The Literalist Fallacy & the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism

Hello everyone, welcome to ActInFLAB guest stream number 18.1. We're here with Julian Keberstein and Michael Kirchhoff as well as Dave, Dean and Steven from ActInFLAB and we're really appreciative for the authors for joining today to be discussing some of their work. We're going to have a presentation by the authors and then following the presentation we'll have ample time for discussion so please feel free to write any questions down in the live chat and we'll get to it. So without further ado, Julian and Michael thanks a lot for joining and please take it away. Thanks so much for inviting us. We've been looking forward to this particular session and thanks for staying up late in the US and whoever you are in Europe for getting up early. It's only 3 30 in the afternoon here for us so that's more manageable in Australia. I'll just share my screen. Let's see and share. Is that right? Yeah, you guys can see that. Bring that up. So that should all be clear in a second, is that right? Looks good. Great. So the paper is called The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle. It's a philosophical paper on the topic of scientific realism, scientific anti-realism slash instrumentalism in the context of the FEP or the Free Energy Principle. I suppose just as a primer, this is a revised and resubmit stage for our paper at this particular moment in time. So any comments that we might be able to get to further improve the quality of the paper will of course be welcomed. So let's start. There will be a little bit of, I suppose, conceptual stage setting at the start, just given the nature of this particular paper. And also because it sort of speaks to a few other issues that go beyond just a sort of narrow focus on the Free Energy Principle. So this is the debate as it sits, or at least as we try to sketch it in the paper between scientific realism and instrumentalism. So let's just say briefly what scientific realism is and briefly what instrumentalism is. And then I will say a little bit more about how to think about scientific realism. Overall, the point of the paper was to sort of try to marshal a set of arguments for why at least a version of scientific realism can be accommodated by FEP models. And it was motivated in part because it seems like in the last few years, there's been a flurry of papers sort of in one way or another arguing for scientific anti realism with respect to the FEP or how to interpret parts of that particular model. So that's the kind of that's the kind of setting we're in. So scientific realism, that's the view that one reasonable goal of a currently best scientific theories, scientific models is to offer literally true, or probably true, or approximately true, or probably approximately true, descriptions and explanations of target systems. I have here in bracket, for example, natural phenomena. But it could also be artificial systems in the context of artificial intelligence, artificial life, for example. Now, by contrast, then instrumentalism or scientific anti realism, that's the view that scientific theories and models are nothing but instruments for prediction of observable behavior of target systems. So here, the the claim is something like this, from an instrumentalist perspective, theory slash models, they have explanatory power, and that gives them some utility. But they're not in any in any sense of the word, truth producing. So that when it's not to think about instrumentalists, or the instrumentalist position, as putting forth statements about how the world is on the basis of their models, by which you can say something say true or false about how the world is. So the main question now is, for this particular paper we are considering, is the FEP truth producing in a way that's consistent with scientific realism? And of course, as I mentioned, just a minute or so ago, we think it is indeed consistent with a particular way of conceiving of scientific realism. Maybe a footnote here that's…