Lanier struck me as a sort of latterday Rorty: broadly a pragmatist; suspicious about the rigidity of linguistic meaning; unwilling to try to refute big visions but rather inclined to imply that he finds them silly and that perhaps any decently civilized person should do too.
The trouble with this outlook is, if your sense of what's silly is itself miscalibrated, there's not much anyone can do to help you. Moreover if meaning really is too slippery and amorphous to make debating big visions worthwhile, presumably the bright thing to do would be to avoid those debates altogether. As opposed to turning up and chuckling through them.
I wonder what Robin made of the discussion, perceived silliness being one of his hot buttons and all.
My Bloggingheads.tv interview with Jaron Lanier is up. Reductionism, zombies, and questions that you're not allowed to answer:
This ended up being more of me interviewing Lanier than a dialog, I'm afraid. I was a little too reluctant to interrupt. But you at least get a chance to see the probes I use, and Lanier's replies to them.
If there are any BHTV heads out there who read Overcoming Bias and have something they'd like to talk to me about, do let me or our kindly producers know.