Michael Spezio on Imprisoning Free Will
A Critique of Doris Tsao, Chang In Sohn, and Anselm Ramelo
We are trying here to untie the knotty knot of free will and determinism, especially brain-mind determinism. Dominican philosopher Anselm Ramelo and doctoral student Chang In Sohn have weighed in with careful analyses. In response, I’ve tendered my thoughts in Patheos SR 1022, Is our free will really in jail?
Now we turn to an expert in both neuroscience and theology, Michael Spezio, to carry the discussion to the next step.
Meet Michael Spezio
Michael Spezio is well equipped to weigh in on the controversy regarding neuro-determinism and free will. Michael is a scientist by training and occupation. He is also a lay theologian, having an M.Div. degree with a specialized focus on moral theology, and being ordained as a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
As a scientist, Michael is a computational cognitive neuroscientist specializing in valuation, emotion, and decision making in interaction. At the renowned Scripps College he is an Associate Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Data Science as well as Director of The Laboratory for Inquiry into Valuation and Emotion (The LIVE Lab). He has edited several interdisciplinary volumes on religion & science and science & virtue. He is a co-editor of the Open Access journal Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences (Mohr-Siebeck). As a theologian, Michael has been Residential Fellow in 2013-2014 and a Senior Research Fellow in 2023-2025 at Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry.
Did Doris Tsao and Chang In Sohn really put fee will in jail?
Michael Spezio writes. A positive interpretation of the t-shirt that Prof. Doris Tsao and her teaching assistants and students adopted as their course symbol is that, as Chang In Sohn says, they have not (yet) decided that human agency is dead. Nor have they decided that human agency should be executed. Whew!
Free agency is imprisoned, however. Imprisonment is a view that could be consistent with some trustworthy analyses of human development and of agency in adulthood. Unless humans undergo formation in communities of persons who are themselves formed by commitments to humility as interpersonal openness and to coherence as evidential and corrigible, we humans inevitably lock ourselves into prisons of our own making. We end up not knowing what it really is that we prefer. Or why. So we end up preferring what we know, constraining our future freedoms to conduct trustworthy inquiry and to make trustworthy claims.
Perhaps a critical view of the course symbol — free will in jail — is that Prof. Tsao and her teaching assistants and students have adopted or have been subjected to an ideology in place of free inquiry and careful consideration of evidence and arguments. The course, “Neuroscience, Film, and Philosophy” has no prerequisites, which is always a warning signal when a faculty member with no deep expertise in an advanced and complex and clearly deeply interdisciplinary topic offers a course in that topic.
Students come into the course with no expected preparation in the topics and have little to go on but their own life and educational experience, their own reading and intuitions.
Important preparation for the course would include some introductory logic, introductory action theory, introductory moral philosophy, introductory physics, introductory neurophysiology, and introductory film theory. But lacking any of that, students are expected to read and comprehend and understand lectures on Rene Descartes’ Meditations, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to name a few.
Does it make sense to teach students about primate vision using primary, peer-reviewed literature in molecular, cellular, and systems neuroscience without first giving those students a background in basic statistics and neurobiology and neurophysiology? Neither does it make sense to teach challenging, advanced primary literature in philosophy without adequate preparation on the part of teacher(s) and students.
It's concerning when a lauded scholar imposes ideology over open inquiry, especially when that ideology involves issues that require a deeply interdisciplinary intersection of methods and epistemological criteriologies and criteria for trustworthy claims.
It’s also a bit concerning if graduate students in theology and ethics, who one would expect to maintain an interest in resisting ideology in favor of trustworthy inquiry and claims, endorse ideologies that cut against core commitments of ethical public theology. In this case, it may be that they do not feel free to do otherwise.
Is Anselm Ramelo’s incompatibilism scientific?
Michael Spezio writes. On Anselm Ramelo's view, he's wrong about science not being able to account for aspirations to the good. Statistics can account for that as well. The science of addiction shows that individual aspirations to the good are usually not overriding in the case of actions relating to addiction, in a statistically compelling manner.
The core problem facing the scientist who wants to claim no human freedom is that the entire framing of any experiment already involves a participant's own freely given choices, in agreeing to the numerous constraints of the experiment. Only with those constraints in place can the models using neural signals succeed in above-chance prediction performance. And those constraints usually need to apply to very simple choices, rather than to self-determining ones or to choices that involve one's deep sense of who one is in relation to others and to one's own social identities.
Ramelo also fails to distinguish between his own personal faith position — incompatibilism except for God's own will and foreknowledge in human affairs — and the requirements of making publicly accessible claims about the extent to which science reveals limits on human free agency. In failing to make this distinction, he falls into the same danger as Doris Tsao and sails near to ideology. These two questions about the promises and limits of science on revealing aspects of human freedom have nothing to do with faith commitment or with Aquinas' views, except if Aquinas' views provide a trustworthy guide in specifying conditions that the science must meet in testing the limits of human freedom.
It's really time for Theology and for theologians to acknowledge that Theology does sometimes operate in an empirical mode. And that when it does so, it needs to attend closely to its criteria for its publicly accessible empirical claims beyond its own ingroup. That's a different sphere and a different task from the one Theology has within the intuitive and the faith community, of course.
What might the neuroscience actually say about free will?
Michael Spezio writes. Now, what about the neuroscience itself? Does the ability to predict and to model, statistically better than chance, a person’s choice in some highly formulaic, extremely well-regulated experimental set of conditions that involve only simple motor movements or some other simple alternative-forced-choice tasks, mean that humans lack agential freedom and are completely neurophysiologically – and physically – determined? Not at all.
Think of the number of freely made choices that a human participant must make – including the agreement to be an informed, well-intentioned, honest participant in the first place – prior to any responses that are studied and modeled in the tasks.
We should not be surprised by the predictive outcomes. Of course, our choices are influenced and mediated by the brain. It would be utterly shocking – and in defiance of evidence and embodiment – to expect that careful measurements of the brain and of choices under those highly regulated conditions would result in anything but successful models of behavior from neural signals at levels above chance. Of course, the brain is directly involved in motor systems and decision-making. Of course, what we choose is manifest, at least in part, via neural signals.
But as trustworthy as all of that is, nevertheless, our choices are not always byproducts of those signals. The preponderance of evidence is deeply inconsistent with any view that holds that healthy and reflective human choice is a byproduct of neural signals.
So does the brain negate the person and the person’s deep reflection on who they are and on the reflectively understood promises they have made to others? Does the brain control the person or negate the person’s agential freedom? Well, I have to concede that, yes, perhaps, when liking what we know takes the place of asking what we know and how we know it, and why we like it; that is, when ideology supplants authentic and trustworthy inquiry into human freedom and agency, in both theology and in the sciences.
Substack SR 1024 Michael Spezio on Imprisoning Free Will
Substack SR 1020 Anselm Ramelo, AI, and Free Will
Substack SR 1021 Chang In Sohn Puts Free Will in Jail
Patheos SR 1022 Is our free will really in jail?
Patheos SR 1023 Braden Molhoek on Free Will
Substack SR 1024 Michael Spezio on Imprisoning Free Will
Substack SR 1025 Roger Olson on Divine Determinism and Human Freedom