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.
I also found it frustrating that Lanier refused to engage on specifics.
Which is ironic, because I also came to the conclusion that the problem here was it was a discussion between (someone acting in the role of) a philosopher and (someone acting in the role of) an engineer, and it was the engineer who was refusing to talk about specifics.
Where I term philosophy the stuff you do with topics you don't have enough solid information yet to make a full-fledged science out of (as touched on in the discussions of the natural philosophy phase which preceded the science of biology, etc.)
Lanier may be correct that ignoring the philosophical side may make you a better scientist for certain strict definitions of scientist, but it may also fail to make future scientists better scientists. Just because the philosophical work precedes the formation of a full fledged science doesn't mean you can skip it. It's important for people to be thinking about these things even if we don't know much about them.
It's a very different kind of work from engineering though, and it may be that Lanier is uninterested in that work. I know I get quickly bored and frustrated when I try to spend much time doing that kind of work. But I try to distinguish between things that bore me and things which are unuseful.