Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant 1978 paper here:
The research strategy of computer simulation has often been misconstrued by philosophers. Contrary to the misapprehensions innocently engendered by Turing's classic paper, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,'2 it is never to the point in computer simulation that one's model be indistinguishable from the modelled. Consider, for instance, a good computer simulation of a hurricane, as might be devised by meteorologists. One would not expect to get wet or wind-blown in its presence. That ludicrous expectation would be akin to use-mention error, like cowering before the word 'lion.'
A good computer simulation of a hurricane is a program which, when you feed in descriptions of new meteorological conditions, gives you back descriptions of subsequent hurricane behavior. The descriptions might be in roughly ordinary English, dealing with clouds, waves and tides, or in some arbitrary notation, dealing with barometric pressure, wind velocities, and yet more esoteric (but measurable) features of hurricanes. The goal is to devise a program that will give you good 'predictions' of what a hurricane will do under a great variety of highly complex conditions. Such a program is tantamount to an immense conjunction of complicated conditionals: 'if conditions A, B, C, . obtain, then R will result; and if conditions D, E, F,... obtain, S will result; and .. .' Obviously the only way to populate that conjunction reliably is by deriving the particular conditionals from general covering laws, all properly meshed and coordinated. So in order to write a good simulation program one must have a theory of hurricane behavior, and it must be a good theory.
The research strategy of computer simulation has often been misconstrued by philosophers. Contrary to the misapprehensions innocently engendered by Turing's classic paper, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,'2 it is never to the point in computer simulation that one's model be indistinguishable from the modelled. Consider, for instance, a good computer simulation of a hurricane, as might be devised by meteorologists. One would not expect to get wet or wind-blown in its presence. That ludicrous expectation would be akin to use-mention error, like cowering before the word 'lion.'
A good computer simulation of a hurricane is a program which, when you feed in descriptions of new meteorological conditions, gives you back descriptions of subsequent hurricane behavior. The descriptions might be in roughly ordinary English, dealing with clouds, waves and tides, or in some arbitrary notation, dealing with barometric pressure, wind velocities, and yet more esoteric (but measurable) features of hurricanes. The goal is to devise a program that will give you good 'predictions' of what a hurricane will do under a great variety of highly complex conditions. Such a program is tantamount to an immense conjunction of complicated conditionals: 'if conditions A, B, C, . obtain, then R will result; and if conditions D, E, F,... obtain, S will result; and .. .' Obviously the only way to populate that conjunction reliably is by deriving the particular conditionals from general covering laws, all properly meshed and coordinated. So in order to write a good simulation program one must have a theory of hurricane behavior, and it must be a good theory.
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