Jaron Lanier: Loss of the virtual dream

Despite the binary nature of his own neural wiring, each synapse an on/off switch, passing electrochemical messages from axon to dendrite, Jaron Lanier will be the first to tell you that the mind is not a digital device. We are analog creatures, staticky and mysterious, resistant to the normalizing containment of code. Lanier's mind has few apparent boundaries. It grapples with zombies and "gray goo," "inner trolls" and the "lords of the computing clouds," with "cephalopod envy" and "songles" -- "A songle is a dongle for a song," Lanier explains, in case you didn't know -- with "the mystery of Bengalese finch musicality" and the bucket containing all red things.

By Ben Ehrenreich

January 10, 2010