Which is more patronizing and non-respectful the opinion of the other: to say I believe all humans have a soul and so even though you firml,ybelieve that nothing like that exists, nevetheless I believe YOU TOO have a soul. Or to say "I respect your belief, and trust your own self-analysis, and its conclusion that YOU do not possess a soul... but I DO". Is the last a horrible thing to say, or is it actually more equitable, and potentially more in line with actuality.....

Similarly regarding free will, and nmc.....

We will be addressing these three questions

1. .  Some philosophers claimed that modern scientific discoveries & insights lead to the conclusion that life is meaningless, humans are insignificant, and that nothing can be actually 'known' - the philosophy known as 'nihilism'. How does one overcome these arguments?

2. In recent times, it has been proposed by some that our reality is simply a 'simulation' and therefore all we believe is an illusion - we can indeed be sure of noting at all; as nihilism indicates, there is no true meaning to our existence. What counter-argument is there to this?

3. In 'Western' culture, human significance was often seen as a concept rooted in the Bible's description of humans as beings who are "in the image of God" whom God "breathed the divine spirit into" and whose activities were of direct interest and concern to the creator of the universe. However, arguments were made by various thinkers in the last few hundred years - supposedly in the name of science - against the truth of the Bible, and thereby negating the significance of humanity, the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe, and therefore as indications of the truth of nihilism. What were these 'science-based' arguments and are they still relevant? 

Nihilism source quotes:

WIkipedia: "... Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no objective meaning or purpose. ... The inherent meaninglessness of life ..."   

Nihilism: Britannica: Nihilism, philosophy that denies the existence of genuine moral truths and asserts the ultimate meaninglessness of life or of the universe.

"nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history. In the 20th century, nihilistic themes–epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness–have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Mid-century, for example, the existentialists helped popularize tenets of nihilism in their attempts to blunt its destructive potential. By the end of the century, existential despair as a response to nihilism gave way to an attitude of indifference, often associated with antifoundationalism."

According to the viewpoint we are referring to here as "quantum kabbalistic cosmology" (QKC), our lives can have Significance, where the capitalization is deliberate, and there are several basic mistaken assumptions underlying nihilism: 

The thesis presented here differs from other approaches in that we feel nihilism is neither correct nor incorrect, universally. This approach is based on a yet more fundamental proposition of ours which differs from the generally-accepted philosophical view, and could be considered controversial: 

We propose that in some sense nihilism in indeed correct, but only for some people. 

Non-material consciousness ("nmc") exists, and its existence leads to the possibility of the existence of true meaning. However, the author's opinion is that not all humans possess it (or are associated to it), eg materialists who have only a material consciousness and say nmc is impossible, and nonsensical, and for whom therefore nihilism seems almost inescapable. 

What Descartes spoke of is nmc, but he did not use this disambiguative terminology. Many of his readers therefore do not realize that he meant specifically nmc (rather than "consciousness", which to mc's is material) and so they do not understand what he was saying. Indeed, mc's are ontologically incapable of comprehending Descartes' intent, because they lack nmc - we believe that only those with nmc can understand what is meant by nmc.

As Descartes showed, the statement by an nmc "I exist" is true, nmc is self-evidenty known, and this itself is a contradiction to nihilism which claims nothing can be known.  

We'll refer to materialasts as "mc's" and to others as "nmc's"......

Mc's are correct about themselves, that they are purely-material. It would seem that there aren't any - or many - idealist nihilists; instead, nihilists are likely to be materialists.  Mc's may ineed be correct that there is nothing they can know, and that there is no Meaning or Purpose to their own lives, and so perhaps nihilism is an occupational hazard of being mc. However nihilist mc's mistakenly project this onto nmc's. 

Ontological status affects epistemological ability: We propose that mc-nihilists are incapable of comprehending what 'nmc' is, and accepting that it exists and that others possess it, and this is the reason for their erroneous belief that nihilsim is valid for all and not just as applied to them.

And some credulous nmc's, hearing pronouncements from philosophers that life is meaningless, assume this must be so; there is also a hidden assumption that these philosophers are nmc's like them and speak of nihilism from their nmc vantage point, but if these naive nmc's understood the ontological gulf between them and these mc nihilist philosophers, they would not be misled by their pronoucements.

....

Nihilists claims that nothing can be known or communicated, however as Descartes showed, the statement by an nmc "I exist" is true, nmc is self-evidenty known, and this itself is a contradiction to nihilism which claims nothing can be known.  And the knowledge of the fact of the existence of nmc is in some sense itself the result of a form of 'communication from the nmc-realm of reality'.

Also, one can posit that some other transmission exists from the nmc-level of reality to the human brain, for example moral truths.

Similarly, the Meaning and Purpose which is sought, resides not in the physical universe but rather in the nmc realm of reality, and is 'accessible' to those with nmc. However indeed a universe without nmc would in fact be inherently meaninglessness, and life in it would be purposeless, and there would be no genuine moral truths, with all values being baseles, as nihilists incorrectly claim for our nmc-based universe. For mc's therefore, who effectively inhabit such a material universe, nihilism may indeed be an appropriate philosophy.

....................

 Even if "the universe" we perceive is a simulation or an externally-induced hallucination of a brain-in-a-lab-jar, quantum kabbalistic cosmology (QKC) teaches that our lives can have Significance

QKC agrees with 'incompatibilists' that our nmc is not just a passive observer of what transpires but rather can influence the physical universe (the 'real' universe, or the computer on which our perceived universe is a simulation, or the alien lab in whose jar what we think of as our brain lies, or the multiverse or whatever else 'the universe' is) via our truly-free will, influencing it in ways that are NOT results of the conditions of the big bang and the laws of nature and causality. This makes it possible for us to be Morally-Responsible for (some of) our decisions and actions (to do or refrain from good or bad actions, to develop compassion and take action when knowing of the sufferering of others or to ignore it, etc), and this is part of what provides Meaning to our lives and Purpose to the existence of the universe. QKC however also agrees with materialists/AMN's that they themselves lack nmc and thus not only do they lack true independent existence but also of course do not have true free will, so their bodies and brains are effectively machines, cogs in the universal mechanism (with random hiccups),  and thus their lives are indeed devoid of Purpose and Meaning. And as indeed implied by these theories, the electrical brain-patterns corresponding to their deep nihilist philosophical ideas and all the words they utter about alienation and meaninglessness do not originate with "them" but rather are inevitable+random physical consequences of the initial conditions of the big bang, and the laws of nature (+quantum randomness), as is also the neural electrical pattern which is "them". 

Partial Summary of the book: 

(the points outlined here are presented in a brief essay further below (see embedded GoogleDoc), and then in far grater detail in the bulk of this webpage via excerpts of several of the author's published articles)  

Preface: Why I leave out 'soul', 'God' etc, and speak only of nmc & FW

We consider important the distinction between:

1. what is known and can be proven, 

2. what is known but cannot be proven, and 

3. what is believed but not known (or proven.).

Much could be written about this set of distinctions and about the choice of demarcation line, but that would derail us from our purpose here.

Our conception of the division between what is known and what is believed has shifted over time. In ancient times the universe seemed to most people to obviously have what today would be considered religious aspects. Later, Descartes clarified the situaiotn somewhat and showed the distinction between what could in theory be explained by science and that which cannot, namely what we call today 'mind' in the sense of nmc. However he used a term which translated as 'soul' but now means 'mind', and he believed that he could prove the existence of God, but that proof was not convincing to others even shortly afterward. 

It is the purpose of this book to stay on the side of the line that to the author includes 1 & 2 above, but without dealing with 3.  

This is not to deny the validity of level 3, eg religious beliefs, nor to endorse them necessarily, but rather simply to show what can be drawn from levels 1 & 2 without level 3.

Of course not everyone will agree where these lines are, nor on the importance of the distinctions I drew, etc etc.

For example, our use of the Bible as a source in discussions, and the notion of 'Kabbalah', seems to cross this line, but in our mind it does not. Rather, we refer to these since the Bible and its Midrashic and Kaballistic/mystical interpretations figured so prominently in the cultural and philosophical mindset in European civilization, and is clearly a source for - or early echo of - the central philosophical concepts of this book (In non-Western cultures there are quite other ways of thinking about all this, and those cultures and civilizations are not Biblically-based, and it is not clear what relevance any of this might have in those regions): 

• the existence of a non-material realm which humans are associated to (in the Bible according to Midrashic/mystical interpretations this is 'a spiritual realm', here we talk of a realm of nmc);

• what we call 'true free will' or 'Free Will' (capitalized): in the Bible this is 'the knowledge of Good and Evil", and being held responsible by God for one's choice between them, which according to midrash/Kabbalah is all possible since we are 'created in the image of God'; here we refer to it as incompatibilist libertarian free will with agent causation, rooted in the 'active' aspect of nmc

• a morality or 'categorical imperative' which is rooted in a Transcendental realm (in the Bible it is rooted in the Will of God, the creator of all);

• the SIgnificance of humanity: in the Bible it is due to being 'created in the image of God', a being 'infused with the 'spirit of God', which is given various interpretations in midrash/kabbalah, including the possession of a 'soul'; in this book Significance is anchored in the nmc-level of reality. 

....

Summary of the book

I. NMC

1. Many prominent theoretical physicists over the generations, as experts on what the 'material universe' is, have agreed (but many physicists disagree) that there is more to reality than that which is encompassed within - or accessible to - physics. Specifically, as pointed out by Descartes, everything we know of as existing (ie 'know' as opposed to what we 'believe' or 'feel' exist) can be divided into the material realm studied by physics, and non-material conciousness (n.m.c. [our terminilogy]), which is NOT accessible to the methods of science. 

2. As pointed out by Descartes, nmc-beings ('nmc's': [our terminilogy]) know their existence is incontrovertible, albeit unprovable to others. We here make the point that they exist in the only way that is meaningful - it is irrelevant whether the familiar physical reality ('the universe') is 'real' or is part of a 'simulation', or lab-induced illusion' (brain-in-a-jar'), or a hullucination in a 'solipsistic universe'. The alleged existence of a material physical universe does not add (or subtract) to the reality of an nmc's existence; there is in fact no real meaningful distinction from the nmc-perspective between a 'simulation' and a 'real' universe since the only relevant aspect is the incontrovertibly-existent nmc. 

3. Whatever the origin of the physical/material universe, whatever randomness and determinism there is, whatever evolutionary theory explains about how bodies/brains can evolve from a big bang and from non-human animals, nmc exists, and does so in an entirely different plane of reality than the (alleged) material universe.

4. As nmc's intuitively understand but mc's cannot - nmc cannot be 'just a simulation' and cannot be 'just an illusion', and an nmc's existence at its essence is non-material even if the brain/body they believe themselves to have is part of a 'simulation' or brain in a lab-jar, and even if they are simply nmc-awarenesses ''prisoner in a machine(material) body/brain, merely experiencing rather than initiating. 

5.  In material approaches, since advanced brains study the universe not just their immediate surroundings as do other animals,  one can consider human brains to be a way for the universe to understand itself, however there is no relation between this and the raison d'etre of the universe, or that which caused the universe to exist. In contrast, in idealist philosophy, there is a more fundamnetal sense in which  nmc is the universe's way of knowing itself, of understanding itself - ie physics, math, logic, philosophy are all so profound, and reflect fundamental aspects of the physical material universe, but without intelligent nmc-beings, none of this  actually exists, and so nmc is the universe's way of nmc-knowing these profound truths about itself! 

According to the general undertanding of idealism in philosophy,  nmc is sui generis (where we have substituted 'nmc' for the 'awareness' or 'consciousness' usually refered to in this context), only nmc knows itself to exist, is self-evidently-existent, and even the universe is not in that category, and so it is meaningless to postulate the very existence of a universe lacking any nmc. In this sense, nmc grants existence to the universe. What was new in Wheeler's adaptation of Wigner's idea was that this idealist notion seemed to be arising within quantum physics, or at least in the approach pioneered by Wigner. 

According to this view of "quantum metaphysics", even more than nmc being the way the universe knows itself, or that which gives meaning way to the statement "the universe exists", it is in fact that which enables it to exist physically, or even brings the material universe studied by physics into existence, and is related also therefore to how and why it exists. [MESH: Wigner's notion of 'consciouness 'as the crucial element in the 'quantum wavefunction collapse' should be understood as refering to nmc rather than to the material-consciousness posited by many neuroscientists; (and materialists in general). Adapting Wheeler's cosmological application, we could say that the universe's emergence  into existence is tied to the emergence within it of a nmc -being within it.  ]                      Our QKC adapts these insights and approaches to apply to deeper levels, as we'll explain below.

6. Nmc is inherently acausal, and enables the very possibility for a universe to exist which did not always exist. Thus, nmc is fundamental rather than being an 'epiphenomenon' and it would be absurd to think of an nmc-being as somehow being 'insignifcant' because the brain/body they are associated to is physically smaller than any purely-material entity, eg any ordinary star.

7. According to QKC, non-material conciousness (nmc) is part of a realm of reality which provides the conceptual foundations for 'Meaning' and 'Significance', where these are capitalized to indicate their root in the nmc-realm, inaccessible to science and the scientific method. For example, even in a clockwork universe where all thoughts are fully-determined, and all the emotions arising in all brains are fully a consequence of the conditions at the big bang (note: adding in quantum randomness changes nothing.), nmc's are indeed 'exceptional' relative to all entities which do not possess nmc; as such, according to QKC their emotions have Significance, and their lives have Meaning and Purpose, even if they themselves do not consciously feel this is the case! 

In contrast, an entity lacking nmc - perhaps materialists are such - we will refer to them as "materially-conscious" beings or "mc's" - would not even be capable of intuiting what nmc means, and if they speak of the insignificance of humanity it would only truly refer to themselves, not to nmc-beings, who can be reassured that their inner-experiences do indeed have Significance.  (Non-nihilist mc's who state that their lives have significance, meaning and purpose are speaking the truth, but those terms have a very different meaning than their 'capitalized' nmc-rooted equivalents.

Note: Physics does not contain the notion of a flow of time, an actual progression from a beginning onward, rather there is a frozen tableau of all space and time together, no actual cause-effect in the ordinary sense of cause preceding effect. It is only due to  our nmc that this 'flow' of time exists......

For more on the above topics, see eg the author's article: "Mindless Materialists". 

.............

II: FREE WILL

There is a fundamental issue regarding free will which has occupied philosophers and scientists for thousands of years, and which will be even more relevant to us if we ever get to create universes - for real, or in simulation using some future advanced computer & AI etc. 

Genesis (or the usual traditional philosophical understandings of its implications) sets out a paradigm of a combination of:

 1. a type of free will;

2. a type of Moral Responsibility/'ought';

3 . a Being which created all, including space-time and matter-energy, laws of nature and causality, emotions, concepts and thought.

4. The Being is unconstrained and decided on its own to create, and what to create - it has a Free Will.

5. a being created by the Creating Being, which has the ability to choose 'freely', presumeably due ot the fact that it has some characteristics of its creator, and it 'understands good and evil'.

The combination of these five made it possible for many (not all) readers of Genesis through the generations to imagine that the Creator is non-insane for considering the created beings to be morally responsible for their actions, and it is not unfair to 'punish' them for doing evil.  

The above type of free will interests me: eg "incompatibilist libertarian with agent causation" plus "would have meaning from an 'Outsider' perspective'.  What we will analyze here are non-religiously-based models of it. Any other type of free will, or "ought" is simply not of philosophical interest to me.

I have no problem finding/believing naturalistic explanations for anything that can be proven to exist, as for example it is a fact that "many humans feel that they have free will and ought to to the good", and I can believe that evolutionary socio-neurobiology etc can explain why the big bang produces this type of feeling in some brains. 

Until this point you will have followed what I mean, but from this point on I believe you won't, in the sense that you will think the ideas wrong or 'not even wrong' ie nonsensical, in two steps:

1) I know for a fact that I have a 'consciousness' which as a physicist I know is non-material, as has been pointed out by contemporary physicists such as Linde and Witten, and physicists of the previous generation or two such as Wigner, and which seems to have been believed by yet-earlier physicists such as Einstein, and by various of his physicist predecessors back to Newton and Descartes.

Where I part not only from you but also from them, is this:

2) I believe that both materialists and non-materialists are correct - but only about themselves. That is, I know mine is a non-material consciousness ('nmc'), but I believe materialists that their consciousness is material. And I speculate that only those with (or 'are associated to') 'nmc' can intuit what it means, and this is why materialists consider talk of nmc to be nonsensical.

To mc's the last part above (both 1 & 2) will seem absurd, but the more I read the writings of those like Dennett, the more convinced I am that the only way such an intelligent deep thinker can write what they do, is if they simply do not possess the nmc which I, and Linde, and Witten, and Wigner etc etc do (posses).

I am not interested in trying to prove the existence of non-materiality [# 1 above] to those without it since I think that as Descartes stated it is impossible to prove even to those with it, and in any case the point of the article is not the existence of nmc, but rather its non-universality [#2 above]. 

{If someone wants to argue against the very existence of nmc [#1], I suggest they are better off discussing this with non-materialists who are established professional philosophers.

In any case, if you know of a non-materialist, ie someone who accepts/knows the truth of #1, I would be pleased if you would forward my article to them so that they can comment on/critique my proposition [#2].}

8. True Free Will (TFW) transcends the determinism and quantum randomness of the physical universe, enabling true moral choice and creativity in the nmc-realm (see discussion below, excerpted from BH "FW"). Beings lacking nmc - we will refer to them as "materially-conscious" beings or "mc's" - cannot possess true free will nor would they intuit what it means or even perhaps why it is 'necessary', and they are indeed the 'machines' they are considered tobe by nihilists and other materialists.

9. Far from being an incidental feature in the universe, TFW'ed beings may be tied to its purpose, and according to (our interpretation of) quantum metaphysics may even  have played a role in its emergence into existence (See BH "QP&H, and "FW").

10. Nmc and TFW exist in a realm of reality which provides the conceptual foundations for 'Meaning', 'Purpose', 'Significance', and 'Good/Evil|Moral Responsibility' (all capitalized to indicate their root in the nmc-realm) and none of which are therefore accessible to science and the scientific method (see author's web-article...).

11. True Free Will (TFW) bridges the nmc-material gap, enabling the physicality-transcending activity of moral choice and true creativity in the nmc-realm to affect the physical universe, so that TFW nmc's can be considered Morally Responsible for (some of the) decisions/actions they take, and their creative activity can bring in new order into the universe beyond the limitations expressed in the laws of thermodynamics.

12. FWC possesed by humanity is a crucial acausal factor... related to creativity, only where nmc is tied to fwc can intelligent creativity be possible.

13. Nihilism is invalid for nmc beings since their lives indeed do have Significance. Nihilism and existential despair may be considered a from of mental illness.

........................................................Bible, Midrash & Kaballah....................................................................

14. The notion of a Free-Willed nmc is a paradigm sufusing the Biblical creation/eden acount, and perhaps originates with it, and is more of a "Western" than "Eastern" notion. Those first accounts of Genesis promote the idea of human significance and exceptionalism, to the extent of considering humans as created 'in the image' of the creator, with the human essence being "the breath of the creator".

15. The Biblical creation account present the universe as a product of Will, a free choice to create, a combination of creativity and free will by God which is then built-into the abilites of the human created 'in its image'.

16. QKC adopts all the above, plus elements of the midrashic view of creation; this contains many mystical and philosophical teachings, often presented as inner meanings of Biblical text, and is quite different than the literal reading of Genesis, and often seems to directly contradict it.  For example, the midrash refers to events in God's Mind and specifically of creation in thought via a blueprint, creation as having occured instantaneously, cycles of creation long before the one recounted in Genesis etc, and it also discusses the meaning of terms in Genesis, eg what it means for a being to be 'the image of God' ; many midrashic teaching are seemingly in total contradiction to each other but are nevertheless not viewed as being in conflict with each other. 

17. Kabbalah conceives of reality in a way similar to that of Plato's dual levels of Matter & Form, where the latter represents a deeper more fundamental level - and in both conceptions the familiar physical reality is a 'shadow' of the "true reality". The kabbalistic presentation of the creation is meant in many places as a spiritual description of the events unfolding in the 'upper-worlds' during the creation referred to in Genesis and so it  differs from the description in midrash, but is not at all meant to be in contradiction to it.  In many cases the Biblical creation account is barely recognizable in it, though the written record in Genesis is considered as completely authoritative and indisputable and totally accurate. QKC bases itself to some degree on these ways of understanding reality, and so is not overly concenrned with the external literal intepretations of Genesis as for example obtained via a 'traslation' of the text.  

18. In kabbalistic metaphysics that which is 'above'....'below' ..... Humans va their possession of free will straddle both realms, and can manipulate the deeper level of reality via their decisons and actions.  Kabbalistic cosmology presents human nmc/fwc as ..., and the Biblical creation account is interpreted as being a reference to a mystical process in the upper realms. (Many of these kabbalistic ideas also have echos in midrashic teachings.)

.....Below are my adaptations of a mix of physics with the above "Bible, Midrash & Kabbalah" ideas...... 

19. Adapting to nmc and then to FWC  Wigner's notion of consciouness as the crucial element in the 'quantum wavefunction collapse', and adapting Wheeler's cosmological application , it would make sense that if the universe was created by a FWC being, the initial moment was that of the emergence of a FWC (nmc) being within it, 'in the image of the creator'. This idea is presented in the BH article "inst un bb" excerpted below... 

20. fwc nmc can perhaps even communicate directly with the underlying level of reality... perhaps a grouping of nmc fwc beings can achieve a connection which is inacessible to an individual one.  This idea is presented in the BH article "The Cosmic Connection" excerpted below... 

The above ideas are presented in full in the following articles (excerpts of these articles comprise the main content of this webpage): 

• GEO (1985): Summary: we are not insignificant, despite the incredible vastness of the universe and multitide of stars; it's true we are not the center but neither is anyplace else! Indeed, Einstein's general 'relativity' removes the notion of an 'absolute center', and grants any location the 'right' to consider itself as the center (as long as any such 'center' understands this reciprocity). 

intro to Geo: Why is this material relevant today? 

European people in medieval times thought of our home as the center of the universe. Many also read that into the Bible, though it was certainly never really taught as religious dogma, and many religious figures were not disturbed at the Copernican discovery that it was the sun not the Earth that was the center (now we would say of the solar system, then they said 'of the universe'). However for many it did seem that somehow as a result of this new scientific understanding humans were less significant than had been thought, and even those who did not think that 'geocentrism' was a religious Biblical teaching which had been discredited somehow felt that there was somehow less likelihood of the validity of the Biblical picture of humans as being significant players in the universe, potentially of interest to a creator if there was such. 

From the perspective of our times, we of course did not grow up thinking that Earth was the center of anything, nor that the sun revolves about the Earth etc, and so even Bible-believing people nowadays largely did not grow up with a feeling that somehow the Bible had been discredited nor that humans have been made less significant. However people now DO grow up with a pervasive cultural background permeated with elements of atheism, philosophical-materialism, and nihilism - and these are to some degree an echo of the Bible-science conflicts of the past. And one does still hear arguments against the significance of humanity which base themselves on the incredible vastness of the physical universe, and these arguments arose due to the newer scientific understnadings of Copernicnaatimes and later, and were part of, a continuaiton of, the initial anti-Biblical polemic around the issue of solar-centrism For this reason, though that specific polemic has largely dissipated, the issue of the relation of human significance to the size of the universe and to the location of our planet and to supposed Biblical support for geocentrism is relevant and of interest even in our time.

.And we'll see also how other scientific advances were used to discredit human significance and exceptionalism, and how even today this trend continues eg with the hard-AI project and materialistic-neuroscience.

..

How did nihilism arise? As explained in the "GeoCentrism" article excerpted  below, in ancient times it was natural to think that the truly-significant beings would be located at the center of the universe, and the essence of the universe would be manifest at its center; or since the physical universe seems to be composed of bodies circling other bodies etc, the most important entity in the physical universe  would be that  around which all else revolves. It was also assumed that the Bible teaches that the Earth is at the center of everything.  This "GeoCentrism" was eventually rejected and replaced by Copernican "solar-centrism", which led some to think of humanity as insignificant (today, knowing the size of the universe, if our sun was the center we would consider that as an indication of our significanc,e not insignificance). However that too was overthrown, and the sun was understood as being one out of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and it was assumed by many that this implied that humanity was insignificant, which became the essence of the nihilist view. Today noone anymore links our physical location in the universe to our significance, but it took time for that realization to prevail, and the article outlines the arguments leading to that realization. 

The article also  presents aspects of Einstein's theory of general relativity which indicate that there is no locational or orbital center, or equivalently that every place is equally legitimately considerable as the center, so it is clear that spatial location is irrelevant to significance. 

There is the notion of a possibly infinite universe, with us being infinitesimal in it - but we point out that nmc is primary, so size is irrelevent, and nmc is beyond the quantitiative, so (as outlined in the final part of the GeoCentrism article) even infinite size does not make for insignificance of the finite, and small, part of it which is humanity. 

GR has been said to be one of the greatest achievements of the human brain..... the brilliance and depth cause many nmc's to feel that this if anything points to greater significance of the human brain, (not that only nmc's can achieve this) and it makes these nmc's feel even more that there is some greater meaning or purpose to the universe and to humanity. This is just a feeling not a proof etc, but it is an indication of the absurdity of conditioning the significance of humans on a specific location of their planet.

MESH: 

Judaism and Geo: Of course there is no Jewish religios dictum that says that the statemnts implying geocentricity in Tanach are meant to convey that God expects Jews to believe that the Earth as some physic-relevant special physical location in space! Bibe quotes a lot from people;s perspecties etc, it is not God saying "And God spoke to Moses sayingL you must believe that 'the sun rises', meaning it moves aorund th Earth, and it does so in a sense that physics can prove" or whatever. Judaism does NOT say this. And Physics has no problem with a book authored by God whcih speaks in human terms, as long as it doesnt make claims ike the spurious one in the previous sentence.

Why bother with Geo material: I'm not concerned in the first part with attacks on Judasm or Torah so much as on religion, and even not religion specifically as the underlying aspects, eg are humans significant, is there mening purpose, MR.

Later, at evo, I'll be dealing more with chumash, breishis, but even then not with the quesiotn of the literal or allegorical meaning of the psukim.

Certainly not re psukim in GEO, but rather the issue of significance, even if the geocentric system is incorrect we are significant ie we accept that it is incorrect, that is not the issue. So what about the psukim? In footnote can say that we assume it is obvious that God did not intend that we should think that we are required to believe goecentrism etc. I wrote about all this elsenwere, it is not the focus here.

So if we accept non-geocentrism and re not worried re the psukim, why is it interesting to go through the whole GR aspect re center etc? Bec we know the sci relg conflict started with this issue, and it made a huge impression and then after GR was discovered we have eminent relativists saying that GR shows geo is not more incorrect than any other, and I wanted to explain why that is so. NOt that we beleive in geocentrism or believe the Torah requires us ot believe in it, butthis issue was culturaly- important enough to get Eddington and others ot make these statmeents bec of the history invovled, and so it was interesting to me to explain what they meant.

And this is a sort of part of the 'convergence' notion.

• (1985): The Instant Retroactive Universe: "And God said: 'let there have been a big bang, and it was so!' ". Shamir publication (Book). Various ideas/sections in this book were later published as articles in "B'Ohr HaTorah" (BH), see below, and presented in lectures at science & religion conferences.

•  "Geocentrism": BH English 1986, BH Hebrew 1986.

• Free Will (1987 BH): we are not machines: due to our Free Will we are beyond the causality and randomness of the physical universe, and indeed, according to QKC, Free Will is at essence related to the universal emergence into existence.

• Quantum Physics & Halacha (1987 conference; 1989 BH): A presentation of Wigner/Wheeler quantum-metaphysics, and the notion that it is actually Free Will rather than "consciousness" which is the active factor solving "the quantum measurement problem".

• "The Cosmic Connection" (Prayer):(1987 BH): We are designed to be able to interconnect with the deepest levels of reality. 

• "The Instant Universe" Evo (1985/2000 BH): the universe and we are not incidental/random etc, we did not appear by chance; even from the lofty perspective of the creator of the universe (as in Genesis), we are not 'lowly' but rather so significant that the timing of the creation of the universe is associated to that of the emergence of FWC beings within it; indeed far from being insignificant, the midrash and kabbalah present humanity as part of the essential reason for the creation of the universe.[The juxtaposition of the creation & Eden accounts is interpreted as a statement that the emergence of moral responsibility via true free will was the initial stage of the universe from the perspective of meaningful activity (as considered by the Creator) so that from this perspecitve free willed brings (eg humans) are exceptional and fundamentally significant relative to the rest of the universe (the stars and planets and all matter and energy, and non-sentient living entities).] [A re-working and condensation of the author's “The Retroactive Universe”: sites.google.com/nyu.edu/andgodsaidlettherebemeaning/the-retroactive-universe-intro-to-book.]

• "Mindless Materialists" (1998/2021): The ideas in this paper about "nmc" are outlined in the first points of the 'summary' above, and though they underlie the central conclusions of all the BH articles above, they were not made explicit until they later found expression in this paper. 

• The final section of the "Geo" article presenting the notion of the significance of humanity assumes the nmc-nature of humans. 

• The "FW" article speaks of a type of FW which is possible only for nmc's. 

• The QP&H article adapts Wheeler's notion, which we point out implicitly assumes the existence of nmc. 

• The "Cosmic Connection" article assumes humans have nmc, and perhaps even more than that.

• The "Inst Un b.b. evo" article assumes that the Free Willed being which is referred to in Genesis, which brought about the emergence of the universe into existence, had nmc. 

So true Free will is an underlying theme of many of the articles, but it was not made explicitly-dependent on nmc, however it was referred to as free-willed consciousness (FWC) which in the author's mind implied nmc-based FW, but this is now made explicit.

.................

The notion of "Human Significance" in the BH articles: Not that this book is re-casting all the BH articles to be about human significance, but rather the BH articles themselves were - in a way - about this. They are a reaction in a sense ot the prevailing notion expressed eg as: "The Atlantic": JULY 1961 ISSUE The Freudian Revolution By Charles J. Rolo: THE most revolutionary changes are changes in man’s basic beliefs about himself. Three such revolutions have occurred in Western thought in the past five hundred years — the Copernican, the Darwinian, and the Freudian — and they have successively dealt shattering blows to man’s pride. Copernicus dethroned man from the center of the universe. Darwin challenged his sense of divinity by tracing his descent to the animal kingdom. And Sigmund Freud, the first cartographer of the unconscious, punctured his conviction that the conscious mind was master of man’s fate. “I belonged,” Freud justly said, quoting the poet Hebbel, “to those who have profoundly troubled the sleep of mankind .”

So the BH articles deal wiht this as follows:

Geo: the last section is explicitly about this, but in the context of the physical size etc of the universe, not re FWC. That last section was not an afterthought but in a way the main point, or at least one of the main points. ie one ramification of the Copernican discoveries had to do with the validity of the Bible, but another had to do with the loss of significance. 

FW: The last section is all about how human FW makes humanity "exceptional", and re the cosmogenesis aspect, which is indirectly about human significance.

Evo: I even quote Darwin to show that evo theory is not necessarily diminishing of humans, one quote is about conscience which I interpret re MR/FW etc, and the othe ris the grandeur of the produciton of the animals and then humanity. But the essence of the article is that human fwc is most significant aspect of the universe, and so its emergenc is THE critical juncture.... etc.

QP & H: it is about human significance in that humans determine the outcome etc, and it has the Wheeler diagram!

Prayer: This is about human exceptionalism form the religious aspect, different than the other articles. 

.....

Clock cannot be blamed: see "retroactive universe"

Cosmogenesis acausality, critique of koestler  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HVp2sc71NZ02VKQw4m74iB2y44TrcTpBJo2PB3FcyJU/edit

....

AR to AR: BH articles: the technical parts are: 

• GEO - 20 pages which can be online and with url,;

• FW: very little is technical, it can be appendix or footnote

• QP&H: The qp theory part is useful, and the Wigner & Weeler part is great, Adam is terrific, but I am leaving out the halacha part, it can be on website, it is about Judaism, not fundamentals of religion; it is an application of the philosophy espoused in the book.

• Prayer: the interconnection of human and cosmos is great, but I am leaving out the prayer part, it can be on website, it is about Judaism, not fundamentals of religion.  it is an application of the philosophy espoused in the booklet.

• Evo: all is good for evobook, but for significance book it shoud be excerpted, edited?.

.....

 At which point would someone begin a simulation? Depends what they wanted to find out.

If they could predict all the results of the initial conditions and play any scene in their mind, it would be boring to watch it, etc.

If they introduced a wild card, awareness, it might be interesting form then, but moreso of course if there was free will. So even simulaiton people should beleive in instant universe etc.

And meaning & purpose issue is well-explored re this dieas, since it involves an Outsider perspective

Interesting to know whether the people who believe in tius believe they are aware... and if so, how does awareness arise.

From the religious point of view, after there is awareness, and sufficient intelligence, it makes sense to begin the experiment, by the introduction of this wild card, free will and the moral sense etc, via some relationship to the mind which created it all (ie the soul).

.

....

Moral Responsibility as a Primitive MR, re mind paper   my google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14jVUdE3BrVPVJ_jyA9MQhHLV9w8Y_f55o8_hMoY25qs/edit

....

retro un re outsider persepctive FW & meaning: Chapter 2: : Meaning, Purpose and Moral

Responsibility: The Outsider Perspective  and later on in the book, 2022 version: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#advanced-search/from=air1%40nyu.edu&to=air1%40nyu.edu&subset=all&has=%22outsider+perspective%22&within=1d&size=0&sizeoperator=s_sl&sizeunit=s_smb&query=from%3A(air1%40nyu.edu)+to%3A(air1%40nyu.edu)+%22outsider+perspective%22+larger%3A0M/CllgCJlFlgrBMKcJkZTkLrjVFMrLsWCpWXZKzQSLVcJdbmJWQcPgcjRBWbsMvgQhvldQHPNxPTg?compose=xQTrpVwxCzcZDtqLCLNVTJvslPZqjDpRDbcBRgLlcXpSbcMwksFprnLpRtRHzhpxXZsdBcjWffgDCbMTStXbxsBhVChlRXmrhrmQfMDdrqmhPdHTKwJNw&projector=1&messagePartId=0.1

...

FW BH article: 1. New version; 2. how to edit it; 3. transformed to Evo bb; 4. version corrected from scanned, w some changes & additional material;

see: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=9c2c1eb32b&view=lg&permmsgid=msg-a:r2187528789514692546&ser=1

Avi Rabinowitz <air1@nyu.edu>

Mon, May 20, 2024 at 8:57 AM

To: Avi Rabinowitz <air1@nyu.edu>

-----

Changes to make in the overall structure:

Intro/Preface should state that qp not compatible with FW, FW not compatible with logic, physics of cause effect etc, and readers unfamiliar with this topic should read Appendix, move all the Part I/II/III there.

 I can leave re physicists as part of the mian article rather than appendix.

The start the article with the main results, ie Part IV & V. Also re physicists at end of Part III.

.....

Editing: 

At end of Part III, the section "Free Will and Physicists":

1) See insert above: this section should be separated off to become Part IIIb.

2) See insert below: I need to mention that philosophers have expounded on compatibilist fw, and most physicists accept this as a way of not having to think about the issue. Mc physicists certainly accept this, but there are plenty of nmc-physicists, among the most distinguished.....

Then: re-cast it all as my statement coming from the nmc point of view, not the mc point of view.

Mention nmc's: Eddington, Wigner, Wheeler, Linde, Witten.

Einstein is in the middle.

...

Beginning of Part IV: need to stress that I am talking of FW, not fw. The heading capitalized it in any case, so I need to make it clear in the text that there are capitals, eg first sentence: "In order that free will exist..." need to tranform fw--> FW.

At end of Part IV:

1) as noted in other notes re editing, I did not actually explain the qmp, only mentioned it!

2) re the sentence/paragraph: "Attributing the difference to human consciousness is useless unless consciousness itself is beyond quantum processes, ie it is nmc. Even moreso,This would be the case for example if the operative element is free will, in which case we could understand why the measurement of a free-willed consciousness is qualitatively different. And different in precisely the required way.

"Part V": Changes to make in final section re "Options A,B,C"

1) consciousness --> nmc;  free will --> FW (ie incompatibilist...etc), mr --> MR.

2) In order that the article not end on a partisan strident tone, I can present the last paragraph(s),top right of p157, second last paragraph of the article. "All people" as part of Option C: rather than as the author's pompous declarations. To accomplish this, I can preface the final paragraph(s) with the added words "Following the path of Option C...." 

3) VIP: top right of p157, second last paragraph of the article. "All people...must admit". This is either continuaiton of Option C or is the conclusion:  

Change  fw --> FW  mr --> MR 

4) The final footnote should have as first sentence the part of the upper text it refers to, so that the paragraph is not 'religious' or 'polemical' (ie move a sentence or part of one from the text to the already-existing footnote).

5) I can add a title, eg Part V: "Options of scenarios", or "paths of belief" etc

---------- 

scanned ocr text version, corrected, edited;

plus file of instructions how to edit it

......................

Excerpt from first page of file "FW to Evo. Transforming article via this addition". Editing "Free Will" BH article:

Introduction: Leave it out.

Part I: 

• Give Part I a new heading: eg: Is 'Mind' Subject to Natural Law?' Then the next heading immediately following  makes sense: The Concept of natural Law.

• Keep section "The Concept of natural Law" and the next: "Natural Law vs FW" (except change last sentence, see below)

• Put the section "Causality and Determinism" as an Appendix for advanced readers, and change the reference to it in the last sentence of the preceding section.

• Keep the next sections, but in section "Explanation of QP" put the paragraph "For example" as advanced Appendix.

Part II: Keep

Part III: Contentious. Whitehead quote is good for this, but maybe just leave it all out. But keep last paragraph, just delete the first phrase of the second (=last) sentence.

Section: "The Universe as God's Machine" and the next section "det vs FW"

A) Either Skip intervening sections and go directly to "God's (Quantum) Machine": which makes the same point as the earlier ones, just with qp. So maybe just state early on that all is det'd or qp random, and leave the explanations for an appendix or a box for advanced readers, and combine det & q machine.

B) If not skipping it: Remove ref to 'compute'/prediction'/calculation at end of Paragraphs 3&4, and beginning of 5 and of 6, and 7,8 and last paragraphs.

Paragraph 5, "Of course": the idea of thoughts being determined by previous state is in very last words of first section. And the beginning of the next section is about fw'ed decisions being determine, so really thoughts et should be before it, ie after end of 1 and before 2.

Also: this paragraph mixes in the big bang, which should be a separate idea.

Also: only the first and last paragraphs bring in God, which could therefore be a separate point.

And the first paragraph of the next section "det vs FW" brings in God, this really should be separate.

"The Universe w/o God": too religious sounding.

"The Life….Dice": Take out the whole idea of dice, and its continuation later in next section "FW", it is unnecessary, the point is that it is random/det not meaningful from point of view of God, so God would create FW.

Maybe this is actually better done in the Retro Un material, where I introduce and stress the idea of the 'outsider perspective'.

Part IV: Keep : with order changed : 

Need to explain that perhaps consciousness is governed by natural law and ultimately by qp. however the type of FW we are referring to is by definition not.

Something is missing, need to change order. I don’t present the idea of consciousness collapsing the wave function but I refer to it! And there's a heading "FW & Collapse" before the heading "The Measurement Problem". So I need to insert material re QP/Collapse, and then re consiousness and then re FW.  Eg the last sentence of "FW & Collapse" should be part of an intro or conclusion of a section re the measurement problem.

Part V: Make Option C less dogmatic.'We must" "all people" etc.

.......................................................................

Second part of file "FW to Evo. Transforming article via this addition".

The first part is re editing the FW article (that part is now separated out), the second part is are transforming it to be re evo.

With this configuration the BH free will article becomes a big bang article.

Free Will & Cosmology, the Bang and Adam

We propose that it is a truly free-willed consciousness rather than just a generic consciousness which would be required to 'collapse the universal quantum wave function'. We discuss the implications of this for cosmology, and also the relevance to Bible-science issues.

Insert diagram and caption from Wheeler [It is referred to in a footnote in the article so it is not a totally new addition – but insert it as a part of the text not into the footnote].

 (quantum metaphysics indicates the possibility that the universe emerged into true physical existence only when there was a conscious observer in it).

We claim that the type of purpose which the Bible imputes to the universe could not commence until a free-willed being emerges, and so both quantum metaphysics and biblical religion require the beginning of the universe to be related to the emergence of a free-willed being, which in biblical terms is the Adam of the Eden account (Adam after eating from the 'Tree of Knowledge'). 

Thus it is reasonable both from the biblical and our quantum metaphysical perspective that the bible presents the creation of the universe juxtaposed to the emergence of Adam.

Outline: 

• The first part of the article below discusses the issue of free will from the philosophical and logical perspective. 

• We then introduce concepts of quantum physics and the possible relevance of human consciousness. 

• We then explain our reasons for supposing that for this purpose it is free will which is the essential ingredient of consciousness. 

• We then proceed to a discussion of universal purpose from an anthropomorphic 'divine perspective'. 

• In the last section we analyze the cosmological significance of free will.

INSERT LINK TO FREE WILL ARTICLE HERE

Conclusion:  The creation/Eden accounts imply that the universe emerged into existence as part of a process in which the first free-willed beings emerge. This meshes well with both Wheeler's quantum metaphysical idea of the universal conscious observer, which we interpret as a free-willed observer, and also with the idea that from the divine perspective the onset of universal purpose, and therefore the most reasonable creation point, is at the emergence of free-willed beings.

Further Reading: The bible-science aspect of the above article is fleshed out in more detail in the author's article "The Instant Retroactive Universe: And God Said: "Let there have been a big bang".

..

BELOW: COMPLETE CONTENTS OF ATTACHED FILE:

full contents of file

"New Version of FW BH article"

FW BH article has several main thrusts: need to separate the strands.

……………

1) W/O God or religion, only FW: If all events are governed by physical law, determined or quantum random, then so too are in the human mental realm events, including thoughts, emotions & decisions.

• History of development of idea that there are laws of nature, cause/effect

• Explanation of QP

• Determinism & Randomness vs FW. Logic vs FW

• Collapse of wave function: FW is the essential element, not consciousness.

• Acausality of FW.

• FW is relevant to cosmology.

2) Relevance to Religion: If there is an omnipotent creator - God then human moral decisions and actions would be attributed by God to physical law rather than to the person, and God would not hold people responsible for their actions. Unless somehow human mental choices operate independently of determinism and randomness, and humans have a 'free will'.

• Example of universe as God's deterministic machine, and the universe as God's q. machine.

• An omniscient God would be bored in a det/random universe, and as part of this, human action w/o free fw is boring.

3) Relevance to creation method/bb/age of the universe

…………..

………….

FREE WILL

  The question of the existence of free will acquires its great philosophical-religious importance only inasmuch as it relates to the concept of the moral responsibility of man. If man possesses a free will so that he can choose his actions, and if there is a "good" and an "evil" way of acting, and if it is true that one "should" be good, then one can say that it is logically possible that man is "responsible" for his choice, andthat he should choose the good.

The issue which we will explore in this article is the question of whether the picture of morally responsible man is compatible with the fundamental outlook of modern physical theory: specifically whether the idea of free will is compatible with quantum theory in particular, and with the logic of causality in general.

We intend to show that they are not compatible and to discuss briefly the ramifications of this incompatibility (Parts II and III). We then present speculations regarding the possible physical and cosmological basis for free will (Part IV). We present our conclusions in Part V.

Part I

The Situation prior to Quantum Physics

The Concept of Natural Law

The very first mathematical equations relating to natural phenomena were those developed by Kepler in about 1600. He was convinced that the real world is one of quantitative characteristics-as opposed to the Aristotelian belief that the world is composed of qualitative characteristics-and that genuine causes of phenomena-must always be in the nature of some underlying mathematical harmony. According to Kepler, these harmonies originated in the creative mind of God, and are the causes of phenomena, not merely their description. Galileo, a contemporary of Kepler, and the founder of terrestrial dynamics (the physics of falling bodies, pendulums and so forth), believed that natUre acts "inexorably... through immutable laws which she never transgresses", (See Burtt.)

Thus, instead of the Aristotelian view of events "unfolding" in a process representing "the actualization of potentiality" -Le. working to fulfill some future goal (teleology)- there arose the new idea of a chain of cause and effect regulated by immutable natural law. The occurrence of an event was now seen to be caused (determined) by prior physical events rather than by some metaphysical "longing to achieve "perfection" or "completion".

Thus, as a result of the revolutionary discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the belief grew that all observed phenomena should be described in quantitative terms. The predictive and explanatory power of the new theories as well as their mathematical exactitude con­vinced all scientists that a set of "natural laws" was operative in the universe governing all its processes.

Furthermore, in a process culminating in the development of the theory of evolu­tion, man himself came to be considered as having arisen via natural law: from the inanimate to the animate via natural pro­cesses. Similarly, the universe as a whole was considered to have emerged into existence without the benefit of any super­natural agency. As a result, it was postu­lated that since man arose within a natural universe via the operation of natural law, there would be no reason to suppose that the laws governing processes in man are any different than those governing the rest of the physical universe-that is, it would be only reasonable to conclude that even man's mental processes are governed by "natural law".

Natural Law versus Free Will

From this it follows that those mental processes which we label "free-willed choices" are actually physical processes occurring entirely according to natural laws of cause-and-effect. That is, they are in reality totally "determined", not free; "Free will" would thus have to be consi­dered a physical impossibility, belief in it an error, and the sensation/experience of making "free-willed choices" an illusion. It is of course an illusion caused by natural processes in the human brain, having their origin in the natural processes (evolution) which led to the formation of the human brain. However the fact that an illusion rises naturally makes it no less an illu­sion.

This seeming opposition between the orderliness of the universe (which leads us to postulate the existence of 'natural law") and the alleged phenomenon of free will (which is impossible if natural law governs all) is however not unavoidable. We can avoid a clash between the two if we do not insist that an immutable natural law exists. Instead of assuming that "natural law" prescribes immutably the path of events, we postulate that "natural law" is merely a description of the path of events. This approach will now be explained.

Causality and Determinism

The "law of gravity" as it was formu­lated before the modern period stated that all things tend to fall to the earth. This was based on observation, not on some brilliant theoretical deduction. If it had been the case that rocks fell but wood rose to the sky, the "law of gravity" would say "rocks fall and wood rises". If on Sundays and Tuesdays rocks fell but on other days they stayed where placed, the "law of gravity" would say"...".

Even in such a universe' this "law of gravity" would be "prescriptive"", because it could predict what would happen to rocks and wood if the day of the week were known. However, if every few minutes there was a change so that some-times rocks fell and sometimes not, sometimes water flowed and sometimes not, then a complete description of events could be made only after they had occurred. However, once a complete list were made then it could be called the "law of gravity". This law could state e.g. that last Tuesday at 9 AM rocks fell and at 9:05 they rose and at 9:08...

This would be, however, a descriptive rather than a pres­criptive law since it describes but does not predict. However, it is a fact of mathematics that no matter how complex this law would be, it would be possible to express it mathematically so that one would have a formula, a mathematical law of nature, to describe the entire history of the universe.

We can see that if we took the history of any universe, even one where the laws change chaotically every minute, we could write down its entire history, even express it mathematically, and call it the "natural law" of that universe. We would be justi­fied in calling it this because every event could be derived from this "natural law"... However, this would be a descriptive rather than a prescriptive law.

In contrast, imagine a universe in which prescriptive natural laws are available, and in which these laws maintain their validity always and everywhere, and where only a very few basic laws are needed to predict any event anywhere. In such a universe, rather than considering natural law as a "description" of events, as it would be in a chaotic universe, we are tempted, after meditating on this regularity and encoun­tering it everywhere and always, to con­sider that events must occur in accordance with natural law.

This approach, which postulates that nature "must obey" natural law, obviously considers natural law to be far more than merely a convenient (mathematical) des­cription of how events occur.

However, neither approach is conclu­sive; both have equal logical validity. Although we are more used to the latter approach-where natural law dictates how events must occur - the former approach - where "natural law" is merely Ia description of how events actually occur - is entirely valid.

What we are actually saying is that "causality" is not a priori truth: if effect Y always has followed from cause X, we do not say that if X occurs then Y must follow it (i.e. that Y is "determined" by X or Y is "caused" by X, but rather that "so far Y has been observed to follow X".

Thus it is entirely possible that at some time X will occur without "causing" Y to occur. Conversely, Y can occur without having X occur prior to it. If this is so, then even the apparently immutable order of our universe does not logically imply that all processes occur in accordance with causality: there would be then no logical necessity to consider mental events as fol­lowing causal laws even if they were totally natural phenomena. Thus human free will could exist even in a seemingly deterministic universe.

However, although it is true that logic does not compel us to assume causality, nevertheless physics does assume the existence of a causal structure to the uni­verse and its processes. Indeed one of the accepted signs of a true theory of nature is that it is "elegant". All great physicists have believed deeply that a simple order permeates all the phenomena in the uni­verse, and that one great-yet elegantly simple-equation/law can describe all of nature. This belief in the unity of nature and in the elegance and simplicity of its laws has not only inspired generations of physicists, but it has led them to searches which have so far confirmed the validity of that belief.

Along with this belief in the operation of law in the universe was the belief that everything within the universe - including man and the mental activity in his brain­ - operates in accordance with this law. Thus, scientific attitude rules out the exist­ence of free will even though it is not necessarily constrained to do so.

In any case, we will see that even if one denies the existence of "natural law", and thus of causality, one encounters a very basic difficulty inherent in the logical con­tent of the idea of free will: free will seems to be possible only if it involves processes which give the lie to its being free. This logical inconsistency in the very concept of free will is explained farther on in this article.

The Religious-Scientific View before Quantum Physics

Before proceeding to a discussion of quantum physics, we shall examine the problem of free will versus determinism from the viewpoint of a religious scientist before the advent of quantum physics. Such a person would believe that the natu­ral law operating in the universe is a crea­tion of God (and perhaps they would add that the unity it manifests and the awe and sense of beauty it engenders are reflections of the Divine unity and majesty).

Using this approach of a universe created by God, which is run according to a set of divinely created, immutable pres­criptive laws of nature, we can present the conflict with free-will even more graphi­cally, as follows.

The Universe as God's Machine 

Assuming that God created the uni­verse and natural law, then any act/event which follows automatically from the initial state of the universe is indirectly an act of God. In order that a human be responsible for their actions it must be true not only that it was physically possible for them to act otherwise than they did but also that he was free to choose his action from among these available alternatives. Under these condi­tions, we can say that free will exists. If on the other hand it was not physically possi­ble for them to choose any of the other alter­natives, or if there were no other alternatives to choose, then that act is an automatic one, and is caused by the condi­tions of the universe as God created it. As such, it is an act of God, and not an act for which that person can be said to bear responsibility.

Two of the fundamentals of Judaism are that humanity is commanded by God to shun certain actions and to actively pursue others and that humans are responsible for their actions. This implies that it is up to people whether or not they will do these actions, ie that humans have a free will. Science, on the other hand, has raised a number of objec­tions to the idea of free will.                 

According to the philosophical interpre­tation of scientific determinism presented above, all phenomena are governed by nat­ural law: Le. all events always' occur in accordance with certain cause-effect rela­tionships, and only in accordance with them, as though they were obediently following some all-powerful set of laws. We thus call these regular cause-effect relationships "natural law". As a result, if one possesses all the relevant information characterizing a system (any system) at anyone point in time, then since event must follow event in accordance with nat­ural law, if the natural law is known it is possible to compute the exact state of that system as it would be at any other time, past or future.

Since event follows event in a way immutably set by natural law, we say that events are" determined" by prior events, and thus we say that the state of the system at present is determined by the state as it was at a previous time. Implicit in this philo­sophy is the belief that all observed pheno­mena are subject to natural laws. For example, although thoughts, emotions and decisions are mental phenomena, they are detectable by human consciousness and are therefore considered to be operating subject to some (albeit as yet unknown) natural law. Knowing the state of the entire physical universe at any given time allows one in theory to predict its state at any future time; and, as part of the physical universe, thoughts and emotions would be predictable as well.

Of course, the necessary calculations might well be so long and difficult that the entire human race with all its computers might not be able to complete such a pre­diction. Nevertheless, the problem is at least theoretically soluble. That is, given all thoughts, emotions, actions motions, positions...etc of all the particles/entities in the universe, as they are/were at any point in time, their future thoughts, emotions, actions, motions and positions could be exactly specified. For example, your thoughts at this very moment were determined by the previous state of the universe (which includes the previous state of your brain and of your surroundings). That state was determined in turn by the previous state and so on, so that your thoughts now are actually de­termined by the very first state of the universe.

The possibility has been raised that even were such a calculation made, the amount of information to be processed would be so vast that even in theory the result could be obtained only after the pre­dicted event already occurred. For exam­ple, a prediction of the state of the universe one year in the future would take more than a year to calculate.

However, in our case, this is irrelevant: when we say that the future can be pre­dicted, we mean that it is determined­ even if the prediction of events requires a longer amount of time than the actual occurrence of the events, if they can be predicted at all, then this is proof that the events are determined.

Thus, if the exact state of the Big Bang were known, one could (in theory) predict all the actions, thoughts, works of art and philosophy and science, all acts and words of kindness and brutality, love and hate, of all humanity for all time.

Thus, if the theory that the universe is (totally) deterministic is correct, then every act that we consider to be spiritual, good, meaningful or beautiful is merely an inev­itable, automatic consequence of the Big Bang.

It is not even necessary that it be possi­ble for man or any physical being in our universe to be able to predict the unfolding of the universe in order for this to be true.

Obviously, if God created the universe with its physical laws in such a way that it would develop in one and only one way, then everything that occurs in that uni­verse is an automatic result of God's creat­ing the universe. Whether or not we can predict events, they are nevertheless determined.

Determinism versus Free Will (and "Meaning")

Now, if human acts are truly automatic results, we can neither claim credit for our meritorious deeds nor be held responsible for even the most reprehensible crimes.

Rather, since God created the Big Bang, and all our actions follow inevitably from it, then God is the direct cause of all that "we" do. Humanity and the rest of nature are merely the puppets through which the uni­verse acts out the drama programed into the Big Bang by God.

Indeed, if the universe actually does develop in this totally automatic way, then it is in reality merely a very large machine of which we are simply a small part. Like the motions of a machine, our actions are devoid of any moral or spiritual meaning.

The motions of a machine cannot be "good" or "evil"-they just "are". As determined, automatic events, our actions,

thoughts and emotions are thus neither "good" nor "evil''-they just "are".

Yet we all feel very deeply that our actions do possess meaning and that there does exist a distinction between right and wrong, good and evil. Is there any way to overcome this paradox? Can our actions have meaning?

Clearly, in order that we could consider our actions to have any meaning beyond the personal (ie rather than the feeling inside us of "I feel this has meaning", the belief that there is some trans-personal "Meaning"), we would have to believe that in some way we could control what we do.

If we control our action, then at least to some degree we are neither puppets nor machines; our actions can carry with them a measure of "responsibility"; and they therefore have the potential to be mean­ingful. However, for it to be true that we indeed control our actions, it must be true that, for any possible course of moral action taken, alternative possibili­ties existed, and people could have cho­sen freely from among them.

However, these conditions were negated by physics. It was an accepted doctrine in physics that each event occurred as a direct, inevitable result of other events. There are no alternatives possible. The event occurs as it does because it cannot occur otherwise. It is "determined".

The idea of undetermined processes seemed contrary to the spirit of science and of physics in particular. Thus, many people ceased to believe in free will so that they would not be forced to give up a belief in science and predictability. It was postu­lated that our feeling that we possess a free will is only a fantasy (caused perhaps by that strange phenomenon we call con­sciousness). Non-religious scientists flirted with the idea of man as an evolved mechanistic organism without free will, and religious scientists were on the defen­sive (trying to justify belief in the acausality of free will).

And then came Quantum physics….

Explanation of Quantum Physics

According to Quantum physics, events at the most fundamental level are not determined but can instead occur in more than one way. In order to know how an event will occur, one must use the Quan­tum formulas to determine both the dif­ferent ways the event can occur and also the relative probability of each such different way of occurrence. Then nature rolls the dice and chooses one of these ways.

FIGURE

Way No.

Code Nos.

Relative

Probability

A

1-10

10%

B

11-15

5%

C

16-50

35%

D

51-77.

27%

E

78-100

23%

For example: quantum formulas applied to process X show that there are five ways for it to occur: A, B, C, D and E. The formu­las show further that item A has a 10% probability; B 5%; C 35%; D 27% and E 23%_ Nature then constructs the following table in its mind (see Figure) and then rolls a one-hundred sided die. The 100 sides are numbered from 1 through 100, and thus each number has an equal chance in each throw. If the number on the die is between 1 and 10 then event X occurs in way A. If the number is between 51-77, it occurs in way D, and so on.

Every physical process is governed by physical law, and every event occurs in some specific circumstance. By combining a knowledge of the relevant physical law and the relevant circumstances with the rules of Quantum physics, one can exactly determine the relative probabilities of each "way of occurrence" for every type ofphysi­cal process, under any circumstance.

Since the relative probabilities are exactly determined, we call Quantum pro­cesses "probabilistically-determined" pro­cesses. However, to stress the fact that the actual choice is made using a random procedure (nature's "dice") we call Quan­tum events "probabilistically-determined random events" (to be abbreviated here as "PDR" events).

Part II   Free Will

To many people, this weakening of determinism seemed to present the possi­bility that free will does indeed exist; since there is indeed a multiplicity of options available at each decision point, our deci­sions are not uniquely determined.

However, it would seem that this was a misplaced hope. It became clear that although there is indeed a multiplicity of physically possible options for each event, the choice of which possibility to select is not up to us, but is rather up to pure chance (nature's dice).

Quantum Physics and Free Will

According to Quantum physics, the universe is governed by probabilistically determined randomness (PDR). We can imagine the development of the universe in the following way: outside the universe there is a "random number generator", and every time a Quantum process is to occur in the universe, the universe picks a random number from the generator and causes the events to occur in accordance with the chosen random number. Therefore, any event in the universe is partially pre-determined by the initial state of the universe and is partially random, i.e. it is PDR. Human beings are part of the universe, as are their thoughts, emotions and decisions. As such, all actions, thoughts, emotions and decisions of all people of all time are partially predetermined automatic events, and partially random ones, i.e. they are PDR events.

Obviously the thought "I am dead" does not reflect reality; nor does the thought "the world is flat". However, one can imagine circumstances which would lead to the arising of such thoughts.

That is, although all thoughts always result automatically/randomly from the initial state of the universe, the contents of a thought need not be true. Thus, although thoughts such as "I have a free will" or "this thought is neither determined nor PD-Random" will exist in the universe, even though deeply held beliefs in free will exist, nevertheless if quantum physics is correct then there is actually no free will, and all thoughts are determined/PD-random. 

Probabilistic Quantum Free Will

Since free will assumes that more than one option is available in each decision, it thus is in this respect compatible with quantum physics. However, free will seems also to conflict with quantum phys­ics since, according to quantum physics, events are decided by a random process while free will requires a very non­random, deliberate choice.

One could, however, seemingly get around this difficulty as follows: Very little is known about the human mind/brain. It is quite possible that if the laws of the mind were known, it would turn out that when quantum physics was applied to them, the result would be that the relative probability of a quantum event in the brain's decision center occurring as the mind wishes it to occur is 99.999%. That is, decisions are based on quantum processes, so that there are options available to choose from, and yet the choice of which option to follow is highly non-arbitrary. The choice process, although random, is so heavily weighted in favor of occurring as the mind wishes it to occur that events effectively follow the mind's will. This is as if one had a 1,OOO,DOO-sided die. Each time a free-willed choice must be made, the possible options offered by quantum physics are consi­dered, and the will chooses one of the options. Then the die is flipped. If it lands on any number between 1-821,367 or 821,369 - 1 ,000,000  then the free-willed choice is acted upon. If it lands on 821,368 then it is not acted upon. Thus in only one out of 1,000,000 choices will the event not occur as desired.  

 FOOTNOTE 1 Indeed there is reason to believe that consciousness "controls" quantum events. See the section entitled "Free Will and the Collapse of the Wave Function" below.

The Basic Problem

It would then seem that free will is compatible with quantum physics. How­ever, in actuality it is not. The problem lies in the causal chain leading to the decision to act. Even if we say that once the decision is made to do C for example, that the rela­tive probability of C occurring becomes 99.999%, the problem remains that we still must examine how it came about that C was decided upon rather than A. B, D or E. Whatever process it was, it was either random or determined and thus not free. That is, we can use quantum physics to say that it is indeed possible that there are options available, and that once the 'free decision is made one can force events to occur in accordance with the choice. How­ever, it is still impossible to understand how the choice itself can be arrived at except via physical processes, which are all necessarily random or determined.

In other words, it is true that when mak­ing a decision, various options are open, as postulated by quantum physics (rather than there being only one' inevitable "option" as per classical determinate physics). It is also true that. once the mind decides which of these options to choose, it can ensure that its choice is followed -with a degree of certainty of 99.999%-since the physical laws.of con­sciousness and of free will taken together with quantum physics determine that the relative probability of events occurring as decided by the will is 99.999%. What still remains an insurmountable difficulty is the question of how the decision itself is taken, i.e. what is the procedure whereby the mind chooses its desired option. The decision will involve quantum and macro­scopic processes and will thus also be either random or determined. There is no way to exit from this loop. If the processes in­volved can only be either quantum or macroscopic ones, then at the most fun­damental level all is random and/or deter­mined, not "free".

Quantum physics does solve the prob­lem of the multiplicity of options necessary to free will, and it can allow decisions to be carried out with arbitrary precision by appropriate manipulation of the relative probabilities. Nevertheless, it is not able to solve the basic problem of how the actual choice is arrived at.

The Universe as God's (Quantum) Machine

If all is governed by quantum physics, then all events in the universe occur in a probabilistically determined manner. That is, to some extent they are determined and to some extent they are random. Clearly the Big Bang, the conditions prevailing at the Big Bang, the laws of nature, and chance are the only parameters needed to

produce every event' in the universe, including the human mental events we call free-willed decisions. Since the Big Bang and its initial conditions as well as the laws of nature were all created by God, then one can see that all events in the universe - including free-willed decisions - are partially auto­matic results of God's act of Creation and partially chance. Certainly no responsibil­ity can be attributed to humanity for their actions, and God can obviously not "expect" humans to act any way other than the way they do.

The Life of the Universe as a Meaningless Game of Dice

In order to ensure that the resulting universe be of the desired type, then if God were to create a Big Bang and natural law and so forth, it would be according to some mental blueprint. Then, before actu­ally creating the Big Bang, God could use this Big Bang blueprint to extrapolate and find all the "quantumly-possible universe histories" which could result from this Big Bang. The actual universe-history would of necessity be one of these.

Since it is chance that determines which of the possible universe-histories is actually realized, we can say that the actual universe-history is chosen at ran­dom from among the (ensemble of) possi­ble universe-histories.

Thus, instead of God actually creating the universe and allowing it to develop into one of the known possible universe-histories, it would be "easier", more "ele­gant" and "faster" for God to simply choose a universe-history at random from among the possible universe-histories. There is no need to actually create the uni­verse or even the Big Bang: all God needs is the blueprint for the Big Bangl To actually go ahead and create the Big Bang and allow it to develop into a complete universe containing human life and soforth is ineffi­cient and superfluous and adds no mean­ing or content to the universe and life within it.

Thus the creation by God of a universe is simply an elaborate game of chance. which boils down  to God playing a solitaire game of die-throwing, a game involving only one single throw of the (infinite-sided) die.

The Universe without God

We now imagine the universe as having emerged into existence by itself, without the benefit of a creative act on the part of God (God forbid), as an atheist would have it. Certainly this would not change the fact that all human mental processes are random/determined events. Indeed, they would be in this case doubly random/determined events since they would be based or. the chance-derived conditions of the Big Bang, where the Big Bang itself emerged into existence by chance (rather than by Divine design).

Either way, if the universe were created or arose by chance, its life drama would be merely an empty farce, a one-shot game of chance on a cosmic scale. That God should engage in such a boring farce is inconceivable.

 Free Will

The only way for the Creator to prevent the creation of a universe from degenerating to this kind of trivial and meaningless die-throwing is to introduce a non-deterministic, non-random factor - namely free will.

If a universe contains free-willed decisions, its history can be neither determined by the initial Big Bang conditions nor simulated by throwing dice. The history of a free-willed universe can be actualized only if it is created and allowed to actually live its history. Having the blue print of such a universe is not enough – no extrapolation and die-throwing can simulate the history it would have. Therefore such a universe can have meaning and purpose to its creation and to its life history.   2 [FOOTNOTE 2: God's omniscience implies knowledge of what we will do" but not "what we would do had we been created". It is necessary that God create the universe and allow it to have a life history in order for God to be Omniscient in regard to the events in that history.]

Thus, free will is not merely an incidental phenomenon in the universe. From the religious perspective it is the only factor in the universe which can justify the very existence of the universe.

A Radical Solution

Clearly, the only mechanism which can allow a free-willed process is one which does not rely on quantum or macroscopic processes but instead relies on some hitherto unknown-to-science, acausal, "free" process which goes beyond determinism and beyond PD randomness. Once this "free" process is employed to decide "freely" how to react, no problems remain. Indeed, if such a free process exists, Quantum physics becomes irrelevant to the issue of free will since the remaining steps can be taken on the macroscopic level - with 100% probability rather than the 99.999% probability supplied by quantum physics. Quantum effects would only interfere since they would introduce an unwanted element of randomness into a carefully arrived-at "free" decision.

Thus, quantum physics alone is not radical enough to encompass free will. In order to allow free will, we must postulate a new "free acausal" process. However, once this process is allowed, there is no need for quantum physics at all. Instead, we can say that as far as the requirements of free will are concerned, once the decision is made by the "free" process, the rest can occur in a deterministic way.

Of course we still require the validity of that basic postulate of quantum physics which allows a multiplicity of options. However, we do not need to consider quantum physics and our new phenomena as separate laws. Instead we can consider our new "free" process to be a more fundamental phenomenon in nature than quantum physics, so that it includes within itself the multiplicity of options of quantum physics as well as the radical free-choice ability. Quantum physics could then be considered a special limited case of this phenomenon, i.e. operating in those instances where the decision between options is not "free", as it is in its general form, but is instead PDR. We can then consider determinism to be a further special, even-more-limited case, where the decision occurs neither freely nor PDR but rather with 100% probability in one set way, so that in effect no options exist.

Free Will: Probabilistically Determined Acausality

According to religion, man can freely choose his actions. However, according to science, man's activity is governed by his genetic structure and his environment (all that occurs to him). In our analysis here we assume that indeed man can freely choose his actions from among infinitely many variations but that the probability of his choosing some particular action is determined by genetics and

environment. Then, in analogy to the randomness of quantum physics, we consider the actual choice of action to be totally

independent of the ordinary causal structure of events.

Instead, the choice of action is decided on by a free-willed

mechanism.  3 [Footnote 3: We can evade problems of "hidden variables' Bell's inequality and so on (see d'Espagnat) by pointing out that even in the free-willed case where the event is not random. this is only due to the effect of some outside cause which forces the quantum event to occur as it wills the event to occur-there are no hidden variables within the system itself which determine how it will occur Rather, it is another system outside which "imposes its will" on the Quantum event forcing to act that way.]

Of course, the more that one chooses that which is easier, more convenient and so on, the less one's self-control and will power are developed, the more one's ability to choose freely atrophies and the smaller the likelihood of choosing the correct way.

Quantum Physics, Intuition and Free Will - the Role of Quantum Physics in the Free Will Question

As phenomena in themselves, quantum processes are' insufficiently radical to allow the operation of free-willed activity. However, the very existence of quantum processes shatters the myth that all physical processes must be deterministic, and thus opens the door to acausal processes such as "free will".

Although it is easy to imagine deterministic processes, quantum physics teaches us that these are really random at the most fundamental level. The fact that this result is violently counterintuitive indicates to us the inadequacy of our intuition regarding what is and what is not physically possible. Thus, although the extreme acausality required for free-willed consciousness is also violently counterintuitive, the fact that it is so cannot be accepted as a disproof of free will. Instead one can rely on one's direct intuition that one does possess a free will and ignore the already ­proven-fallible indirect intuition regarding what is physically possible.

However, the problem is deeper than merely a conflict between current physics and our intuition and beliefs.

Part III

The Objection from Logic

Even if we are prepared to rely on our intuition and to accept a limited form of quantum physics (limiting it!) validity to non-free will processes) and to accept the new phenomenon' of free will. there remains a very serious objection to the existence of free will, not from physics itself, but from logic and nature in general (Le, the law of causality).

Regardless of whether or not mental events are dependent on individual quan­tum processes, and whether or not these processes are random, free or determined, the very idea of free will seems logically impossible.

If a person decides to act in a specific way (even though he could have acted oth­erwise) then we could say he has exercised free will only if he acted this way for a reason. If he chose this specific action at random, without reasons, then it is not a free-willed choice'but a random one. On the other hand, if there is a reason/motive for his choice, then this choice was deter­mined by the reason/motive. Since this motive was in turn determined by his prior mental states and so on then his action is actually determined by these prior mental states.

For example, imagine the following conversation:

  "Why did you do that action rather than another?"

"Because it was the right thing to do."

"Why did you do the right thing?"

"Because I feel one must do the right thing."

"Why did you feel that?"

"Because I believe in God,"

"Why do you believe in...?"

"Because..."

"Why...?"

"Because .....

One can see that there must always be a "why" question which always leads to a "because" answer. If there is no answer then the act is the result of a random pro­cess. If there is an answer to every ques­tion then this shows that the action was determined.

It is impossible to understand how a decision can be rational and deliberate without being determined as well.

 This is the central paradox of free will: if a choice is to qualify as free will it must be rational, which implies it is determined -but if it is determined it is not free. Nevertheless, people firmly believe they have free will. Thus, at the core of the free will issue there lies the very fundamental issue of the logi­cal/rational versus the intuitively believed. In addition, as we saw previously, at the outer level lies the issue of free will indeterminacy versus the indeterminacy of quantum physics. Thus, since both physics and logic rule out non-random "free" choice, a belief in the existence of free will implies a belief not only in the incompleteness of physics as we know it but in the defectiveness of logic itself.

What do physicists have to say about this?

Free Will and Physicists

 WHITEHEAD QUOTE

Among physicists today it is an almost universally accepted maxim that one bears responsibility for the possible immoral uses of one's research results. In the past many of the great scientists have been philoso­phically - even mystically - inclined, and probably all deeply believed in one moral code or another. Scientists today, although in gen­eral not belonging to a religious group, would nevertheless unequivocally assert that certain actions are totally immoral and should not be committed. For example, wanton killing, purposeless torture and needless stealing are all universally seen as wrong without any reservations. Implicit in this deeply held belief is the surety that man can choose whether or not to commit these actions and that he "should" choose not to.

However, those very same physicists who believe this also claim that quantum physics governs all processes at their most fundamental level. Since as we have seen a quantum universe cannot contain free­-willed decisions, the explicit belief of con­temporary physicists in quantum physics is logically incompatible with their implicit belief in man's free will.

How then is this contradiction defen­ded? The answer is that it is overlooked,, misunderstood, ignored, denied. Much has

been written on the subject of free will, but the vast majority are attempts to deny the contradiction by redefining "free will" and by proposing similar semantic tricks. Since an admission of the reality of the contradic­tion would involve a vast upheaval in phys­ics and a possible influx of ideas commonly associated with religion (free will, morality and so forth) into physics, virtually no physicist today can bring themselves to admit that this contradiction exists. The furthest they would go is to say that questions of free will are outside the realm of physical inquiry and belong instead to the realm of philosophy, This approach would be a valid one except for one fact: these scientists themselves run their own lives as though they do believe in free-willed choice, and they clearly deeply believe in certain "ought & ought not's that they feel man has the capacity to freely choose to obey or disobey.

Thus, their basic philosophy of life is inconsistent with their belief in the funda­mental validity of quantum physics. True intellectual honesty would demand a rejection of one of the two-free will/morality or quantum physics - or at least a frank admission that a serious contradic­tion exists, between, their life philosophy /deeply held intuitive beliefs and their intellectual/scientific beliefs.

Physics is a study of the workings of the universe at their most fundamental level, and it encompasses all actual phenomena in the universe. Of course the fact that even physicists run their lives as though free will exists is no proof that it does

indeed exist. However, it is a very strange creature indeed which can live its life with total conviction that a certain fundamental phenomenon exists, plan its actions as though this phenomenon exists, and at the same time spend its lifetime investigating other natural phenomena with the implicit assumption that the deeply believed-in fundamental phenomenon does not exist.

Physicists should open themselves up to the problem of the existence of free will as a valid question in physics, rather than relegating it to the realm of philosophy. It is my contention that this is demanded by intellectual honesty, and it is my conviction that this could lead to a more fundamental understanding of the universe and of the processes within it.

Part IV  [SEE END OF FILE FOR EDITED VERSION OF THIS SECTION FROM OTHER FILE]

The Acausality of Free Will: a Prescription for Further Research

In order that free will exist, the two following requirements must be fulfilled:

Requirement 1: more than one option exists at a decision point;

Requirement 2: an option can be selected "freely"

a) not randomly, as in quantum physics [Footnote 4], and

b) not deterministically as implied by the rationality of a truly free choice. [Footnote 5]

Footnote 4: Requirement 1 has been shown possible by quan­tum physics, but requirement 2 is contradicted by quantum physics, since the latter states that options are selected at random.]

 Footnote 5: The idea of a truly free non-random choice implies a choice made after careful deliberation rather than by caprice. Free choice must be rational to be free. If it is not, it is caprice, which is random. To be rational, a choice must be based on reasoning. Reasoning is a chain of logic, or at least a determi­nistic chain of thought. This deterministic chain leads eventually to one's genetic complement and environment and so forth. Therefore free choice is self-contradictory!

Therefore if one believes that free will does exist, then one must postulate the 'existence of some radically new type of interaction-one that "transcends" both the determinism of classical physics and the probabilistic determinism of quantum physics. In addition, one must find a new approach to the logic of causality and the causality of logic.

In theory, had a super-genius post-Newtonian physicist looked for a means of incorporating requirement 1 into physics without contradicting observed phenomena and without invalidating the laws of physics discovered till then, a formulation of quantum physics - and its connection to classical physics - would have been arrived at a hundred years earlier. Of course, this is hindsight [AR: It is kind of like Bridgman's dictum and also the reverse of it, of including only measureable facts in physics]. However, perhaps we can benefit from this hindsight by trying to extend quantum physics in such a way that we can incorpo­rate yet more of what is required to support free will - ie by trying to incorporate requirement 2 into physics, as much as we can.

Of course this seems intuitively impos­sible and/or absurd to us now, but so would the probabilistic determinism of quantum physics appear to the pre­-quantum physics community.

The Acausality of Free Will: a Rationale and Ramifications

What logical justification could there be for assuming the possibility of acausal pro­cesses, and what could possibly be the physical origin of such a radically acausal phenomenon?

Perhaps the answer could be found in the greatest mystery of all-the origin of the universe. A universe which exists is in itself a result of acausality for it exists without real cause: cause implies temporal order, yet time originated with the uni­verse and thus no cause could "precede" the existence of the universe. Thus it is clear that at its most fundamental level, existence implies acausality. [6]

Footnote 6 : Indeed, there is perhaps a very close connection between the onset of free-willed consciousness and the origin of the universe. See Wheeler.

Indeed, at the most fundamental level of physical interaction (below the "Planck length"], where quantum physics and general relativity meet, acausal processes seem to dominate. A universe which originates and operates via acausal­ity can almost be expected to exhibit free­-will-type acausality where consciousness is involved.

Another question arises as to the origin of free-willed consciousness: if man is the only species possessing a free-willed con­sciousness, and if man evolved, then we must suppose that free-willed conscious­ness evolved. However, how could one

type of phenomenon, matter ruled by pro­babilistic determined randomness (POR)

give rise to a qualitatively different pheno­menon via evolution? How could POR pro­cesses give rise to free will processes?

One answer would be that free will was inherent in the universe and at a certain point in the evolution of the human brain, free will existed where it had "previously" not existed. When the brain achieved a

certain complexity it connected to the free will inherent in the universe. Or, as an acausal phenomenon it needed no direct

preceding "cause" and could thus arise even as the product of POR processes.

Free Will as the active ingredient of a non-prisoner consciousness

Free will is possible only as a property of a consciousness - an "I" that wills - (this can be seen upon some reflection.). In contrast, consciousness is possible without an accompanying free will, however in such a case it would be powerless to affect the universe. In the absence of free will everything occurs as it would without the existence of consciousness: conscious­ness is a prisoner of its "host" body. Thus, an active consciousness – by which we mean a phenomenon which can interact with the universe and affect it – would necessarily require free will.

Free will – if it is truly free – is necessarily not constrained by quantum rules, and as far as is known may be is the only phenomenon which involves processes not bound to the pro­babilistic constraints of quantum physics. Free will can even be considered as a gen­eral case of which quantum probabilism is a special case - ie when many options exist for how an event will occur but it occurs in a probabilistic way rather than freely.

Thus it will not be surprising to hear that we will now propose a way in which free will "transcends" quantum processes in some way. Specifically, since consciousness is our only means of knowing of all physical events - they exist (to us) only inasmuch as they are reported by our consciousness – we will propose a means by which free-willed consciousness might play an important physical role in the actualization of events.

The Measurement Problem of Quantum Physics ("Collapse of the Wave Function")

Every event is "recorded" automatically as it occurs by virtue of its effect on the universe-however, this type of recording is not sufficient to "collapse the wave function", 

Humans are natural products of the nat­ural universe. If their actions result from random/determined processes, then these actions are likewise random/deter­mined, and thus their actions are natural events qualitatively no different than any other natural event in the physical uni­verse. How then can it be that human mea­surement (by human consciousness, or by a recording apparatus consulted by a conscious being) can "collapse the wave function". How is human consciousness qualitatively different from the "automatic recording" of an event by nature.

Attributing the difference to human consciousness is useless unless consciousness itself is beyond quantum processes. This would be the case for example if the operative element is free will, in which case we could understand why the measurement of a free-willed consciousness is qualitatively different. And different in precisely the required way. Free will can cause events which would not have occurred in a purely quantum universe. It transcends quantum physics. It is in its essence a choice-making phenomenon, choosing which reality it wishes to create. Thus a free-willed consciousness is a unique phenomenon and perhaps is uniquely qualified to "collapse the quantum wave function" . [7]

[FOOTNOTE 7:

1) This would have important ramifications for the issue of Contrafactual definiteness, Bell's inequal-ity and so forth. (See d'Espagnat.) In addition, based on the idea postulated by Wheeler, perhaps only a free-willed consciousness can bring reality - retroactively - to the universe, (See Wheeler.)

2) Quantum physics implies the existence of a new type of logical structure: quantum logic, The causality of ordinary logic implies that free will is impossible. Perhaps using quantum-transcendent free will one can construct a new "free logic".]

Part V

We are left with essentially three options.

Option A

Science/logic as presented today is essentially correct, and is 'sufficient'. The universe arose by itself. Via natural law and chance, life emerged from non-life and humanity evolved from lower life-forms.

Thus, qualitatively, humans, animals, vegetables and the mineral world must follow identical physical laws; human mental activity is no exception.

All events including mental events occur in a PDR way, and thus free will is physically impossible. In addition, if cau­sality is valid, then free will is logically impossible, Therefore, humans have no control over their actions and thought and cannot logically be held responsible for them. Qf course people are not logical, and thus many people feel that they are responsible for their actions, and have invented the words "moral responsibility" to describe this emotion.

Our feeling that we have free will is real - it is a real feeling - but free will itself does not exist. Free will is a chimera, and our belief in moral responsibility is an erroneous belief.

Option B

God created the universe and instituted a system of "natural law" to run it. All events occur in accordance with this natu­ral law, except when God intervenes in nature. If quantum physics is correct, then the state of the universe at any time fol­lows in a probabilistically determined ran­dom way from the initial created state of the universe. Therefore, everything that occurs does so as a direct result of some combination of God's choice of initial state, God's choice of system of natural laws, and randomness. Clearly, God cannot expect humans to act other than they do since they have no control over their actions. All human actions are determined/random results of God's initial act of creation. As a result, God cannot hold humanity responsible for their actions. Of course many humans, not realizing that they really do not have free will, will believe that they are responsible, i.e. that they do have free will. However, they are wrong.

Option C

God created the universe in such a way that it follows the PDR laws of quantum physics - except for consciousness, which is a higher phenomenon. Humanity is conscious and has free will and is responsible for its actions because:

1) Quantum physics (PDR) does not hold in the realm of human mental processes.

2) A causality-defying process allows humans to freely choose their actions in a rational way without this choice being determined (due to the chain of logic behind the choice).

Conclusion: Thus if we wish to believe in human moral responsibility we must believe in quantum-transcendent free will, ie if we wish to be consistent, we must reject the universal applicability of quantum physics and the seemingly logical demands of causality.

Thus, all who believe deeply in free will and moral responsibility will be led to the conclusion that science/logic as it is usually presented today is incomplete in a basic sense since it is incompatible with the basic belief that humanity has free will.

[FOOTNOTE 8: By removing the unscientific assumption that there is no free will (and that humanity is not significant or unique and so on) one also prevents the pseudo-scientific circular logic of using the assumption that these do not exist to "prove" that they do not exist.]

Indeed, if one had to choose in which to believe­ – free-will-based moral responsibility or its lack - surely most scientists would reject contemporary science's implicit assumption that consciousness is a physical pheno­menon as any other, an assumption which makes science incompatible with our most deeply held beliefs, and would choose the belief in free will.

This of course does not mean that one should reject science: on the contrary, one is simply clearing away what is not sci­ence – ie using scientific reasoning to show that certain assumptions are not only unproven, but are also logically incompati­ble with those beliefs we are most sure of.

These assumptions are not science, they are a particular philosophy.

…………..

Bibliography

Burtt, E.A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern

Science (revised edition). N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954, See especially pp. 64-67, 75, 94,

d'Espagnat, Bernard. "Quantum Theory and Reality"

Scientific American, Nov, 1979, pp. 128-140.

Wheeler, J.A. "Beyond the Black Hole," Some

Strangeness In the Proportion. N.Y.: Addison-Wesley 1980­

…

The Acausality of Free Will: a Prescription for Further Research

Quantum Physics, the Origin of the Universe, and Moral Resposibility

Most physicists believe in moral responsibility, and many feel that underlying this must be a ‘true’ free will. In order that such a true free will exist:

1) more than one option exists at a decision point, as in quantum physics as opposed to determinism;

2) an option can be selected "freely", ie

a) not randomly, as in quantum physics;

b) not deterministically as implied by the rationality of a truly free choice.

The conundrum is: On the one hand, requirement #1 has been shown possible by quan­tum physics, while on the other hand #2 is contradicted by quantum physics which states that options are ‘selected’ at random. Furthermore, choice must be rational to be free, and rational implies deterministic (The idea of a truly free non-random choice implies a choice made after careful deliberation rather than by caprice. To be rational, a choice must be based on reasoning, which is a chain of logic, or at least a determi­nistic chain of thought. This deterministic chain leads eventually to one's genetic complement and environment and so forth.) Therefore free choice is self-contradictory.

It would seem that free will necessitates the existence of some radically new type of interaction "transcending" both the determinism of classical physics and the probabilistic determinism of quantum physics. In addition, one must find a new approach to the logic of causality and the causality of logic.

If we take seriously our intuition regarding the existence of true free will then perhaps we can benefit by trying to extend quantum physics in such a way that we can requirement 2 .Of course this seems intuitively impos­sible and/or absurd to us now, but so would the probabilistic determinism of quantum physics have appeared to the pre­-quantum physics community.

The Acausality of Free Will: a Rationale and Ramifications

Beyond our intuition there is another justification for assuming the possibility of acausal pro­cesses, and it perhaps points the way to the physical origin of the type of radically-acausal phenomenon such as free will.

The greatest mystery of all is the origin of the universe. A universe which exists is in itself a result of acausality for it exists without real cause: cause implies temporal order, yet time originated with the uni­verse and thus no cause could "precede" the existence of the universe. Thus it is clear that at its most fundamental level, existence implies acausality.

[Indeed, there is perhaps a very close connection between the onset of free-willed consciousness and the origin of the universe. See Wheeler. See also my article “And God Said: ‘Let There Have Been a Big Bang’ ” and “Halacha and Quantum Physics”]

It is not so out-of-character for a universe which originates and operates via acausal­ity to expected to exhibit free­will-type acausality where consciousness is involved.

Another question arises as to theoriginof free-willed consciousness: if humanity is the only species possessing a free-willed con­sciousness, and if humans evolved, then we must suppose that free-willed conscious­ness evolved. However, how could one type of phenomenon, matter ruled by pro­babilistic determined randomness (PDR) give rise to a qualitatively different pheno­menon via evolution? How could PDR pro­cesses give rise to free will processes?

One answer would be that free will was inherent in the universe and at a certain point in the evolution of the human brain, free will existed where it had "previously" not existed. When the brain achieved a

certain complexity it connected to the free will inherent in the universe. Or, as an acausal phenomenon it needed no direct preceding "cause" and could thus arise even as the product of PDR processes.

Free Will and the Collapse of the Wave Function

Free will is possible only as a property of a consciousness - an "I" that wills. (This can be seen upon some reflection.) On the other hand, although consciousness is possible without an accompanying free will. it would be powerless to affect the universe since in the absence of free will everything occurs as it would without the existence of consciousness: consciousness is a prisoner of its ‘host body’.

Thus if by human consciousness we mean a phenomenon which can interact with the universe and affect it, then we must consider consciousness to be free-willed, and so we can for this purpose consider free will and human consciousness as inseparable.

Free will is the only phenomenon which involves processes not bound to the pro­babilistic constraints of quantum physics. Free will can even be considered as a gen­eral case of which quantum probabilism is a special case- ie when many options exist for how an event will occur but it occurs in a probabilistic way rather than freely.

Thus it can almost be expected that free will "transcend" quantum processes in some way. Since consciousness is our only means of knowing of all physical events -they exist (to us) only inasmuch as they are reported by our consciousness-it can almost be expected that consciousness might play an important physical role in the actualization of events.

The Measurement Problem of Quantum Physics

Every event is "recorded" automatically as it occurs by virtue of its effect on the universe-however, this type of recording is not sufficient to "collapse the wave function",

Humans are natural products of the nat­ural universe. If their actions result from random/determined processes, then these actions are likewise random/deter­mined, and thus their actions are natural events qualitatively no different than any other natural event in the physical uni­verse. How then can it be that human mea­surement (by human consciousness or by a recording apparatus constructed by a conscious being and consulted by it) can “collapse the wave function”? How is human measurement qualitatively different from the automatic recording of an event by chance.

Attributing the difference to human consciousness is useless because if con­sciousness is governed at its most funda­mental level by quantum processes then the argument is circular. However if the operative element is free will, then we can understand why the measurement of a free-willed consciousness is qualitatively different. And different in precisely the required way. Free will can cause events which would not have occurred in a purely quantum universe. It transcends quantum physics. It is in its essence a choice­-making phenomenon, choosing which reality it wishes to create. Thus a free­-willed consciousness is a unique pheno­menon and perhaps is uniquely qualified to "collapse the quantum wave function".

1) This would have important ramifications for the issue of contrafactual definiteness, Bell's inequal­ity and so forth. (See d'Espagnat.) In addition, based on the idea postulated by Wheeler, perhaps only a free-willed consciousness can bring reality-retroactively-to the universe, (See Wheeler.)

2) Quantum physics implies the existence of a new type of logical structure: quantum logic. The causality of ordinary logic implies that free will is impossible. Perhaps using quantum­ transcendent free will one can construct a new "free logic".

PartV

In sum we present three options:

Option A

The universe arose by itself, via chance. Life emerged from non-life and humans evolved from ‘lower’ life forms. Qualitatively human, animal, vegetable and mineral follow identical physical law, and human mental activity is no exception.

All events including mental events occur in a PDR way, and thus free will is physically impossible. In addition, if cau­sality is valid, then free will is logically impossible, Therefore, man has no control over his actions and thought and cannot logically be held responsible for them. Of course people are not logical, and thus many people feel that they are responsible for their actions, and have invented the words "moral responsibility" to describe this emotion.

Our feeling that we have free will is real-it is a real feeling-but free will itself does not exist. Free will is a chimera, and our belief in moral responsibility is an erroneous belief.

Option B

God created the universe and instituted a system of "natural law" to run it. All events occur in accordance with this natu­ral law, except when God intervenes in nature. If quantum physics is correct, then the state of the universe at any time fol­lows in a probabilistically determined random way from the initial created state of the universe. Therefore, everything that occurs does so as a direct result of some combination of God's choice of initial state, God's choice of system of natural laws, and randomness. Clearly, God cannot expect humans to act differently than they do since all follows determinedly from God’s initial creation, and so humanity cannot be held responsible for its actions. Those who do not realize that they really do not have free will and believe that they are responsible, i.e. that they do have free will, are wrong.

Option C

God created the universe in such a way that except for consciousness it follows the PDR laws of quantum physics. Humans are conscious and have free will and are responsible for their actions.

[ie:  Quantum physics (PDR) does not hold in the realm of human mental processes, and a causality-defying process allows one to freely choose actions in a rational way without this choice being determined due to its rationale.]

The belief that humans are purely physical beings and consciousness is a physical pheno­menon as any other is incompatible with our most deeply held beliefs about moral responsibility. Indeed, if one had to choose deterministic and materialistic science or moral responsibility, most scientists would choose the latter. Belief in human moral responsibility implies rejection of the universality of quantum physics and of the seemingly logical demands of causality.

The assumption that humans are purely physical is not only unproven but is also logically incompati­ble with those beliefs we are most sure of. These assumptions are not science but rather are part of a mechanistic/atheistic philosophy.

Bibliography

·         Burtt, E.A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (revised edition). N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954, See especially pp. 64-67, 75, 94,

·         d'Espagnat, Bernard. "Quantum Theory and Reality," Scientific American, Nov, 1979, pp. 128-140.

·   Wheeler, J.A. "Beyond the Black Hole," Some Strangeness In the Proportion. N.Y.: Addison­-Wesley, 1980.

.

…

Thus, all people who believe deeply in free will and moral responsibility must admit that science/logic as it is presented today is incomplete in a basic sense, since it is incompatible with the basic belief of religion - that man has free will.  Of course this basic incompleteness of science is due to its implied assumption that there is no Gd, and that man is essentially a product of chance, and a purely physical being.  Thus science assumes that consciousness is a physical phenomenon as any other. 

  For other discussions of the connection between moral choice, free will, consciousness and quantum physics, see the article "Quantum Physics and Halacha" in this issue, and the forthcoming  (b'ezrat Ha Shem) book "Let There Have Been a Big Bang".  A.R.

..

Godel material from other file:

  One of the most surprising and significant mathematical results ever arrived at is that formulated by Kurt Godel in 1930.

  Roughly speaking, Godel's "first incompleteness theorem' states that in mathematical systems, there are true statements which cannot be proven.  That is, a system generates equations which we can see are true, using our common sense and mathematical intuition, but which cannot be proven to be true by using only the rules of the system itself.  Instead, one can prove the truth of these statements only by adding on new components to the system.  However, although it would now be possible to prove those intuitively true but unprovable statements, the new enlarged system would itself generate new statements which were also intutively clearly true, but not provable within the newly enlarged system.  Of course one could add on yet additional components to allow a proof to be formulated, but then the newer system would generate true but unprovable statements ... etc., etc.

  Thus, mathematical systems are "incomplete".

  This astonishing theorem, which was rigorously proven by Godel, destroyed the hopes of those who wished to reduce all of mathematics , and all of the physical universe, to only those concpets/entities directly provable.  It was now evident that man's mathematical intuition was able to grasp truths not directly provable in any given system.

  To quote Prof. R. Rucker: (P. 178)

  "The Incompleteness Theorem shows that human beings can never formulate a correct and complete description of the set natural numbers, (0,1,2,3, ...), but if mathematicians cannot ever fully understand something as simple as number theory, then it is certainly too much to expect that science will ever expose any ultimate secret of the universe ..."

  "...rational thought can never penetrate to the final, ultimate truth."

  Godel even postulated that since man is able to grasp mathematical truths which are not rationally explicable - i.e. they are not provable within the relevant mathematical system - that perhaps "sets and concepts exist externally to any individual's activities" [Rucker, pages 175 - 6 referring to Godel's "What is ... Co. "].

  Man can interact with these truths which (page 176):

  "... may represent an aspect of objective reality, but, as opposed to the sensations, their presence in us may be due to another kind of relationship between ourselves and reality" [Godel ...].

  Godel also wrote a paper discussing how one could (Rucker, page 177) "prove the consistency of mathematics by assuming that mental objects have an objective existence".

  It is well known that science is not equipped to deal with questions such as "what should man do?", "what is good and who is evil?", etc.  As a result, many people tend to denigrate these kind of questions and to claim that since science cannot encompass them, they are illegitimate.

  However, when one considers that man is able to intuit(?) mathematical truths which are unprovable in any given mathematical system, it becomes much eåsier to claim that man can intuit(?) other unprovable truths as well, e.g., free will, the existence of Gd, Gd's omniscience, etc.

  Similarly, even when some of one's intuitive beliefs seem to be conceptually conflicting, such as the idea of man's free will and Gd's omniscience, since both of these ideas belong to the extra-physical realm, one could postulate that the system of "physical universe plus logic" is not strong enough to prove their compatibility, but that in the higher realm, their consistency would be obvious.

  Analogously, our example of how it is that Gd is both transcendant and immanent employed an analogy with spaces of differing dimensions: within the more limited system, appeared to the intuition which were troublesome to rational inquiry: however, when a more comprehensive system was employed, viz a higher dimensional space-time, the conflict disappeared.

..

Project Goal:  To combine into a book:

• The articles (published in "B'Ohr HaTorah" [in English];

• Videos/transcripts of some talks (to the AOJS, YU Museum, YU/Stern science club, and several torah-science conferences and elsewhere);

• other written material.

List of the BH articles etc, and amount of pages:

1. I gave lectures at the AOJS while in grad school and then later, on topics relating to the Big Bang, evolution, and Genesis: see eg the lectures titled "The Instant Universe" and "Einstein's blunder and the God who plays dice"; and about "The future convergence of science and religion" - some ar eon youtube. In the book: 25 pages.

2. Geocentrism English 1986, about 40 pages, but only 20 will be in the book (the technical part will be on an accompanying site).

2. GEO Hebrew 1986 (has an additional appendix, but it was include din the English version published later in the book "BHR").

3. "The Cosmic Prayer Connection" 1987 about 10 pages (also on a chabad website, with a different order of the material and new title).

4. "Free Will" 1987, 16 pages (there was a lot of evo material in here, including mention of the Wheeler diagram).

5. "Quantum Physics & Halakha": 15 pages. Dec '87 (Chanukah), my lecture at the Miami BH conference had a presentation of the material, maybe it is on video? [ Aleph Institute and held in Miami Beach, December 20-22, 1987]; the article version of the lecture appeared in the BH journal Hebrew 1988, and then in English in the book "Fusion" 1990, and later in the "BH Reader" 1994. These all have the Wheeler diagram (not sure whether it was part of the lecture, I'll check, I htink I may have the slides)

6. Hoffman's book "Against all Odds" Jan 1 1990 has re the Miami conference, mentions my 'convergence' idea, has photo of me speaking at the conference; 

6. Evolution/big bang article: BH 2002: "And God said: "Let there have been a big bang": 12 pages, mantions that it was submitted in 1986; reprinted in the JCT book (journal) "The Heart of the Matter", 2009.

Altogether about 100 journal pages, plus 60 pages of additional material in the website version of those articles, plus 50 pages of somewhat newer writings = 210 pages.

..

I'm looking for someone not for pure editing but rather to help make decisions as to how to best compile the existing material into book form.

Partly it depends on taking a sort of survey of potential readers, to decide upon the appropriate rubric.

..................

Links to the articles above:

1. The first article was this: GeoCentrism & eGoCentrism, Existentialist despair & human significance. <-- this is an edited version; photos of the original journal pages are below it.

2. The next article was: "Free Will" :Part I & Part II

3. Some relevant material is in this article​: "The Cosmic Prayer Connection", or "Cosmology of the mitzvot"​

4. ​"Quantum Physics and Halacha": Was not in English B'Ohr Ha'Torah journal, appeared in Hebrew.​ ​

Photos of pages from "B'ohr haTorah Reader" book version: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BKrgaQs-Dz21I0ChszBVGd30uEDx9gUD

See edited version: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/quantum-halacha-analogies/home , and on that page see the menu for orginal hebrew version , or directly at https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/quantum-halacha-analogies/%D7%A4%D7%99%D7%96%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%95%D7%99%D7%94%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA

​

​5. ​The last is ​:​ And God said:"Let there have been a big bang" an edited version​. Photos of the original pages at the bottom​.​:

I've been mashing them together on this webpage, where the unifying theme is "Human Significance". However I first want to survey students to find out what topic that is relevant to my past writings is of most interest to them - eg I'm preparing another version centered about Genesis and the big bang etc.

Path of development of the idea through diff sections of the book

How to fit the BH articles into the book: Geo, FW, EvoBB, QPH

The idea of nihilism might seem extreme, so opening with it maybe is not a good idea, better to see how it developed, ie the booklet can start with:

A) The overview of relig sci conflct re the significance of humanity, stemming from the issue of geocentricity and humans as machines vs fw, and evo as chance rather than design etc.

So start with:

1) The beginning of the GEO article (1985) but the version from BHR:

• p82-mid p 84, 

• and p118-19 the two paragraphs of "Part II: The s of m" (but place the latter earlier, after the historical list)

2) And then the relevant material from the FW article (1986): 

• the first 1.5 pages or so, 

• plus p148 1st paragraph of "Prob Q FW", 

• then the three sections: "The U as G's (Q) M" , the Life of the UN, The U wo G,;

• then from the end of the article, p156-7, insert Options A and B. 

This sets up the problem (and the later part of the booklet will have the full article with more statment of the problem, plus my proposed solution).

B) Then the nihilism material with quotes etc, present it as the 'result' of the above 'conflict"

C) And then as intro to the rest of the book, my new preface, and I can say that the above frames why I will present these articles: from the abve the conclusion was that the overthrow of geocentrism reduced us to cosmic insignificnce, the mechanisitc interprettion of ll including our brain made us souless machines automatons, and the bb evo theory took away the ide aof the niverse as designed and creaed, and removed our role as beings in the image of God designed for a purpose etc

• GEO material re geocentrism (no we are not insignificant), 

• FW (no, we are not machines), 

• bb: it is PRO creation, not against!

• evo(no un and we are not incidental/random etc, we  not appearing by chance, purely-material etc) 

D) and then footnote 3, then GEO stufff re geocentrism itself, then FW, QP&H, Evo, Prayer.

....

re FW: 

there are psukim or actually whole accounts whose import is that we are morally responsible etc, but that is ikar not just a matter of literalism of psukim, and we stand by its truth, without needing to talk of individual psukim - that is the whole issue, we have FW, indeed at the cost of stating that religion is in direct conflict with science!

The qp part was partial move towards FW, and this is a sort of part of the 'convergence' notion.

An physics cannot say what can;t be in this regard, it describes what can be measured.... so it is NOT a conflict with physics, it is simply a statement that there is more to reality than can be encmpassed within physics.

...

GEO for sig book: why reprint earlier version, it would be crazy. And don't need all the physics aspects, just the conclusions, the rest can be online.

Mach's principle: The Hebrew version of the GEO article came out in 1988/7? It mentions Mach;s principle still being discussed giving as ref "some strangeness..." in a footnote , is that in the Eng version? Add quote from Rosen in binder, and Komar notes etc.

The bottom line is that it is not at all clear whether one can say that physics invalidates the physics aspect of the relativity of perspective (ie as opposed to the psychological/perception aspect is obviously valid, and of course any eq can be cast in any coord system), but it may be that it IS valid, but even if not, it is true about ANY point in the universe, not specifically aobut the Earth, 

....

...

re Evo for sig: re-frame the below

to tie in the topic/idea of convergence, and Einstein's Blunder lectures:

Mention that I gave keynote address at AOJS e convergence, give barcode url to that

Maybe before the eco article, say: "For thousands of years it was assumed that philosophy proves universe is eternal, and this presented a contradiciton to genesis's notion of a unverse created a finite amount of time ago. The big bang theory supprted the genesis notion and so this was a major aspect of convegence, evne though many religious figure considered it as a cntradiction to Genesis. Give ref to my lecture videos etc.

...

sig Book: not focused on the psukim and literal issues etc but on the overall picture, as part of dispelling the force of the counter religion attack in the name of science.

The bb theory showed creatiom, so this is a sort of part of the 'convergence' notion.

And Wheeler diagram is also sort of part of the 'convergence' notion.

------

Claim:  The laws of nature which were carefully designed to produce a human with free will, and the creation process ended after God's creation of a big bang designed to follow,

The above is untenable for several reasons:  

1) qp randomness, so to guarantee emergence of humans need interventions, so universal automatic development can only start after fw emerges....

2) if by 'big bang' we mean the situaiton described by physics, then it cannot produce nmc

3)  All agree - atheist materialist and Biblical religionist - that the type of fw we spoke of (and even nmc) cannot arise from

a big bang - it CANNOT produce the type of free will necessary for God to hold us morally responsible since this true fw is NOT compatible with logic and physics, not even qp, so if by 'big bang' we mean the situaiton described by physics, then it cannot produce true fw.   

From QP&H, FW & EvoBB

4) Wheeler: from the q metaphysical perspective..Wheeler.. and so...paradoxically the universe emerges into physical reality only after the emergence within it of fw'ed beings: DIAGRAM.

If the process of creation is considered to have ended when all the elements of the universe are completed in potentiality, the universe cannot be considered completed until fw (and nmc) are implanted in humanity. Therefore creation continues long after the big band and only is completed when humans emerge with brains capable of housing fw, and God decides to 'implant' fw in them.

So our emergence was itself a new creation, it would have needed to be a divine intervention long after the big bang.

In the light of this, it makes sense that a creation account telling not of chronology but of the purpose of creation etc as stated by Rashi, would speak of creation as a process culminating billions of years after the bb when humans in the divine image emerged, ie as described in the Eden account, at the initiation of true fw.

Conclusion: Since the accounts of creation provided in the Bible are teleologically-oriented, the biblical and eden accounts are juxtaposed, which has the effect of making it seem that humans arose around the same time as did the universe itself.

.....

Q: What actually happened? 

Is the above a guide to a creation account written from the teleological perspective or an  account of what actually happened? And can this distinction be made within the parameters of Orthodox belief? (Footnote: And we'll even see that from the scientific logical perspective, it is not obvious that there is physical meaning to "what actually happened"...[Footnote or for that section, give examples: even "now , far away" has no real meaning; what state is that atom or system in now while I am not measuring it" has no meaning...etc)

If we are interested in what actually happened, would God bother to actually create the bb and wait billions of years until it developed to that point, or would there be a more elegant procedure? We of course cannot know, but there is an intersting path of speculation, outlined in these chapters:m,n,b. For example if we are God's simulation, it would have been extrapolated up to the appropriate point.

..

SIte-links:

• "Quantum Halakha" with Prof Branover, reworked into this on new sites: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/quantum-halacha-analogies/home, and this article. See also the brief video linked to on that page of my site (video included below).

• "GeoCentrism & EgoCentrism": The article may be easier to read on the newer site. See also the brief video linked to on that page of my site (included below). The original article is available here in three sections: Geocentrism-1, Geocentrism-2, Geocentrism-3. 

Note that Googling "geocentrism" leads directly to the Wiki page for "Geocentric model" which refers and links to the article-version on my older website( based on the article in the BH journal & book, with Prof Branover). 

• And God said: "Let there have been a big bang", (re the big bang & evolution): see here for the article split up into separate topics. (Abstract of the article.) It was a condensation of a book. 

• "The Cosmic Prayer Connection" or as titled in the version published by Chabad: "The Cosmology of the Mizvot". Reworked here: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/cosmology-of-prayer-nd-mitzvot/home   [Links to the original article (in two sections): The Cosmic Prayer Connection-1 , The Cosmic Prayer Connection-2 [here]. Although this article is not about science & religion as are the rest, it CAN be re-cast as part of the Retroactive Universe book material, ie a type of cosmology and cause-effect that is different than the scientific one, more linked to spirituality, and those who exercise true free will etc.

• "Free will": 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)

Fusion: Absolute Standards in a World of Relativity: Science, the Arts & Contemporary Life in the Light of Torah

by Herman Branover (Contributor)

 4.50  ·  Rating details ·  2 ratings  ·  0 reviews

Essays on science, the arts, and contemporary life in the light of Torah. The contents include "Education as the Basis for Morality" by Laya Block, "Jewish Distinction in Science" by Cyril Domb, "The Role of the Observer in Halachah and Quantum Physics" by Avi Rabinowitz and Herman Branover, and "Applications of Mathematical Infinity in Jewish Philosophy" by Zvi Victor Saks

...

https://www.amazon.com/Fusion-Absolute-Standards-Relativity-Contemporary/dp/0873065166

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Feldheim Pub; First Edition (February 1, 1990)

…

Science in the light of Torah : a B'or Ha'Torah reader

Publication date 1994

Topics Judaism and science, Judaism -- 20th century, Orthodox Judaism

Publisher Northvale, N.J. : J. Aronson

https://archive.org/details/scienceinlightof0000unse/page/n9/mode/2up

https://books.google.co.il/books/about/Science_in_the_Light_of_Torah.html?id=m6yOAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

......

The booklet can incorporate elements of - or at least refer to -   the site/googleDoc "Quantum Kabbalistic Astrology, Karma, and Self-actualization: The cosmic secret of human transcendence" 

Blurb: ―A theoretical physicist‘s mashup of astrology, karma and kabbalah‖"

It has a lot re human significance:  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5eDYQ2oWFxuZjZoS0pLbFBzeHc?resourcekey=0-b_3mTqgpx_HCjG0OJ4Qi_w

...----- 

"Quantum Kabbalistic Astrology, Karma, and Self-actualizatio. was dream stuff from misc": Quantum Kabbalistic Astrology, Karma, and Self-actualization  The cosmic secret of human transcendence Blurb: ―A theoretical physicist‘s mashup of astrology, karma and kabbalah‖  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5eDYQ2oWFxuZjZoS0pLbFBzeHc?resourcekey=0-b_3mTqgpx_HCjG0OJ4Qi_w  ..

https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/quantumkabballahastrologydream/home Quantum Kabballah: Cosmology, Astrology, Karma & Dreams

...

"Human significance": 

the message of "Quantum Kabbalistic Cosmology" against atheist materialist nihilism

or: Quantum Kabbalistic Humanism vs atheist materialist nihilism

TItle: "Quantum Kabalisitic Cosmology" 's message of Human Significance

As opposed to nihilistic philosophies, the message of the Torah is that each individual human is the creator's image/breathe, and our choices, actions and feelings underlie the universe's design, and are the purpose of its very existence. Only our ego - self-involvment - serves as a barrier separating us from our essence, and the more we lower it the more our essence - the divine spirit - shines forth, constituting a revelation of the DIvine presence, as occured with Abraham and Moses whose compassion for those suffering or about to suffer, and their complete dedication to the needs of others, was such that they were willing to sacrifice their lives to save their fellow humans. In fact, there is a delicious irony that in both cases the danger to them was due to their holy chutzpah of confrontation with God(!) to save others, not fearing the possibility that God would annihilate them on the spot - and it was this ego-reduction to engage in confrontation with God which led to a high level of revelation of the Presence of God! This ultimate significance of human beings - based on their being in the image of God/divine breath is a deep message of Biblical God-based Humanism.

In contrast to the position of some existentialists to the effect that the miniscule size of humans compared to stars somehow indicates our insignificance......we are unique among living beings and elements of the natural universe from tiny elementary particles to vast galaxies of stupendously-large stars, in that we possess a characteristic and ability which are beyond physical laws, beyonds the chains of nature....a non-material consciousness which cannot arise via natural processes and which most scientists deny exists. And it is this which makes it possible for there to be a physically-transcendent meaning to our feelings, our deep emotions, our longings and pain and suffering our contrition and sincere aspirations, making them poignant even to the creator af all.

And in contrast to the notion that we are puppets or robots or machines or ruled by the randomness of chance via quantum processes....what we choose to call "QKC" teaches that we possess a free will which makes our moral choices relevant even to the creator of all, a phenomenon which is so radical that most scientists deny the possibility of its existence - being that it is beyond the randomness of quantum phenomena, beyond the determinism of the statistical ensemble of quantum phenomena, and even beyond logic.

In contrast to the materialist atheistic deterministic philosophy that we are our bodies/physical brains and therefore are tied to the determinism and randomness of the physical universe .....duNouy ..

what we are referring here to as "QKC" teaches that ...Our bodies and brains are physical and can arise naturally - with various scientific theories describing possible mechanisms - but not these properties, which science does not enfranchise and so does not claim arose naturally, and which the Torah tells us were imbued directly into the physical aspect of humanity in a special creative act which is part of the reason the cosmos exists at all.

And this is how there is direct resonance at the divine level of our human sense of meaning and purpose, and our conviction of the existence of a non-subjective moral responsibility for our choices/actions.

And we will see another profound speculation of quantum metaphysics - a kind of almost-mystical quantum physics posited by various prominent distinguished physicists - which relates human existence at this non-material level with the deepest aspects of cosmological emergence, and which echoes a fundamental aspect of the creation and Eden accounts in Genesis, so that humans are indeed partners in creation as taught by Jewish Tradition.

And it is via our special material-transcendent attributes that we can interact with the spiritual cosmos at its deepest levels - and as the image of the creator we can even interact with the creator, and given that our essence is the divine breath, we can do so directly without intermediary.

In fact this divine aspect of our essence which motivates my somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition of "Biblical Humanism" = all people are created in the image of God, with their essence being God's breath/spirit, and God expects you to treat people accordingly". And that our essence is God's breath/spirit enables our purpose: as Kaballah explains, the reason we were created is so as to experience the greatest possible joy, which occurs through attaching to (or reunite with) our essence, the creator, after the death of our body. The path to the greatest joy, the deepest d

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Alternate book title: 

Non-material consciousness and true free will as the quintessential ingredients of human exceptionalism & significance in contrast to AI, as emerging from a physicist's reading of Genesis's juxtaposed creation & Eden accounts (The Instant Retroactive Universe: "And God said 'Let there have been a big bang (to produce the beings I have designed)'. And it had been so. And God blew into the evolved humans the divine-image capacilty for nmc & fw")

..

Preface or postscript: Although this is a preface, it would be understood only after reading the book....so please re-read this preface at the end...:)

vs nihilism,Message isn't to prove the divine origin of the chumash or the truth of Judaism or creationism etc, it isn't against any other religion or against Humanism, but rather vs nihilism, whether of the atheitsic materialism or even some religious variety if such exists. 

It isn't to say that other religions or philosophies are not against nihilism, but rather merely to present a particular approach.

It certainly is not against science, but rather is not hesitant about staking clearly the ground claimed here for these views.... Making clear what science is not qualified to determine in this regard, etc. And to unapologetically state that there is no purpose in trying to fit science and religion into the same box when the most basic fact, our existence in the nmc sense, is kept by science carefully outside its own box, and especially so since religion begins exactly with that which science so carefully and impressively excludes from its purview.

Message isn't to prove chumash or Judaism or creation etc, it isn't against any other religion or against Humanism, but rather vs nihilism, whether AMN or even some religious variety if such exists. It isn't to say that other religions or philosophies are not against nihilism, but rather merely to present a particular approach.

It certainly is not against science, which has made such incredible advances due to its exclusion of that which cannot be experimentally measured/proved, but rather is not hesitant about staking clearly the ground claimed here for these views which are precisely in the area science has limited itself from dealing with .... Making clear what science is not qualified to determine in this regard, etc

No purpose in trying to fit science and religion into the same box when the most basic fact, our existence in the nmc sense, is kept by science carefully outside its own box, especially as religion begins exactly with that.

...

To some degree, this is relevant as Preface to the Evo article, rather than as preface to the booklet as a whole (orignially the booklet was going to be only evo, so it was appropriate as the preface ot the whole thing)

Tell the reader that all the below will be expanded and explained:

Contrasting the atheist-materialistic and Biblical-religious perspectives: 

A) re human significance, and moral responsibility

The atheistic materialistic perspective: The universe emerged by chance, life and humans arose by chance, and due to evolutionary-socio-biological influences there arose in human brains the notion of 'significance' in general, and in some human brains the notion of "the sanctity of life" and "human significance" etc, however other than this evolutionary-induced feeling inside some particular human as to whether or not they feel their lives to have significance, there is no "actual significance". Or for that matter, no "insignificance" either. 

The physical universe emerged without relation to the eventual emergence within it of humans, and human brains initiate actions and make decisions as follows from the laws of nature and their relevant life-conditions, and could not possibly have acted differently than they did, except that the randomness of quantum effects might have caused some other decision or action, but which of the possibilities unfolds in actuality is not a decision of the human in whose brain these processes are occuring. 

The Biblical perspective: Humans are very significant, having been created "in the image of God" by God "breathing/imparting spirit into matter". The God of the Bible has great interest in human affairs and directly intervenes, and even communicates (or did) with some humans.

God granted humans a sufficiently-free will that even though God designed and created them and the big bang which gave rise to the conditions of their lives and which governs what human brains decide to do - God can legitimately hold humans responsible for their moral choices.

B) Re: The meaning of life, the Purpose of the universe, and the onset of its existence

The atheistic..

and so the universe arose billions of years before humans did,

Biblical...meaning,, purpose begins when fw being emerges... juxtaposition of the Biblical creation & Eden account ...humans are so cosmically significant that to God the purpose of the created universe cannot begin to unfold until there emerges...

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I - via Descartes - disagree with r sacks re this: https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/tzav/the-thanksgiving-offering/ 

In his book A Rumour of Angels, the American sociologist Peter Berger describes what he calls “signals of transcendence” – phenomena within the human situation that point to something beyond. Among them he includes humour and hope. There is nothing in nature that explains our ability to reframe painful situations in such a way that we can laugh at them; nor is there anything that can explain the human capacity to find meaning even in the depths of suffering.

These are not, in the classic sense, proofs of the existence of God, but they are experiential evidence. They tell us that we are not random concatenations of selfish genes, blindly reproducing themselves. Our bodies may be products of nature (“dust you are, and to dust you will return”), but our minds, our thoughts, our emotions – all that is meant by the word “soul” – are not. There is something within us that reaches out to something beyond us: the soul of the universe, the Divine “You” to which we speak in prayer, and to which our ancestors, when the Temple stood, made their offerings.

AR: No, even 'sensitive' humans can be mc, with all emerging from a material big bang. Just that they dont actually 'feel' anything as we nmc do.

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Summary of GR article technical and sig parts: Ancients assumed or deduced that the Earth was the center of the universe in all meaningful senses, and this was part of the notion of human significanc,e thoufht Ramabam....... in Copernicus' time it was thought that the sun was the center, perhaps of the universe, and to some this was a demotion of the status of the Eartha dn to some this had theological significance since they felt tha tthe Bible... .... later it was understood theuniverse is large, and even the sun ins not at the center, and then that the universe is vast with many galaxies and our sun us not at the center of our galaxy which is not at the center of the universe in any sense, and some thought his has theologicla in that humans could not be condiered significant... then GR, (as pointed out by eminent physicists) every point can claim to be at the center, but no point can claim to be the absolute center, or the only center etc. To EInstein and Born and Eddinton and others this notion of GR seemed to counter the ideas claimed in Copernicus's name, and to Jeans the later developments....against the notion of the lack of significance of humans...

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In order not to make this all into a Mind article, put the nmc and mindless materialists stuff in footnotes?

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["And it was after nmc free-willed humans were created that God saw everything and it was very good" (ie there was now the possiblility of 'good', which transitions to 'resting', holiness, and the the Eden account.]

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There two groups on opposite sides who have misunderstood Genesis: religious fundamenatlists and materialists.

Physicists - even the athists among them - have more correctly understood Genesis than have fundamentalists..... bb vs eternity...

Also: the focus on nmc and fw, not about the literal 6 days and calculated age.... 

It is ironic that Materialists who are engaged in an activity similar to that depiced in Genesis - crafting a new form of intelligence, a new type of being -  nevertheless completely miss the point, and are physically uncapable of understanding anything on this topic. As in Genesis, they are crafting entities in their image, however in their case this means that the entites inherit their crafters' basic flaw, ie the lack of nmc and therefore of free will, whereas in Genesis that the beings are created in the image of their creator means that they inherit materility-transcending nmc and free will....

We are in this reacting to two very common questions:

1. Can humans be considered as specially 'significant' by anyone aware of the immensity of the universe, of its magnificence? 

Outline of the answer: We will see that until a few hundred years ago the universe was thought to be very small with humans at the center...... But it turns out that this was the wrong reason to think humans special.... Copernicus etc...Then when the actual size of the physical universe was realized a new reason was invented for insignificance, but we'll see (as pointed out by eminent physicists) why numerical superiority, and physical magnitude are no relevance to the issue, and that significance and magnificence and the humility in the face of vastness exists nowhere in the universe except in brains and so it is ironic and misplaced to think of those brains as somehow insignificant as a result!

2. Can it be that humans are 'exceptional' if they are products of nature, the big bang and evolutionary processes? 

Outline of the answer: We will see that (as pointed out by eminent physicists) humans exceptionalism is precisely due to that essence of humans which is NOT the product of nature, ie nmc which is a fact...., and also fw, which is the focus of the creation Eden account.

The big bang and evolution can be seen via an interesting and relevant lens provided by the Genesis creation & Eden accounts...

The discussions which follow are those refered to above, meant to hopefully dispell the notion that humans cannot be concidered exceptional and specially signifanct, and to make explicit the message of human significance and exceptionality we see in the Genesis acounts of creation & Eden, and then apply these insights to the AI debate.

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I am not interested in arguing for human exceptionalism as ordinarily thought of, rather I am speaking from within the perspective of a model like that in Genesis, where we are nmc and FW and the Outsider perspective Absolute etc, that is the source of the type of MR (&M/P) we speak of here. WIht the addition that any entity with nmc & FW etc will be considered as 'human', whether it is an AI or an alien, or some non-humanoid species here on Earth or software etc.

If there is no nmc, and no fw, then all is simply working out of the conditions of the bb plus randomnness including this sentence, and it is all a matter of physics which reducitonalistically underlies everything including neurosci and the fact that human evolve who critique human exceptionalism. A suitably different set of initial conditions and slight twist in the laws of nature might perhaps not have produced this.

What interested me is the hypothesis that reality is not as atheistic deterministic nihilism, but is more like Genesis (but of course I cannot prove that ADN is incorrect so that maybe this sentence too is actually from bb etc)

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re not abusing our exceptionalism, while maintaining human exceptionalism re fw nmc I can include my FB vort for breishis and noach, and also maybe vayera

See sources re "human exceptionalism" at the end of this site-page

...

Human exceptionalism & significance as it emerges in a physicist's reading of Genesis's creation & Eden accounts, and the relevance to the debate about AI.

1. Can humans be considered as specially 'significant' by anyone aware of the immensity of the universe, of its magnificence? 

We will see that numerical superiority, and physical magnitude are no relevance to the issue, and that significance and magnificence and the humility in the face of vastness exists nowhere in the universe except in brains and so it is ironic and misplaced to think of those brains as somehow insignificant as a result!

2. Can it be that humans are 'exceptional' if they are products of nature, the big bang and evolutionary processes? 

We will see that humans exceptionalism is precisely due to that essence of humans which is NOT the product of nature. And that the big bang and evolution can be seen via an interesting and relevant lens prvoided by the Genesis creation & Eden accounts.

The discussions which follow are those refered to above, meant to hopefully dispell the notion that humans cannot be concidered exceptional and specially signifanct, and to make explicit the message of human significance and exceptionality we see in the Genesis acounts of creation & Eden, and then apply these insights to the AI debate.

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Why we ARE significant

Physics used to be thought of as the arbiter, but physics does NOT encompass mind, which is the basis of all, the most fundanetal. Physics has no way o grapple wiht it, to een erecognize its existence. 

Due to their ossession of a Mind, humans are qualitatively diff than inanimate, and maybe than other biological entities at leas itn degree, we dont hold other morally responsible, ie we hold ourselves to a higher level, our actions have a greate significance

So scinece, physics, biology, anthropology etc cannot be  bsis for a conclusion aobut the signficanc eof humanity

significance is a feeling/concept in human (or other) Minds, so by definition WE decide what is significant :) so maybe sig means nothing on an absolute scale but there is NOT absolute scale...

difference between "we ar einsignificant" and "can;t say we are significant"

THe first is a judgement depending on the existenc eof an absolute scale, gsed n which we are not sig, but tha tis not what those people are claiing of course

It is not logical to project a human's feeing of insignificance on to "the universe", as if the universe is making a judgement; instead,  it is simply that one person'sindiivual FEELING And if a feeling tha thuman ar einsignificant is valid then o is isthe feeling that humans ARE significant!

are there reasons to assume humans are NOT significant/

People thought science somehow demonstrates our lack of sig: via

evo bb , randomness of our emergence etc

no need for a god, so no god, so we are not in divine image

no real absolute morality etc so dont magnify our obsession with that

mind doesnt exist

sould doesnt exist

we are not center of the unverse as previously thought

...

Fallacous argument -types

the other side clais the same so oyour clai is not valid (the corectns sof my side is not dependent on noone else claining tha ttheir side is the valid one.)

it goesaginst a princile, egequiy etc (who said tha tprinciple is vali?!)

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Nihilists correctly showed that the universe is devoid of meaning and purpose, and there is no hint in any scientific experiment of the existence of some type of non-subjective morality. However it is childish or pre-scientifically primitive to suppose that nature contains within it any of this. Only in pre-scientific times, before the mind-body distinction clarifications of Descartes, and the mechanical explanations of natural phenomena by Galileo, Newton and others would people expect that. For example, they spoke of a stone falling to the earth due to its wish to go to its natural place, the ground, and similarly perhaps they would project values or meaning onto elements what in modern times is known to us as "the physical universe". Of course there is no meaning or purpose or hint of moral responsibility and good and evil in the physical universe. Instead it is in the other half of Descartes' mind-body division, ie it is "in the mental realm", which science does not include (since as Descarted clarified, these phenomena are known directly to us, but are not provable to anyone else). 

Although some conclude from this that therefore there is in fact no meaning and purpose, to the author such a conclusion - that our existence lacks meaning - seems more of an indication of a lack in the person making that judgement, perhaps a lack in their possession of the 'mind' aspect of reality, ie they perhaps are purely-material. In contrast to them, are those who possess the type of consciousness-awareness which underlay the passionate writing of scientists who though living after the dawn of existentialist nihilism - Eddington Einstein Jeans etc etc - scientists who are well-aware of what is or is not included in the physical universe, were convinced of the existence of a plane of reality beyond the natural studied by science. It is in this realm in which reside the qualities the nihilists misguidedly sought for in the physical universe, granted them a status beyond the 'subjective'. 

It is this conneciton with the Transcendent plane from which our awareness/consicounsess derives the grounding of the non-subjective values, of the moral responsibility to choose to do good rather than evil, and of the free will to enable such choices to be made. Those who do not posses this connection to the Transcendent will however conclude that it does not exist, and thus embrace nihilidm of one sort or another.

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All this will be explained in the articles ahead...

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https://www.britannica.com/topic/nihilism

nihilism, (from Latin nihil, “nothing”), originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II. The term was famously used by Friedrich Nietzsche to describe the disintegration of traditional morality in Western society. In the 20th century, nihilism encompassed a variety of philosophical and aesthetic stances that, in one sense or another, denied the existence of genuine moral truths or values, rejected the possibility of knowledge or communication, and asserted the ultimate meaninglessness or purposelessness of life or of the universe.

wikipedia In popular use, the term commonly refers to forms of existential nihilism, according to which life is without intrinsic value, meaning, or purpose.[18] Other prominent positions within nihilism include the rejection of all normative and ethical views (§ Moral nihilism), the rejection of all social and political institutions

https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/ Internet Encyc Phil

Among philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is most often associated with nihilism. For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. Penetrating the façades buttressing convictions, the nihilist discovers that all values are baseless and that reason is impotent. “Every belief, every considering something-true,” Nietzsche writes, “is necessarily false because there is simply no true world” (Will to Power [notes from 1883-1888]). For him, nihilism requires a radical repudiation of all imposed values and meaning: “Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys” (Will to Power).

The caustic strength of nihilism is absolute, Nietzsche argues, and under its withering scrutiny “the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and ‘Why’ finds no answer” (Will to Power). Inevitably, nihilism will expose all cherished beliefs and sacrosanct truths as symptoms of a defective Western mythos. This collapse of meaning, relevance, and purpose will be the most destructive force in history, constituting a total assault on reality and nothing less than the greatest crisis of humanity:

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . . (Will to Power)

Since Nietzsche’s compelling critique, nihilistic themes–epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness–have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Convinced that Nietzsche’s analysis was accurate, for example, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1926) studied several cultures to confirm that patterns of nihilism were indeed a conspicuous feature of collapsing civilizations. In each of the failed cultures he examines, Spengler noticed that centuries-old religious, artistic, and political traditions were weakened and finally toppled by the insidious workings of several distinct nihilistic postures: the Faustian nihilist “shatters the ideals”; the Apollinian nihilist “watches them crumble before his eyes”; and the Indian nihilist “withdraws from their presence into himself.” Withdrawal, for instance, often identified with the negation of reality and resignation advocated by Eastern religions, is in the West associated with various versions of epicureanism and stoicism. In his study, Spengler concludes that Western civilization is already in the advanced stages of decay with all three forms of nihilism working to undermine epistemological authority and ontological grounding.

Re existentialist nihilism: the existentialist athisatic philosophers generally cared about humanity etc, and were often very perosnally ethical, so in some sense we are fighting agianst a straw-man, we are countering the tenets of a philosophy, and making belief in the opposite not seem like a wish-fulfillment fantasy emant to kake oneself feel better, but actual truth.

..

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Title on book cover: 

"Human significance": 

the message of "Quantum Kabbalistic Cosmology" against atheist materialist nihilism

or: Quantum Kabbalistic Humanism vs atheist materialist nihilism

Although this is a preface, it would be understood only after reading the book....so please re-read this preface at the end...:)

Message isn't to prove the divine origin of the chumash or the truth of Judaism or creationism etc, it isn't against any other religion or against Humanism, but rather vs nihilism, whether of the atheitsic materialism or even some religious variety if such exists. 

It isn't to say that other religions or philosophies are not against nihilism, but rather merely to present a particular approach.

It certainly is not against science, but rather is not hesitant about staking clearly the ground claimed here for these views.... Making clear what science is not qualified to determine in this regard, etc. And to unapologetically state that there is no purpose in trying to fit science and religion into the same box when the most basic fact, our existence in the nmc sense, is kept by science carefully outside its own box, and especially so since religion begins exactly with that which science so carefully and impressively excludes from its purview.

Message isn't to prove chumash or Judaism or creation etc, it isn't against any other religion or against Humanism, but rather vs nihilism, whether AMN or even some religious variety if such exists. It isn't to say that other religions or philosophies are not against nihilism, but rather merely to present a particular approach.

It certainly is not against science, which has made such incredible advances due to its exclusion of that which cannot be experimentally measured/proved, but rather is not hesitant about staking clearly the ground claimed here for these views which are precisely in the area science has limited itself from dealing with .... Making clear what science is not qualified to determine in this regard, etc

No purpose in trying to fit science and religion into the same box when the most basic fact, our existence in the nmc sense, is kept by science carefully outside its own box, especially as religion begins exactly with that.

...

The booklet can incorporate elements of - or at least refer to -   the site/googleDoc "Quantum Kabbalistic Astrology, Karma, and Self-actualization: The cosmic secret of human transcendence" 

Blurb: ―A theoretical physicist‘s mashup of astrology, karma and kabbalah‖"

It has a lot re human significance.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5eDYQ2oWFxuZjZoS0pLbFBzeHc?resourcekey=0-b_3mTqgpx_HCjG0OJ4Qi_w

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"Quantum Kabbalistic Astrology, Karma, and Self-actualizatio. was dream stuff from misc": Quantum Kabbalistic Astrology, Karma, and Self-actualization  The cosmic secret of human transcendence Blurb: ―A theoretical physicist‘s mashup of astrology, karma and kabbalah‖  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5eDYQ2oWFxuZjZoS0pLbFBzeHc?resourcekey=0-b_3mTqgpx_HCjG0OJ4Qi_w  ..

https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/quantumkabballahastrologydream/home Quantum Kabballah: Cosmology, Astrology, Karma & Dreams

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Check for Dup on this site-page

TItle: "Quantum Kabalisitic Cosmology" 's message of Human Significance

As opposed to nihilistic philosophies, the message of the Torah is that each individual human is the creator's image/breathe, and our choices, actions and feelings underlie the universe's design, and are the purpose of its very existence. Only our ego - self-involvment - serves as a barrier separating us from our essence, and the more we lower it the more our essence - the divine spirit - shines forth, constituting a revelation of the DIvine presence, as occured with Abraham and Moses whose compassion for those suffering or about to suffer, and their complete dedication to the needs of others, was such that they were willing to sacrifice their lives to save their fellow humans. In fact, there is a delicious irony that in both cases the danger to them was due to their holy chutzpah of confrontation with God(!) to save others, not fearing the possibility that God would annihilate them on the spot - and it was this ego-reduction to engage in confrontation with God which led to a high level of revelation of the Presence of God! This ultimate significance of human beings - based on their being in the image of God/divine breath is a deep message of Biblical God-based Humanism.

In contrast to the position of some existentialists to the effect that the miniscule size of humans compared to stars somehow indicates our insignificance......we are unique among living beings and elements of the natural universe from tiny elementary particles to vast galaxies of stupendously-large stars, in that we possess a characteristic and ability which are beyond physical laws, beyonds the chains of nature....a non-material consciousness which cannot arise via natural processes and which most scientists deny exists. And it is this which makes it possible for there to be a physically-transcendent meaning to our feelings, our deep emotions, our longings and pain and suffering our contrition and sincere aspirations, making them poignant even to the creator af all.

And in contrast to the notion that we are puppets or robots or machines or ruled by the randomness of chance via quantum processes....what we choose to call "QKC" teaches that we possess a free will which makes our moral choices relevant even to the creator of all, a phenomenon which is so radical that most scientists deny the possibility of its existence - being that it is beyond the randomness of quantum phenomena, beyond the determinism of the statistical ensemble of quantum phenomena, and even beyond logic.

In contrast to the materialist atheistic deterministic philosophy that we are our bodies/physical brains and therefore are tied to the determinism and randomness of the physical universe .....duNouy ..

what we are referring here to as "QKC" teaches that ...Our bodies and brains are physical and can arise naturally - with various scientific theories describing possible mechanisms - but not these properties, which science does not enfranchise and so does not claim arose naturally, and which the Torah tells us were imbued directly into the physical aspect of humanity in a special creative act which is part of the reason the cosmos exists at all.

And this is how there is direct resonance at the divine level of our human sense of meaning and purpose, and our conviction of the existence of a non-subjective moral responsibility for our choices/actions.

And we will see another profound speculation of quantum metaphysics - a kind of almost-mystical quantum physics posited by various prominent distinguished physicists - which relates human existence at this non-material level with the deepest aspects of cosmological emergence, and which echoes a fundamental aspect of the creation and Eden accounts in Genesis, so that humans are indeed partners in creation as taught by Jewish Tradition.

And it is via our special material-transcendent attributes that we can interact with the spiritual cosmos at its deepest levels - and as the image of the creator we can even interact with the creator, and given that our essence is the divine breath, we can do so directly without intermediary.

In fact this divine aspect of our essence which motivates my somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition of "Biblical Humanism" = all people are created in the image of God, with their essence being God's breath/spirit, and God expects you to treat people accordingly". And that our essence is God's breath/spirit enables our purpose: as Kaballah explains, the reason we were created is so as to experience the greatest possible joy, which occurs through attaching to (or reunite with) our essence, the creator, after the death of our body. The path to the greatest joy, the deepest degree of attachment after life, is that outlined in the Torah - via spiritual actions in this life, and when we lower our ego and compassionately care and act for the benefit of others even at great self-sacrifice so that our essence - the divine spirit - shines through, making this physical world "a dwelling place for God". A life lived in this manner guarantees the greatest attachment after death, and thus the greatest possible (eternal) joy.

This is the message of the Torah, which in various ways conveys the interrelation of mystical cosmology and ethical self-development.

And none of this in any was "contradicts" science, which deals exclusively with the material aspects of the universe and of humanity.

This is the message of human significance and of the relative roles of religion and science which we wish to present via the articles in this collection.

...

Doubt is human and therefore legitimate and is part of the process, despair and rebellion agianst God are part of the nature God designed into us, struggling against disbelief and materialism and self-gratification are part of what is our purpose, so this is not meant to disienfranchise these... and the philosophers who preached nihilism seemed very dedicated to revealing truth to ther humans, dedicating their lives not to achiving wealth and power but to educating others in the truths they believed in, and this is actually quite a noble life - and similarly atheist materialists are often highly moral and preach ethics - so this book is not meant to denigrate the nihilists or nihilistically consider their lives as meaningless but rather to enfranchise that type of struggle as part of what God designed us to do.

Perhaps the chief benefit in our lifetime of a belief in all this is the possibility of an awareness of a relationship with the Source of all

One can be the child in the desert being carried on the shoulders of their father but unaware, but benefiting from their father's help but in despair at being abandoned, or one can be aware and benefit from the relaitonship as well as from the help. [Perhaps even nihilists can remain as they are, and create a relationship based on their disbelief and despair, and benefit from it...?!] 

The Jewish People accepted at Sinai - and all Jewish sould of all time were present at sinai - that God is allpowerful and all knowing and there is only God, that all evil is from God, and yet God is inifinitely merciful and compassionate - a total contradiciton, and yet true, and this unyielding belief that God is good despite whatever happened that God could have prevented was the basis for God's love and the resulting deep and eternal bond between God and the Jewish People. Abraham and Moses railed agianst an unjust God, and God made sure to include accounts of this in the Torah, but they did this not to deny God's existence or to deny the compassion of God, but rather they directly confronted God with their complaint, and this was the basis of their deep relationship, and this was the the reason God loved them. And these stories are included in the Torah in order for us to know that this is a model of how to connect to God - via the desire to protect humanity against harm, even if via struggling agianst God in some sense, based on the recognition that all humans are afer all, (as described in Genesis) in some way vessels for the spirit of God.

...

CONUNDRUM

Do mc's originate nihilism? if they truly have no emotions as nmc's know them, why does this arise? is it something about the big bang conditions?! why should bb have in it the need to give forth eventually nihilism! or for that matter any of the material concomitants of emotions whether deprssisive or otherwise....but it has to be tha mc's have these too otuerwise the fact that mc's feel these is proof of nmc?!This is a complicated self-referencing or looped (?) type of question....

Do mc's have any of the material equivalents of nmc-type mystical or philosophical or religious etc feelings? or do they reject it all as nonsense, ie they never feel those feelings, ie never have the material concommitants.

.....

For mc's for whom nmc does not exist, then effectively the reality they inhabit is indeed without meaning, and indeed they cannot know anyhting, so nihilism can be true for them, but as mc's they do not experience true nmc-emotion and their protestations of ennui and hopelessness are simpy machine-noises. 

So the bottom line is that it is only the depressive emotions of nmc's which matter, but they cannot self-consistently be nnihilists. ANd on the othe rhand, whereas it is not non-self-consistent for mc's to be nihlists, they are mc's and so cannot truly be 'experiencing' depressive-emotion etc.

mc's are right that there is no meaning or purpose to THEIR lives, but not for the reasons they often propose but because they are machines.

nmc's who feel hopeless should know that is a mental illness, and they should be given hope, and told not to listen to AMN...

nmc's are based in the realm of reality in which resides purpose and meaning etc.

........

AR: instead of seeking 'objective' meaning or purpose, an nmc can feel the meaning and purpose resident in the nmc-realm, that is 'objective' enough. And if someone thinks that 'objective existence' is impossible, then perhaps the self-evident nature of nmc's existence is a form of 'objective turth'.

The basic idea presented on this webpage is  based on a combination of the ideas explored in several of the author's articles (listed above).  There is a short ('condensed') version summarizing the main ideas, and then the rest of the site presents a very long version composed of lengthy excerpts of the original articles, with accompanying discussions and quotes. 

Therefore the inconsistency of AMN is this:  They state that the claim of human signficance is false, that values do not exist unless they are subjectively created by individuals, but this would be true only if humans are as they claim they are - mechanistic things. And they claim to deduce from scientific advances that indeed humans are this. However, their conclusion rests on this assumption, and the assumption is decidely false - at least for those of us who know we possess a non-material consciousness, as for example expressed by various pre-eminent scientists such as Descartes and Einstein, as well as by the some of the greatest physicists who discovered and developed quantum physics, and some contemporary leading physicists as well.  

Physicists who have non-material consciousness and know it, are not impressed with the AMN conclusions which supposedly rest on the discoveries of physics. And AMN speak of 'values' as being fully-subjective, but this is in some sens eself-contradictory to those with non-material consciousness, since 'values' reside in the non-material realm accessible to non-material consciousness, whereas a material entity - such as a rock or a planet, or a human as per the atheistic materialistic worldview - cannot access them, and so obviously will not 'understand' what is meant by non-subjective values. So it is inconsistent for AMN's to speak of values as they do. Indeed, we can fully agree with them that material entities such as they conceive humans to be cannot indeed speak of non-subjective values, however we would disagree with them that material entities such as they conceive humans to be could create values on their own, since purely-material entitites cannot by definition connect ot the non-material realm in which reside the 'material-Transcendent' or non-material values we speak of. All that material entities could create would be the neural patterns of electric activity which occur in the brains of non-materially-consicious human when they speak of values, ie a fully-material correlate of the mental-realm, as explained by Descartes.

Note: In terms of specific scientific topics: The Copernican revolution against geocentrism was a matter of cosmic 'geography', the negation of free will stemmed from a linking of human neurobiology to mechanistic scientific views, and the chance-based status  derived from physical cosmology/cosmography (the big bang theory) and evolutionary theory. 

We'll start with the first of these, from my paper titled: "GeoCentrism".

Note: See the website version of the article [GeoCentrism & eGoCentrism, Existentialist despair & human significance. Also: The alleged conflict of Bible and science;  https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/justbecauseitdidnthappendoesnt/geocentrism-egocentrism] for explanations and references describing:

•  the theological objections to Copernicus by some Christian theologians,

• the negative impact on religious belief of the adoption by the intellectuals of the time of the conclusions of the "Copernican revolution", 

• and  an explanation of why there never existed a Torah-science conflict regarding the geocentric view.

Nowadays these issues do not constitute a problem religiously, and the Church long ago retracted its objecitons, however the after-effects still remain - there was a general distancing from religion and a overall sense created that somehow religion and science are incompatible and therefore those who wished to embrace the conclusions of science had to reject religoin, which led to a large part of the population in Europe - including jews - becoming less religious or devout, and of religious people feeling subject to the rule of the established religious authorities (Jewish and Christian) in theological and other matters.

...

for a note:   [simplicity is the only criterion preferring solar centrism over geocentrism, but simplicity exosts only in an intelligent (eg human) self-analysis of the universe (ie by an element of the universe analyzing the universe; and in any case any being living near a different star than our sun would consider everything most simple when expressed as their sun at the center, etc)]

As an analogy let's look at the following situation:

So if it is God who created all, and deterministic natural law by God governs all the processes in our brain, are we morally resonsible for our choices? No, because it is not we who caused the choices made by our brains and the bad things we do.

Quantum Kabbalistic Cosmology's message of Human Significance

As opposed to nihilistic philosophies, the message of the Torah is that each individual human is the creator's image/breathe, and our choices, actions and feelings underlie the universe's design, and are the purpose of its very existence. Only our ego - self-involvment - serves as a barrier separating us from our essence, and the more we lower it the more our essence - the divine spirit - shines forth, constituting a revelation of the DIvine presence, as occured with Abraham and Moses whose compassion for those suffering or about to suffer, and their complete dedication to the needs of others, was such that they were willing to sacrifice their lives to save their fellow humans. In fact, there is a delicious irony that in both cases the danger to them was due to their holy chutzpah of confrontation with God(!) to save others, not fearing the possibility that God would annihilate them on the spot - and it was this ego-reduction to engage in confrontation with God which led to a high level of revelation of the Presence of God! This ultimate significance of human beings - based on their being in the image of God/divine breath is a deep message of Biblical God-based Humanism.

In contrast to the position of some existentialists to the effect that the miniscule size of humans compared to stars somehow indicates our insignificance......we are unique among living beings and elements of the natural universe from tiny elementary particles to vast galaxies of stupendously-large stars, in that we possess a characteristic and ability which are beyond physical laws, beyonds the chains of nature....a non-material consciousness which cannot arise via natural processes and which most scientists deny exists. And it is this which makes it possible for there to be a physically-transcendent meaning to our feelings, our deep emotions, our longings and pain and suffering our contrition and sincere aspirations, making them poignant even to the creator af all.

And in contrast to the notion that we are puppets or robots or machines or ruled by the randomness of chance via quantum processes....what we choose to call "QKC" teaches that we possess a free will which makes our moral choices relevant even to the creator of all, a phenomenon which is so radical that most scientists deny the possibility of its existence - being that it is beyond the randomness of quantum phenomena, beyond the determinism of the statistical ensemble of quantum phenomena, and even beyond logic.

In contrast to the materialist atheistic deterministic philosophy that we are our bodies/physical brains and therefore are tied to the determinism and randomness of the physical universe .....duNouy ..

what we are referring here to as "QKC" teaches that ...Our bodies and brains are physical and can arise naturally - with various scientific theories describing possible mechanisms - but not these properties, which science does not enfranchise and so does not claim arose naturally, and which the Torah tells us were imbued directly into the physical aspect of humanity in a special creative act which is part of the reason the cosmos exists at all.

And this is how there is direct resonance at the divine level of our human sense of meaning and purpose, and our conviction of the existence of a non-subjective moral responsibility for our choices/actions.

And we will see another profound speculation of quantum metaphysics - a kind of almost-mystical quantum physics posited by various prominent distinguished physicists - which relates human existence at this non-material level with the deepest aspects of cosmological emergence, and which echoes a fundamental aspect of the creation and Eden accounts in Genesis, so that humans are indeed partners in creation as taught by Jewish Tradition.

And it is via our special material-transcendent attributes that we can interact with the spiritual cosmos at its deepest levels - and as the image of the creator we can even interact with the creator, and given that our essence is the divine breath, we can do so directly without intermediary.

In fact this divine aspect of our essence which motivates my somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition of "Biblical Humanism" = all people are created in the image of God, with their essence being God's breath/spirit, and God expects you to treat people accordingly". And that our essence is God's breath/spirit enables our purpose: as Kaballah explains, the reason we were created is so as to experience the greatest possible joy, which occurs through attaching to (or reunite with) our essence, the creator, after the death of our body. The path to the greatest joy, the deepest degree of attachment after life, is that outlined in the Torah - via spiritual actions in this life, and when we lower our ego and compassionately care and act for the benefit of others even at great self-sacrifice so that our essence - the divine spirit - shines through, making this physical world "a dwelling place for God". A life lived in this manner guarantees the greatest attachment after death, and thus the greatest possible (eternal) joy.

This is the message of the Torah, which in various ways conveys the interrelation of mystical cosmology and ethical self-development.

And none of this in any was "contradicts" science, which deals exclusively with the material aspects of the universe and of humanity.

This is the message of human significance and of the relative roles of religion and science which we wish to present via the articles in this collection.

...

Doubt is human and therefore legitimate and is part of the process, despair and rebellion agianst God are part of the nature God designed into us, struggling against disbelief and materialism and self-gratification are part of what is our purpose, so this is not meant to disienfranchise these... and the philosophers who preached nihilism seemed very dedicated to revealing truth to ther humans, dedicating their lives not to achiving wealth and power but to educating others in the truths they believed in, and this is actually quite a noble life - and similarly atheist materialists are often highly moral and preach ethics - so this book is not meant to denigrate the nihilists or nihilistically consider their lives as meaningless but rather to enfranchise that type of struggle as part of what God designed us to do.

Perhaps the chief benefit in our lifetime of a belief in all this is the possibility of an awareness of a relationship with the Source of all

One can be the child in the desert being carried on the shoulders of their father but unaware, but benefiting from their father's help but in despair at being abandoned, or one can be aware and benefit from the relaitonship as well as from the help. [Perhaps even nihilists can remain as they are, and create a relationship based on their disbelief and despair, and benefit from it...?!] 

The Jewish People accepted at Sinai - and all Jewish souls of all time were present at sinai - that God is all-powerful and all-knowing and there is only God, that all evil is from God, and yet God is inifinitely merciful and compassionate - a total contradiction, and yet true, and this unyielding belief that God is good despite whatever happened that God could have prevented was the basis for God's love and the resulting deep and eternal bond between God and the Jewish People. Abraham and Moses railed agianst an unjust God, and God made sure to include accounts of this in the Torah, but they did this not to deny God's existence or to deny the compassion of God, but rather they directly confronted God with their complaint, and this was the basis of their deep relationship, and this was the the reason God loved them. And these stories are included in the Torah in order for us to know that this is a model of how to connect to God - via the desire to protect humanity against harm, even if via struggling agianst God in some sense, based on the recognition that all humans are afer all, (as described in Genesis) in some way vessels for the spirit of God.

..

The articles which follow, develop these ideas in specific contexts, relating to various aspects of the supposed "religion-science conflict", as described in the articles themselves. 

....

The articles are presented in the chronological order in which they appeared.

NOTE: The only editing changes will be: Man --> Human, removing He for God; also: a correction of the title of one of the articles as rendered in a footnote.