--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote: > >
> Try it and see, that's the only way to find out. The
> multiple realizability
> argument can't prove you can't do it
But it can provide pretty strong evidence that it isn't worth your while (speaking as an economist) to bother starting down such a thankless research program and that others are better. It can show that you won't maximise your utility function by attempting to produce a road map linking genes to behaviours, unless the activity of doing so enters directly into that utility function. In fact, I think that what you mean to say here is that the multiple realizability argument can't prove that *it can't be done*, and that it in fact does prove that, with computers as they are currently designed, we can't do it.
I'm also not sure of the importance of the distinction between reductionism and determinism in the case at hand; surely if one's talking about reducing behavioural traits to physical objects, any reductive explanation has to be deterministic?
dd
===== “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men” -- JM Keynes
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