How Much Control Do We Have? Reflections on Free Will and Determinism

Michael Fel: How much control do we actually have over how we feel? Our tradition really values freedom and choice and free will. And much of the High Holiday liturgy is all about choosing to make better choices in our lives.

And that led us to ask this question of “What makes us human?” What’s the interplay between our bodies, our minds, our spirits, free will? Where is God in all of this?

Peter Saulson: It seems like the project of physics is to offer a complete explanation of everything. So physics was born with a built-in kind of deterministic bias. There are laws of nature, and if you know the state of the world at one moment, you can predict the state of the world at the next moment – and in principle, on and on forever.

But of course, physics gives you other options as well. For example, we no longer believe that the laws of nature that Newton taught us are the true, exact, complete laws of nature. And the ones that work better – quantum mechanics – have a totally different kind of attitude towards what you can predict about the future, given the past.

And anyone who learns quantum mechanics – there’s a joke that physicists tell each other: “It’s impossible to understand quantum mechanics and take it seriously at the same time.” The concepts just do not cohere into a whole that you could say, “Oh, yeah, now I understand what the world is made of.” It’s too weird, and it doesn’t fit the machine metaphor at all.

It’s all too easy to think that the answer has already been figured out, when in fact, we’re still swimming in all sorts of confusion.

Victoria Templer Rotkow: I’m interested in psychology and neuroscience, understanding why we act and behave in the way that we do; how we think; how our cognition has formed throughout evolution. And those questions are questions that oftentimes center around the nature of human experience and consciousness, in particular.

My discipline – many people would say that a lot of our actions could be explained by natural laws. So just as Peter was talking about the natural laws of physics – “they can explain everything” – I, as a psychologist, happen to think that much of our behavior can be explained by those same natural laws. How we act, and what patterns of thought or brain activity creates an action, is something that we can trace to the brain.

Does that mean we do not have free will? I don’t think so at all. And I don’t think most neuroscientists would argue that it does.

Michael Fel: Our tradition emphasizes responsibility, and so we can’t just, like, have a society that says, you’re not responsible for anything anymore, right? We have two holidays – one coming a month after the other. You have Purim, a holiday that is entirely about Mordechai and Esther and the Jewish people rising and defending and taking care of itself – and God is not present anywhere in the story. And then you have Passover happening a month later – in which Moses is not mentioned in the Haggadah, and it’s all about God coming down and taking care of everything for us.

Annie Tucker: Judaism brings sort of all these sort of philosophical and spiritual motifs about free will. Science nuances the conversation and sort of paints the chasm between having total free will and total determinism, and provides us with ways of thinking about how human behavior works. Science helps us to understand what ultimately motivates and changes human behavior, and in certain ways, that’s what religion is interested in as well, right? Not in a deterministic way, but I think that religion seeks to help us improve our behavior, seek to bring good  and justice into the world, act in community – and if science can help us understand how to do that better, then it becomes a tool that religion can use in trying to further some of these aims.

When I think about free will, I actually think about the earliest chapters of Genesis, and the idea that God created us human beings with free will, and was so devoted to that idea of giving humans free will, that even when humans misuse their free will (as they do, pretty much from the first second we’re set on the planet) that God is willing to still go along with that – that free will is so precious that even when it’s misused, it withstands.

And then there are a couple very prominent and troubling passages, particularly in the book of Exodus, where it seems like God abrogates the free will of another human being – most particularly Pharaoh, by “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart. And this is both morally problematic, because the outcome of Pharaoh’s heart becoming “hard” is that the Egyptian people and the Israelite people suffered greatly.

But it’s also a theological question, because if we believe that humans have free will, how is it that God seems to be manipulating the free will of another human being?

It’s one of the most challenging texts in Torah, and I’m not always entirely sure what to do with it. What I personally do with it is – I try to understand the story as actually reintroducing agency to Pharaoh. The motif of Pharaoh, Pharaoh’s heart being “hardened,” is mentioned 20 times in this particular part of the book of Exodus.

And ten times, it says that “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” and ten times, it says that “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.” And so a lot of the commentary – and actually, some of this, in my mind, is akin to some psychological research – basically says that it was Pharaoh himself who sort of hardened his own heart the first ten times.

And then his heart became sort of so stubborn and so recalcitrant that it looked as if it was divinely imposed, but it was actually Pharaoh’s own doing. I feel very motivated to make it so that Pharaoh does have free will for all the reasons that we talked about – the moral reasons and the theological reasons.

And so this is sort of a literary way into resolving that question. But as I said, drawing on psychological research, there is also a lot of research that once someone starts acting in a certain way, we want to resolve cognitive dissonance and keep acting in that way. And so it seems like a plausible psychological read of Pharaoh in this episode as well.