Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency A Free Energy Account

Hello, welcome everyone. It's April 9th, 2025, and we're here in Active Inference Guest Stream 102.1 with Majid, Benny, and Dean as well. So we're looking forward to a presentation and a discussion on Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency, a free energy account. Thank you, Majid, for joining again. Looking forward to the presentation and go for it. All right. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great to be here. And I'm going to cut to the chase and start to introduce the project, to speak about the project. So Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency is the name of the book. And you can see the image in the next page. Well, it's a 2024 book by Rutledge. And so I'm going to briefly speak about the main themes of the book. It is about the agency in the next page. Sorry to just interrupting by saying the next page, but it is an aspect of my book. So it tries to develop a philosophical articulation of agency in terms of the free energy principle. So I presume most people who are watching this or listening to this are familiar with the free energy principle, which has been developed by Carl Freeston and colleagues and provides an account of perception, cognition, and action in terms of minimization of free energy principle, which is an information theoretic threshold, an upper bound on surprizal or prediction error. And so agency agents are self-organizing systems. Self-organizing systems. And what a particular kind of self-organizing systems, they have this peculiar capacity to minimize not only their free energy, but their expected free energy or the free energy that is associated with the future sequences of action on the basis of their evaluation of counterfactual outcomes of their action. So other people have been doing that. Carl Freeston himself and his colleagues have been working on this theory of agency and a number of other significant people such as Andy Clark, for example, amongst others have been developing theories of agency in terms of the free energy principle. Carl Freeston himself and so I delve a bit more deeper in this respect and try to provide a more specific and clear identification of agency in terms of the free energy principle. What it is not the main contribution of the work, as I said, this this book, as I said, other people have been trying to do that. So the main contribution of the book is to try to cast philosophy of science, theories of causality and scientific explanation and causal explanation in terms of this theory of agency in terms of the free energy principle. So and this is something that I have I'm going to discuss in the next page of this slide. So the next slide is about the main contribution of the of this of this book. So it's there are there have been theories of science for. As for at least for scientific realists is basically about scientific explanation. So science aims at explaining explaining things and there have been causal theories of explanation for a while. So this book tries to instead of treating causal scientific explanation as something that is totally objective and totally about the mind independent structure of the world. It tries to cast causal explanation in terms of. Agents models of the environment and agents are specified in terms of the free energy principle. So and there are a number of interesting philosophical questions here, at least interesting for me. So whether this kind of causal explanation or building on some sort of totally objective conception of causality or it is something that is projected from the mind of agents on to the world. And it is the the accounts that I'm defending in this book, the projectivist account. And I'm supporting that on the basis of the free energy principle at the same time, I do not think that it necessarily undermines realist commitments to the call to realist commitments that might be associated with causal explanations. Because by the very fact that this theory tries to support its accounts of…