“There Is No Such Thing As Free Will”

In the News (Atlantic): “For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. …

“The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. …

“Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? …

“In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most butall of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams. …

“Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion. …

“The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. …The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

“Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has … come to a painful conclusion: ‘We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth’ about free will.

“Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.

Answer: According to the wisdom of Kabbalah there is no free will according to the common definition. All of a person’s actions are unconscious, and are performed unconsciously and only then understood, and some of them are not always understood either. According to many Kabbalistic texts, like Baal HaSulam’s articles “Thou Hast Hemmed Me In Behind and Before,” Shamati articles, etc. speak about that. Another part of Kabbalistic literature describes what does depend on a person. All of the Kabbalistic literature is divided into two parts: the part that depends on the Creator and the part that depends on a person.

The study of Kabbalah actually comes down to the study and implementation of our free will, but we can define and implement it only to the extent that we understand the Creator’s actions and when our attributes become equal to His through adhering to Him like to a partner. The meaning of our actions is in our understanding and our complete connection between all of a person’s actions and the Creator’s. This is called adhesion.
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