence, acausality of free will etc: https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/the-acausality-of-free-will-and-of-universal-emergence-into-existence or: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/free-will/bohr-hatorah-article
[reworked into this, or on new sites]. ·The original article is available there, and here in two sections: Free Will-1, Free Will-2 [On website as pdf, and edited into different order (placed on newer nyu site) ] (listed here)
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MY SITES: The newer sites have banner headings, and the url's are without "a" & without my name :
THE FULL CONTENTS OF MANY OF THESE SITES WERE PASTED INTO THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT, AND SOME SUGGESTION SFOR EDITING THE SITE PAGES ARE IN THAT DOCUMENT
name on list is "BH FW article,Acausality,5D: FW, Metaphysics & Cosmogony. BH article reworked"
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/free-will/home
brief, with "miracle" cartoon, and:
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Three subpages on menu of the page above: ie all 3 below have this part of the URL in common: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/free-will
1. This webpage has everything, all versions, PDF etc
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/free-will/bohr-hatorah-article edited version, plus embedded pdfs of original article, etc
free will is relevant not only to human moral responsibility but also to cosmology
(An excerpt of my 1987 article published in the peer reviewed journal "BH")
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2. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/free-will/to-add,
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3. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/free-will/scanned-text-of-bh-article As in the url, the scanned text of the article:
P141 Beginning
The question of the existence of free will acquires its great
philosophical-religious importance only inasmuch as itrelates to the
concept of the moral responsibility of man,
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MY SITES: with "a" & with my name: older sites:
https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/home = "Mindless Materialists" site.
Starts with:"My fundamental assumption is that all my assumptions are wrong"
The words "Mindless Materialists" appear at top left, on top of the page, do they appear for someone else? Check on dravirab
The FW article is on a few pages of the above site: in various versions
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"Science & Religion"
Starts with summary, then has detail.
Moral responsibility, intuition & Eden.Wheeler, Godel & Bell
Based on scanned contents of the article titled "Free Will" part I, part II ; here re-titled and in re-arranged order]
Introduction: The question of the existence of free will acquires great philosphico-religious importance in its relation to the concept of human moral responsibility. Humans moral responsibility usually assumes that we:
· possess a free will so that we can choose our actions
· there is a "good" and an "evil" way of acting,
· one "should" be good.
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A subpage of the above webpage is:
https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/science-and-religion/moral-responsibility-intuition-eden-wheeler-godel-bell/free-will-article-1987-b-ohr-hatorah It is complete? but OCR of scanned: has typos from scan, needing to be fixed
Quantum Kabbalah: Free Will is incompatible with physics and logic - so if it exists, it transcends those: article in B'Ohr HaTorahThe original article published in the journal "B'Ohr HaTorah" is available as a PDF of photos of the pages of the journal, in two sections, in the files linked at the bootom of this page.[AR: THESE LINKS DON'T WORK ANYMORE]
An edited version is available elsewhere on this site, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY, INTUITION & EDEN.WHEELER, GODEL & BELL , as well as in separate sections (see eg ACAUSALITY: THE ROOT OF TRUE FREE WILL AND OF UNIVERSAL EMERGENCE INTO EXISTENCE)
Below is a 'scanned to text' version of the printed article, which required editing since the process is not perfect:
The existence of 'truly-free will has great philosophical-religious importance inasmuch as it is underlies the concept of human moral responsibility. More is however required than just free will. For example it is logically possible that we are "morally responsible" for our choice If the following are true:
we possess a free will so that we can choose our actions,
there is a "good" and an "evil" way of acting,
one "should" be good,
etc etc til end of article...
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w/ some Einstein material:
https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/science-and-religion/einstein-biblical-free-will-moral-responsibility-quantum-physics Headings: Einstein’s reflections about the Biblical model of moral obligation - a paradigm of an 'objective morality' requiring an acausal free will, anathema in a mechanistic philosophy; Einstein, biblical free will, moral responsibility & quantum physics ; A clash of perspectives: mechanistic vs biblical:; Einstein, Moral Responsibility, and Genesis; The sources of objective and subjective moral obligation (moral imperatives); The belief of many religious people that atheism is incompatible with morality.
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brief webpage: https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/free-will-morality-purpose-and-mind
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Page with 3 subpages:
Condensed version of the final sections of the article "Free Will"
What the existence and nature of moral responsibility can reveal about the existence and nature of our universe
Summary: Big bang theory proposes that the universe's age is finite, and so one can imagine the universe as having somehow emerged into being; we consider such an emergence to be 'acausal'. Given that the universe exists due to acausality, we propose that such acausality is actually a fundamental feature in the universe's operation. Specifically, it can be seen as a resolution of quantum physics' measurement problem, and as providing an essential ingredient for 'true free will'.
Table of Contents:
· The a-causality at the core of the type of free will implied by ‘true moral responsibility’
· The limitation of science and logic due to their incompatible with acausality & free will
· A conundrum underlying quantum physics' relationship with free will
· Why the 'True Free Will' we are speaking of is a unique phenomenon, but controversial
· Self-conflict of the intuition regarding free will
· Acausality’s inescapability in our universe, and its possible reflection in our minds
· a Rationale for - and ramifications of - the acausality of Free Will:
· The Relationship of Free Will and consciousness
· A Prescription for Further Research: Free will as a resolution of quantum physics' measurement problem (collapse of the wave function)
After this article, continue to:
"QUANTUM METAPHYSICS", AND TO:"STRUCTURES WHICH ARE LOGICAL TO EXPECT IN A MIND-BASED UNIVERSE", AND "THE INEFFABILITY OF FREE WILL"
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3 subpages of the above:
1. has a few pages: QP, wheeler, and then FW, and then cosmology: https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/the-acausality-of-free-will-and-of-universal-emergence-into-existence/quantum-metaphysics : Quantum metaphysics: consciousness and free will; universal and human emergence
Our conclusion will be that it is the presence of a free-willed, conscious being which enables the universe to emerge into reality, and since it is Humanity’s consciousness and free will which invest their choices with the possibility of meaning, it is therefore only free-willed consciousness which has the possibility of conducting reality-determining observation and measurement.
SECTION ONE: QUANTUM PHYSICS
For many years there was a debate among scientists regarding the nature of light. Certain phenomena seemed to indicate that light is a wave, while others pointed to its having a particle-like nature. The debate was stilled early in the 20th century when it was realized that both and neither were true, and this was the case also for all fundamental constituents—some physical conditions cause a manifestation of wave-like properties and some cause a manifestation of particle-like properties. This duality became one of the fundamental concepts of the newly-developed quantum physics.
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2. https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/the-acausality-of-free-will-and-of-universal-emergence-into-existence/the-ineffability-of-free-will: The Ineffability of Free Will
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3. https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/the-acausality-of-free-will-and-of-universal-emergence-into-existence/structures-which-are-logical-to-expect-in-a-mind-based-universe structures which are logical to expect in a mind-based universe
Was free will inherent in the big bang? If humans (or any other beings) possess true free will, they transcend the ordinary causal structure of the universe. If humans evolved, it could be that free will either evolved in them, or it might be that it was inherent in the universe at its inception.
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Compendium of my emails to NY, collected in one email with subject heading: Genesis: explains moral responsibility, Free will; 'solves' the theodicy/problem of evil
if the universe did not always exist, does that mean it has a cause?
by definition of course any cause is part of 'the universe'.
so to me there's something inherently acausal about a universe that didnt always exist
so to me it is reasonable to suppose that it is not impossible that there is an acausal aspect to the universe itself - ie to say that everything in the universe has to have a physical cause is not a compelling statement to me since the universe itself does not (have a physical cause).
Of course the universe could be eternal, or there could be a trick like hawking's closed time etc, and without quantum gravity we don;t understand something the mass of the universe when its space is small but all that also points to the likelihood or non impossibility that we shouldn;t fac\ilely rule out acausal type of phenomena within the universe.
The human brain is the most sophisticated, most intricately connected, most complex entity we know of in the universe, and so if there is something causally weird anywhere, it is not unreasonable to suppose it might be associated to the human brain.
I know consciousness exists, and that it is non-physical, beyond spacetime in the usual sense, and so since consciousness is associated to human brains somehow (and maybe to other brains), it makes sense to me that there might be something acausal about human brain operaiton. And since we intuit free will, it doesnt prove we have it but i wouldn't just rule it out based on 'physics' or 'logic'.
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when I speak of free will, I am ONLY interested in the type of free will which would enable a benevolent rational creator to hold someone morally responsible for their actions (at least some actions).
I am completely uninterested in any other type of 'freedom' proposed by philosophers with convoluted logic that almost always is wrong and misses the point or just deals with unpredictability (irrelevant) or indeterminism (irrelevant) or with a feeling of being free (irrelevant), etc etc
Challenge: In comparison to the scenario I outlined based on Genesis, try to come up with a scenario where it could be 'reasonable' or 'not-pathological' for a creator of a being to insert into the system a cause-effect mechanism resulting in some pain resulting from bad actions
VIP: the type of Judaism I could possibly believe in doesn't exactly believe in punishment , more of cause-effect/sort of karma, whether in this word, or the pain which the soul feels as it 'regrets' its actions afterwards, and this 'purifies' it to be perfect and then be able to cleave unto God forever etc.
It can be a scientist creating AI, an alien doing it or a 'god' etc.
In other words, for me it would need to be that there is true free will, an ought, and the image of god aspect, and a type of karma in this world and or the 'next' etc, and so Genesis fits perfectly for me.
Is there any scenario which would do it for you? Or is it impossible even in theory, and if so, pls explain in detail.
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I don;t know whether the type of free will which interests me exists.
I don't know whether there is a God, creator, etc...
People act instinctively and also "higher parts" of the brain and they often conflict. We tend to associate the "me" with the "higher parts". People can do exercises to develop self-restraint.
Maybe the conditions at the big bang determine which people will choose to develop their self-restraint, or maybe a much later event determines it, or it is random, who knows. Or maybe there really is free will and somehow people can go beyond determinism and randomness, but this is counter-intuitive, against logic and science. But I believe it can be.I don't think science knows anywhere near enough about 'ultimate reality' to tell us what can or cannot be, not at all. I don't think the logic our brains frind so compelling is a trustworthy guide to what can be... but of course if we rejec tlogic there's no much else left... maybe intuition?..but most intuition is certainly based on prior experience etc, ie logic etc...
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my book ms "Einstein's Blunder and the God who plays Dice"
(which was the basis for some of my AOJS lectures )
Genesis provides a unifying concept which 'explains' many of its themes - providinge the basis for the notion of a God who - as described all throughout the rest of the Torah - is interested in human moral behavior and feels it is ethically right to punish them for wrongdoing.
And the radical Biblical notion that we are "of God" (breath of God, / have soul which is of God, being created in the image of God, etc) is crucial to this in several ways:
1) explains how we have access to 'ought', which is not part of a physical universe/reality;
2) how we have physics-transcendent free will;
3) why holding us responsible for our actions is ethical, because it basically God holding himself responsible
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I did the same re "the 'theodicy'/problem of evil", ie showing how Genesis is an explanation of the etics of creating a univers ein which there is 'evel', or suffering, making ethical monotheism (ie the notion of God being all powerful and knowing etc and yet also good) comprehensible.
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Free will: libertarian incompatibilsm (ie non-physicalist) with agent causation.. vs Einstein
Einstein didn;t believe in qp randomness and certainly not in free will, and so could not accept that even "God" has free will, ie it is Spinoza's "God", and he mistakenly projected this belief onto the Bible as though Genesis was speaking of a situaiotn in line with Einstein;s beliefs, ie if God of the Bible is as Einstein believed, then indeed God has no right to hold humans responsible for their actions, but this involved a complex misconception on Einstein;s part. He also thought mostly in Christian terms about the Bible, as you can see below. In any case, the TOrah creation and Eden accounts present the jewish Traditional view, which Einstein didn;t believe in (and I guess didn;t really understand).
in Einstein's book The World as I See It (1935), "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature."[34]
Einstein was averse to the Abrahamic conception of Heaven and Hell, particularly as it pertained to a system of everlasting reward and punishment. In a 1915 letter to the Swiss physicist Edgar Meyer, Einstein wrote, "I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him."[35] He also stated, "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."[36]
Part of Einstein's tension with the Abrahamic afterlife was his belief in determinism and his rejection of free will. Einstein stated, "The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events — that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through."[37]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_(metaphysics)
The first recorded use of the term libertarianism was in 1789 by William Belsham in a discussion of free will and in opposition to necessitarian or determinist views.[7][8]
Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical viewpoint under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the agent to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.[AR: Bridgman criticized this since it is never provable, but of course not, not within the ordinary physical universe]
Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories [AR: interesting to me] and physical or naturalistic theories [AR: of no interest to me, it is psychology]. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, and consequently the world is not closed under physics. Such interactionist dualists believe that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality.
Explanations of libertarianism that do not involve dispensing with physicalism [AR: ie the non-interesting kind] require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior – a theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Physical determinism, under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will [AR: which is why it is uninteresting to me].
Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" believed to be necessary by libertarians.
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In non-physical theories of free will, agents are assumed to have power to intervene in the physical world, a view known as agent causation.[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] Proponents of agent causation include George Berkeley,[22] Thomas Reid,[23] and Roderick Chisholm.[24]
[AR: ie not only is there more than one possible way things can develop, as in qp, but the person can 'choose' which will happen, as opposed to qp. And this is a prerequisite to being held morally responsible. But it is all completely counter to all physical and logical understanding and intuition, and maybe does not exist. Genesis proposes it exists, and explains the concept via the context set up in the creation and Eden accounts.]