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When Judaism Meets Science
Posts Tagged ‘neuroscience’
Rabbi Arnold Rachlis Explores “When Judaism Meets Science”
Early in August, 2020, Rabbi Arnold Rachlis interviewed Roger Price regarding his book “When Judaism Meets Science.” Initially, the interview followed an Erev Shabbat service at Rabbi Rachlis’s congregation, University Synagogue, Irvine, California. Over the course of twenty–four minutes, Rabbi Rachlis’s questions and Price’s answers covered a number of issues discussed in Price’s book, including the challenges of contemporary science to Judaism, the rejection of science and facts, vaccinations, artificial intelligence and a Jewdroid, genetics and diseases, Jewish genetic markers, and neuroscience and freewill.
Rabbi Arnold Rachlis has served as the rabbi of University Synagogue since 1987, guiding it from a small havurah to a center that serves more than 600 families. Previously, he served as rabbi of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, Evanston, Illinois. Rabbi Rachlis was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1975, having previously earned a B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an M.A. degree from Temple University and a Doctor of Divinity degree from RRC.
Now the entire interview, by itself, can be
seen and heard here: https://vimeo.com/445649383/7bcc001c52
Enjoy!
For nine years, Rabbi Rachlis hosted Of Cabbages and Kings on ABC-TV, as well as a syndicated cable television show on contemporary Jewish issues, Hayom. He has appeared as a guest on NPR, CBS, CNN, and PBS. He was profiled in the award-winning documentary film, The Legacy, and has served as a Judaica consultant for Compton’s Encyclopedia. He has also published scholarly articles, opinion pieces, and poetry in a variety of publications, including Judaism, Reconstructionist, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, Jewish Journal, and A Psychology – Judaism Reader.
Rabbi Rachlis has served in Washington, D.C. as a White House Fellow, an honor annually accorded to only a dozen national leaders, and as a Senior Foreign Affairs advisor in the State Department. Chosen by the White House to give the invocation for President Obama’s Town Hall meeting, he was selected as one of the 25 most influential leaders in Orange County. Rabbi Rachlis has also served as Chair of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, a coalition of over 1000 synagogues and Jewish organizations across the country.
When Judaism Meets Science can be purchased from various etailers, including Amazon, and also from the publisher, Wipf and Stock.
Judaism, Neuroscience and the Free Will Hypothesis (Part 2)
Credit: DARPA
The Jewish assumption of free will is ancient and enduring. But what does modern neuroscience have to say?
The history of neuroscientists’ efforts to explore the free will phenomenon was reviewed in 2016 by philosopher and neuroethicist Andrea Lavazza in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The setting for our current understanding was drawn a half century ago with the discovery by Hans Kornhuber and Luder Deecke of the Readiness Potential (“RP”), a measurement of increased bio-electric activity in the brain. The RP was measured by an electroencephalogram (“EEG”), a procedure in which electrodes were placed on a subject’s scalp to allow for the recording of bio-electric activity. This activity was seen as an indication of preparation for a volitional act.
One question raised by the discovery of RP was whether an individual was conscious of an intention to act before RP appeared. In the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet, a son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who became a neuroscientist at the University of California-Davis, sought to answer that question. Libet and his team designed a relatively simple test. First, subjects were wired for an EEG. To record muscle contraction, electrodes were also placed on subjects’ fingers. Then the subjects were asked to do two things, spontaneously move their right finger or wrist, and, with the aid of a clock in front of them, report to researchers the time they thought they decided to do so.
What Libet found (Libet et al. 1983) was that conscious awareness of the decision to move a finger preceded the actual movement of the finger by 200 milliseconds (ms), but also that RP was evident 350 ms before such consciousness. While Libet recognized that his observations had “profound implications for the nature of free will, for individual responsibility and guilt,” his report appropriately contained several caveats. First, it noted (at 640) that the “present evidence for the unconscious initiation of a voluntary act of course applies to one very limited form of such acts.” Second (at 641), it allowed for the possibility that there could be a “conscious ‘veto’ that aborts the performance . . . (of) the self-initiated act under study here.” Finally (at 641), it acknowledged that “the possibilities for conscious initiation and control” in situations that were not spontaneous or quickly performed. read more
Judaism, Neuroscience and the Free Will Hypothesis (Part 1)
Forget Moses’s impassioned plea to the Israelites concerning their choices among the many blessings and curses that God reportedly set before them as they were about to cross the Jordan river into their promised land. (See Deut. 11:26-28, 30:15, 19.) Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne claims we have no ability to choose freely among alternatives. According to Coyne, “we couldn’t have had that V8, and Robert Frost couldn’t have taken the other road.” Presumably, the Israelites in the story had not much choice either.
Coyne argues that the free will we sense when we make a decision, the feeling that we are choosing among available alternatives, does not exist. In reality, he contends, our conduct is predetermined by physics. This result follows, he says, because our brains and bodies, the “vehicles that make ‘choices,’ are composed of molecules, and the arrangement of those molecules is entirely determined by (our) genes and (our) environment.” The decisions we think we make are, in his opinion, merely “the result from molecular-based electrical impulses and chemical substances transmitted from one brain cell to another.” read more