Shows
SynTalk#TCCD (The Change Called Development) - - - SynTalkAre you able to realize your potential? Is your country under-developed? Is development a kind of gradual unfurling? Could it then be an infinite, deliberate, process? Is urbanization industrialization? Is industrialization development? Is development, only, economic growth? Does urbanization ‘cause’ development? Did the moral values of ‘improvement’ come from religion? Does Science help make progress material by unlocking the mind of God? How did Development take off post WW2 as a new ontology? Is a society getting richer the same as people becoming less poor? Does development have an urban bias? Does the countryside, also, need urbanization? Do cities & nations compete...
2020-02-221h 17
SynTalk#TCAFG (The Coarse And Fine Grained) --- SynTalkHow do you like your Matcha? Why do fine and coarse materials behave very differently? Is surface texture usually a sign of sub-structures? How does rock become clay? Is dry clay enough to understand wet clay? Could tea be smoked? Is it simple to keep every spoonful of your morning cereal mix similar? Do pure dry solids ‘flow’ in layers and parts? Is soil a definitive sign of life? How are dust and coarse-leaf teas different? Does mechanical agitation organize matter differently from Brownian motion? How/why does swelling happen? Can mechanical grinding lead to fine structural (chemistry) changes? Does fine...
2020-02-021h 14
SynTalk#TFON (The Formation Of Nations) --- SynTalkHow old are passports? Are you a resident citizen? Are nations primeval or modern? Were the colonizers, such as England, the first nations? Are all countries multi-ethnic/multi-religious? Are there phases, then, in the process of the abstract negotiating with ground realities? How do nations reproduce, as some are born, some emerge, some mimic, & some are just put together? When are borders drawn? Why did Czechoslovakia split? Must nations be unitary? How central is ethnicity to national identity? What kinds of countries make patriotic films? Is there too much of suffering in Russian war movies? Do you know of French...
2020-01-181h 09
SynTalk#TROE (The Religion Of Eating) --- SynTalkShould Aristotle have also cooked? Would you eat dog meat? What does your food say about your conception of Reality? How is our gut first colonized? What are you allergic to? How/why do cultures select what to eat? Where are taboos found? Are you a non-believer? Who does your cooking? What are the techniques? How is identity produced? Does culture uniquely meet nature in food? Can anything be purified via rituals? Why do, both, fasting and feasting exist? Does fasting modify the idea of Self? Do we store fat ‘for’ the brain? Do you follow dietary restrictions? Do you both...
2020-01-111h 18
SynTalk#TIAR (The Interactions And Reactions) --- SynTalkHow quiet is the sea? Do you want to mine manganese? What makes certain interactions reactions? Are there reactions happening in your room? How is heat different from light? What does new Law come from? Can oceans ‘retain’ certain information for centuries? When do we say that a bond has broken? Can radio frequencies ionize molecules? Is your water from Greenland? Might an equatorial event in 1982 have impacted Japan in ~1992? Can physical pressure (alone) cause reactions? Does the deep seabed interact with the atmosphere? What does law say about ‘what’ the ocean is? Is carving up oceans very different from carving...
2020-01-051h 18
SynTalk#TOLOA (The Outer Limits Of Adaptation) --- SynTalkHave we over-adapted? How fit are you? Are our adaptive responses often too private? Is any fitness measure also always about the environment? How efficiently do you communicate with the changing environment? Are cultures always born on the boundaries? Can the First World, alone, help the world adapt? Are languages naturally selected? Are more frequent words shorter, & why? Similarly, do smaller organisms adapt, or perish, faster? Why are virus harder to control? Are the adaptive constraints eventually genetic? Or, can entire complex systems sometimes adapt while overcoming the constraints of parts? What is grammar constrained by? Is ideal efficiency often...
2019-12-291h 17
SynTalk#TAOC (The Afterlife Of Colonies) --- SynTalkDo you aspire to write good English? What was Ranjit Singh’s official language? Where do your narratives come from? Is it possible to think rationally while living in a village and practicing caste? Was India (only) a land of static isolated villages? What does colonialism do to social and political formations? Are tribes expected to evolve into castes, & then into class? What has been the epistemic relationship between caste and class? Is caste truly a religious notion? Is colonialism the central fact of ‘your’ history? Did the Church and the Crown think similarly about the colonies? How do Anglicists follow...
2019-12-281h 20
SynTalk#TURU (The Un Regulated Underbelly) --- SynTalkAre you a part of the underworld? Would you like the society to applaud you? Do you gamble? Or, consume illicit liquor? Is the disorderly the underbelly? Will you inherit property? How has dowry existed in many societies for centuries? What changes the valuation of grooms? Are the values of criminals and police often very similar? Is there something fundamentally criminal about sex-selective abortion? Why do (some) women prefer to have a son? Are there power hierarchies inside prisons? What is the State really? When is it important? However, are people also always undoing the State? Might ‘planning’ create disorder? How...
2019-12-211h 20
SynTalk#TWATW (The Word And The World) --- SynTalkAre words valuable things? When did you last search for a word? Is the seed of language also the seed of the world? How does art work? Is direct (unmediated) observation possible? Does language have a (biological) organ that works with other cognitive faculties? What is a ‘word’? Does it have an internal structure? Do speakers find various affixes psychologically real? Why is there such a thing as grammar? Are words beginning-less? Does grammar change more slowly than words and phrases? Why? Where do art’s boundaries lie? Does art have a ‘universal grammar’? Does the (real) world determine the grammatica...
2019-12-141h 17
SynTalk#TROC (The Reconstruction Of Colours) --- SynTalkHow difficult is it to pick berries from a tree? Do green flowers exist? Is blue still blue if it is not being known? ‘Where’ are your eyes? ‘Who’ needs colour vision? Is colour an elemental, physical, measure of the world? Is colour also mind- (or, sensor-) dependent? Do name-ability and know-ability go together? Is lustre similar to colour? Why is there a ‘three-ness’ to colours? How is it even possible to mix colours to get new ones? Are certain colours harder to make than others? Does every quality reside in a substratum? Do you confuse intensity and colour? Do you find B&W...
2019-11-231h 18
SynTalk#TBAN (The Belligerents And Neutrals) --- SynTalkAre wars entertaining? Who is responsible for your security? What is the role of military force in life? Is history violent? Do all cultures have a historical consciousness? Are all orders political orders? Are in-group solidarity and out-group hostility built into human civilizations? However, are we neither violent nor non-violent? Are human nature and international order related? Is the propensity to use violence higher in ‘central’ geographies? Are there structured steps between peace and war? Why are slivers of violence embedded in peace? Is a subject in an empire different from a citizen in a democracy? Is the nation state the...
2019-11-011h 09
SynTalk#TNSO (The Not So Obvious) --- SynTalkDo ‘birds that fly instinctively swim’? Are self-evident truths easy to prove? When is ‘want to’ not ‘wanna’? Is verification easier than proof? Are proofs explanations? Is that why proofs are supposed to be elegant? Is reasoning algorithmic? Is there one Method to all reasoning? Are all ungrammatical sentences also unacceptable? When do sentences have ambiguous meanings? Can statements with long proofs be obvious? Does economy play a significant role in language constructions? Can human beings extract insights from verbose arguments? Are young kids born with some innate inductive principles? Is obviousness purely syntax dependent? Is the measure of (theory) simplicity l...
2019-09-281h 20
SynTalk#TATT (The Attempts To Team) --- SynTalkDo cheaters survive? Do you find joy in competing (& cooperating)? Are teams mechanisms or organisms? How do teams coordinate layers of emotions, energies, and purposes to acquire a coherent ‘personality’? What, then, keeps teams together? Is there scarcity of common purposes in the world? Is teaming essential for bacteria? Might teams, across scales, be both emergent as well as designed systems? How are cost-benefit analyses performed when group and individual goals diverge? Is your life on the spot market? Might individual liberties be compromised when teams form? In what way are all team members equal; & not? Is it better to lose...
2019-09-221h 16
SynTalk#TCAA (The Counts And Amounts) --- SynTalkIs counting just a special case of measuring? Is any kind of measuring, & scaling, dimension dependent? Do lungs ‘have’ a non-integer dimension between 2 and 3? Can you list all the numbers between 0 and 1? Do both the size and number of cells/organelles change with biological growth? Is Euclidean geometry sufficient to describe things in nature? What does thickness ‘mean’? Is size a good indicator of ‘the outer world’? How many times can one cell become another cell? ‘How’ do cells count? How determinate is that? Are evolved systems always robust? Do all dynamical systems, typically, have finite partitions? Where does end-state variety, then, c...
2019-09-211h 12
SynTalk#TIQW (The Isolated Quantum Worlds) --- SynTalkIs there a rhinoceros in the room? Is the quantum world aesthetically weird? Are quantum systems only small? What is macroscopicness? Is there quantum behavior, but no quantum objects? Why is (?) there randomness, but not superposition (say), in the manifest world? Is the World one unified physical system? Are there local hidden variables? Can reality/realism be local? Can detectors detect determinate outcomes while themselves not being in a determinate state? Is interaction free measurement possible? Why does context or history play a role? Is inference observation? Is (even) a single atom, when inside vacuum, truly isolated? Why is quantum-ness...
2019-09-071h 21
SynTalk#TBAB (The Banal And Boring) --- SynTalkAre only boring people bored? How standard are your windows? How did the trivial, marginal, & everyday come to the foreground in literature, architecture, language, & ‘living’? Does space emerge ‘from’ living? Has your built environment been handed down to you? Must tragedy only be about high-born individuals? Are you ‘free’ to be bored? Has modernity produced a certain kind of boredom? How have we come to expect agency over the world? Can ‘having tea’ be the point of a novel? Can one extract the banal speech of-the-day from, say, the Rig Vedas? Is art always a dialectic between the alien and the familiar? Is...
2019-08-311h 12
SynTalk#TLOPE (The List Of Permitted Emotions) --- SynTalkDo you talk to the Divine? Are feelings facts? Do you accept things as they are? What are you feeling at the moment? Are you agitated? Is sound the earliest primordial? However, do (say) colours, gestures, & silence also speak? Do emotions, fundamentally, emerge in cinema with the arrival of sound? How do we learn to say that we are not feeling well? Can emotions be thought of as objects? Which is the most ‘emotional’ part of the brain? Do words (& emotions) fall from heaven? How social or cultural are they? Is empathy (also) mediated by signs/words? Is the world cons...
2019-07-131h 18
SynTalk#TCOO (The Confluence Of Opposites) --- SynTalkAre you neutral? Is neutral inert? Do you practice hypocrisy? What does it mean to be (an) opposite? Are capitalism and socialism always incompatible? Do opposites always attract (even in natural systems) – why not? How might opposites be brought together? Are (certain) paradoxes culturally contingent? Can the cultural be told apart from the religious? Where did the very notion of religion emerge from? Does every enzyme always have a precise lock-key relationship with its specific substrate? How do proteins take their shapes, & what role do opposite charges/shapes play? Can certain mechanisms prevent extreme socio/political outcomes? Can democracy and au...
2019-07-061h 09
SynTalk#TSOC (The Seeds Of Communities) --- SynTalkDo you (only) like people like you? Is belonging ‘necessary’? Are communities homogeneous? How do communities become political actors from being social entities? Are community identities a way of becoming legible for the State? Does the idea of nations pre-suppose the idea of communities? Conversely, how do countries or communities fall apart? Are societies modern, & communities pre-modern? Can communities self-determine themselves as such? How much can communities scale? How is the community enacted, & what keeps it going? Are they all kept together by (filial) feelings? What is the interplay between blood, language, religion, ‘culture’, trade, and subsequent social formations? ‘Where’ are self-int...
2019-06-221h 05
SynTalk#TIIP (The Ideas In Print) --- SynTalkWhat would you have bought – an air pump, or a printing machine? What can you read? Does the idea of ‘writing’ automatically lead to the idea of ‘book’? Do you worship books? But, also immerse them in rivers? ‘Who’ has written the divine texts, & why? Do you (still) read aloud? Does the nature of support (say, clay tablet…) determine the writing style (…cuneiform)? Are media effects deterministic? What made paper cheap? What made/makes it to books? Why did the printing press not take off in Goa in the 16th century? Can there be complex societies without writing systems? Did print revolutioniz...
2019-06-011h 12
SynTalk#TLFD (The Last Few Days) --- SynTalkHave you ever touched the feet of a dead body? Who will you die in the company of? Where do dogs go to die? Do they grieve others’ death? Is fear of death universal? What causes delirium? What role does religion play in dying? When do children first begin to understand that death is permanent, & that even they would die someday? Is every dying person also a living person? Could grieving turn into a disease? How ‘complicated’ can grief be? Do people who deny death often have horrible ends? Does suffering cease to be suffering when it has meaning? Are you go...
2019-05-111h 11
SynTalk#TSOE (The Suns On Earth) --- SynTalkWhat came first – the nuclear power plant or the nuclear bomb? Do you fear nuclear power(s)? What was our experience of encountering coal? What is the relationship between energy consumption and well-being? What drives demand? Is more (always) better? Why did human population grow steeply from c. 1698? Where did the muscular Uncle Sam come from? Does pollution kill more people than wars? Is nuclearization value-neutral? How are human beings a part of nuclear power systems? How does (any) technology become a political or cultural artefact? What was the first official publicity like? Can ‘something’ be an instrument of peace ‘and’ an...
2019-05-041h 20
SynTalk#TMAA (The Mediators And Actors) --- SynTalkAre ‘things’ (truly) suppressed? What does it mean to act? (How?) is the fan in your computer doing something to you? Are there many kinds of intentionalities in the world? Do animals and machines also act? Are language, metaphysics, politics, agency – all – reserved only for us? Could politicization of the material world be thought of as depoliticization of the human society? What cannot interact? Is mediation a sub-species of action? Are definitions also actions? Is a detailed description identical to an explanation? Is there a depth dimension to Reality? Are things contained in space, or does space exist ‘because’ things exist? Does...
2019-03-171h 17
SynTalk#TCON (The Circuits Of Nomads) --- SynTalkAre nomads free? Are nations stable? Do you take the ground for granted? Where are your ancestors from? Why did modern humans leave Africa? Are empires and nations products of circulatory processes? What circulates, & how? Have you heard of nomadic empires? Do nomads make good citizens? Is their relationship with the settled often symbiotic? Are the nomads not settled because the animals (that they live off) are not settled? Does culture reproduce the spaces of circulation via (say) music, houses, culinary practices, & marriages? Is anything static dead? Do different entities (from earth to individuals) and phenomena (from droughts to mutations...
2019-03-091h 08
SynTalk#TMMOF (The Many Manners Of Falling) --- SynTalkWhy is that body heading the other way? Do different objects fall differently? Is it a mystery why bodies attract each other? What is the ontology of gravity? Did Newton find his own idea of universal gravitation absurd? When was Space first believed to be unlimited? Do belief systems and knowledge systems always influence each other? Does experience form intuition? Is a simultaneous process of falling in and falling out always ongoing in the Universe? What is it like to fall into black holes? Are they empty inside? Are their horizons smooth? Are black holes fuzzballs (or ‘string stars’)? How do t...
2019-02-241h 21
SynTalk#TPPP (The Public Private Puzzles) --- SynTalkCan you do whatever you want at home? Do you own private property? Do you hold (private) opinions? ‘What’ do you care for? Why & how do boundaries shift between the private and public realms? Do you have a right to health (& to smoke?)? Does economic development influence how public-private distinction is thought of? Is the process of drawing lines always political? Does increasing GDP always work automatically for publicly desired outcomes? Must private property also (eventually) be seen as enhancing publicness? Do cities get made by plans? Are urban realms continuums of spaces and energies? How do practices create temporary priv...
2019-02-231h 08
SynTalk#TAIU (The Animals In Us) --- SynTalkOf what womb are you born? Are there good & bad animals? ‘Where’ is there no Law? Are the outlawed animal-like? Who gets to be a citizen of the polis? Are Pandavas princes in the forest? Are the freer nobler? Does the wolf look down upon the dog? Are animals truly in the open? Are humans, in a sense, the most abandoned? Is the jungle still within us? Did our ability to exchange (& imagine) enable us to curb our animal instincts and establish ‘humanity’? Where do Gods and demons come from? Is divinity empathy? What exactly is tiger-man? Does hunger lead to evil...
2019-01-201h 17
SynTalk#TETH (The Euphoria The Humdrum) --- SynTalkAre you in (deep) passionate love? Or, have passions calmed down? Do revolutions happen spontaneously, & what maintains them? How do we keep various commitments? Do you imagine yourself as an object? What bores you? Could we, sometimes, experience boredom in a deep kind of way? Can human relationships be authentically mediated by objects? Is consumerism itself a revolution? Do most of us not have a systematic view of the world? Do (only) individuals fall in love? Do we become more revolutionary merely if we suffer more? What role do narratives play? What is the future of – the idea of – pure love...
2019-01-131h 19
SynTalk#TIAU (The Infrequent And Unlikely) --- SynTalkCould traits trend? What do you want to detect? Are there many more rare species than common species? When is the past representative of the future? Are all models wrong and precarious? What, then, is evidence? Can surprises be modeled? Do unlikely events often happen in very likely ways? Are correlations higher on extremes? Are rare species more redundant? How might one find proxies for rarities? Is likelihood a comparative measure of ‘distance’ from the truth to the model? Is it trivial to select the most ‘likely’ model when given the data? Are inferences always highly model-dependent (especially for rare events...
2019-01-121h 11
SynTalk#TNAOT (The New And Old Together) --- SynTalkIs repair a form of creation? When can the new and the old coexist? Is the idea of ‘new’ itself, human and, new? Is this understanding always subject/context dependent? Why don’t we sometimes notice the new? What’s new for the deer in the savannah? Is memory history? When is the old also obsolete? Do events have both a past and a future? How is the past unlike an object? Did capitalism ‘create’ time? Did modernity change both the object and the subject? How do certain societies break away from the past more easily? How can the erased be recovered...
2019-01-051h 15
SynTalk#TSAWM (The Strong And Weak Modes) --- SynTalkIs Earth one system? How stable is New York? What sort of a person are you? How does the structure of your networks change the way you behave? How do you find out if something is good? Are societies with (Royal Family-like) strong hubs bad for social learning? Can atmosphere be thought of in terms of networks? Are unstable solutions more likely to become strong? Is it coincidental that strong El Niño and weak Monsoon often go together? Why/when did Krishna have to show his large magnificent form? Is strength always a transient (contingent) ‘solution’? Is democracy the rule...
2018-12-221h 19
SynTalk#TFOS (The Faculty Of Suffering) --- SynTalkIs it nonsensical to think that suffering is a part of the ‘human condition’? Are you a passive victim? Can you easily be more or less of yourself? Who suffers? Do we suffer because we are highly (self) conscious creatures? Are you forced to engage with the everyday? Does suffering have a duration, and can we live purely (& independently) in the present? Is violence inevitable in all lives? Can one voluntarily incur suffering? Does being a victim have any moral consequences? Can sacrifice be practised narcissistically? Is sacrifice a way of taking violence, and turning it inwards? Does everyone have some...
2018-12-151h 09
SynTalk#TNAN (The Neighbours And Neighbourhoods) --- SynTalkAre we neighbours? Do ghost authors write probabilistically? Could one build a house between your and your neighbour’s house? Can we draw a graph of the universe with colours of all the points in it? Do languages have distances from each other? How do sounds create neighbours linguistically? When/how can process states or words or sentences be said to be neighbours? Can A be a neighbour of B, when B is not a neighbour of A? Why can’t there be adjacent ‘points’? Are neighbours geometry dependent? Does the idea of neighbours change if time and/or space is conti...
2018-12-081h 08
SynTalk#TTOTS (The Traits Of The Searchable) --- SynTalkWhat makes Ujjain searchable? When did you last use a thesaurus? Does all search presuppose a structure, & can this structure be implicit? Is labeling necessary; when? How can one say if a text is structured? Are we all unique; but are we all also searchable because we belong to ‘groups’? Are all search problems matching problems? Is all search correlational? Can we search in different ways and find the same thing? Can different documents/texts/languages be coherent vis-à-vis each other? Is the final arbiter eventually the (human) searcher? Are you able to walk into any ‘library’ and use it with e...
2018-12-011h 18
SynTalk#TSAM (The Still And Moving) --- SynTalkHow are you experiencing time now? Is everything moving? Is the Still merely an ‘extract’ from the flux? Do images constitute both matter and memory? Can a 3D representation be created from several 2D images? How is motion detected? Is the interrelationship between the cameras themselves crucial to figuring out the structure of space? Is the moving image (truly?) a composite of still images? What lies between the moving and the still – GIFs? Is the perceptual world constituted by our senses? Is sensory stimulus itself always ambiguous? Can moments be appended if they are not already there? What exactly does exposu...
2018-11-251h 21
SynTalk#TIBR (The Irregular But Rendered) --- SynTalkCan we avoid fractals if we want to? Are our fingers irregular? Is there thumb cancer? Or, toe cancer? Are all regular objects ‘algebraically’ representable? Are cones manifolds? Do cubes have an algebraic description? Can algebraic equations catch everything (?) that topology cannot? Might two visually indistinguishable manifolds vary dramatically? Can circles have a ‘complex’ structure? Do biological objects (including virus) have edges or points? Do multi scale interactions make hearts or kidneys regular? Do biological objects always (always) live in time? Can the open Euclidean space be put ‘inside’ another space? Can shape, volume, and size (say) tell us whether a biological...
2018-11-251h 19
SynTalk#TTTT (The Turns Technology Takes) --- SynTalkAre you thinking of going back to paradise? Does technology exist, autonomously, without us? Is it the new vector ruling the world? Where did the idea of newness come from? Does technology come (more) from arts & crafts than science? Do both socialism and capitalism go together with technology? Was Industrial Revolution science driven? Might religious change drive technology? Similarly, do new technologies change social relations? How is organic evolution different from the technological? Are hybridization and differentiation possibilities much greater in technology? What does not change? Do we need a ‘Darwin of machines’? Is there always a gap between the user...
2018-10-271h 18
SynTalk#TOOD (The Opposites Of Dry) --- SynTalkAre bones dry? Is blood sticky? Are cells ‘rough’? Do dead cells dry up? Are stiffer (cancer) tumours more dangerous? Would stickiness on another planet be a tell-tale sign of the presence of Life? Does the act of adding and/or removing parts make things imperfect. Therefore, are all engineered artifacts rough? Does wettability depend upon both materials? Why do cells jiggle inside the matrix? Are all living environments aqueous? Can the architecture of blood vessels or cells be mathematically modeled? Is context everything? Why do some materials refuse to stick to another? How does one make something slippery or stic...
2018-10-061h 15
SynTalk#TVVS (The Very Very Slow) --- SynTalkAre younger systems faster? Do elephants mate slowly? Is a plastic ruler always ageing? Is only glass glassy? Why are processes slow or fast, & how do they speed up or slow down? Do all systems have an internal clock? Is water fast because it acts like a large correlated spring? Is there such a thing as fully-dissolved? Are certain social systems stable because they remain ‘useful’? How does fashion change fast? Is slowness a sign of highly connected groups? ‘How’ does inter-caste marriage happen? Is the past more important only for systems that are undergoing change? Do external disruptions lead to a rev...
2018-09-301h 12
SynTalk#TMOTU (The Mapping Of The Unknown) --- SynTalkWas the Earth ever flat? Do we live in a ‘flattish’ Universe? What did we first notice in the starry sky; & was anything fixed? How did the notion of the atom come to be? Have you heard accounts of maps/globes that do not exist anymore? Was the ‘World’ once – just – Asia, Europe and Africa? Do maps always orient us spiritually within the larger (ever-changing) Cosmos? Is the Universe static? Are maps a theory? What comes first – theory or observation? How can we map something we don’t see or is largely empty? Is all Dark Matter of one kind, & how do we know t...
2018-09-291h 15
SynTalk#TCOTI (The Context Of The Implicit) --- SynTalkWhat paints the scene for you? Do you often get carried away? How do we recall the mutable past? Is all implicitness context, time, politics, language, and subject dependent? Is our freest choice also controlled by culture? What makes something visible, sayable, perceivable, or (even) intuitive? Can the visual be more implicit than the textual? Is sound most implicit? Is our implicit explicit for ‘God’? Is architecture, being both symbolic and real, the language of the given? Is architecture mythical? How does the built form (say, the stage) reflect the natural world or the cosmology? Are airports non-places? How do the g...
2018-09-091h 12
SynTalk#TMFF (The Markets For Farmers) --- SynTalkDo you consume Garcinia? What does it mean to (not) own land or the forests? Do farms and forests lie on a continuum? Can forests themselves be farmed? Does wildlife conservation impact people for whom forests are a source of livelihood? Do we eat what some animals would not eat? Do you primarily eat (volatile) fresh produce? How are agricultural markets different from, and similar to, other markets? Is the Market an alien imposition atop the subsistence ‘economy’? Why are farmers often price takers? Where does market power emanate from, & what leads to interlocking and/or intermediation? Does ‘exchange’ capture more val...
2018-08-121h 19
SynTalk#TPKT (The Places Knotted Together) --- SynTalkHow far are you? ‘What’ is a place? Are they a moment of ‘realized’ relationships? Are (say) air pollution, hospitals, hydraulic systems, temperature, diseases, real estate prices, and species distributed similarly spatially? Does it take a lot of work to make a place? What does it mean for places to be similar? Have we always been placed the same way? Why aren’t there tigers in Sri Lanka? Are habitats and species always strongly correlated? Might India be closer to Madagascar than Africa in some respects? Can geological history be inferred from phylogeny? Can noise have a spatial structure? Is all data s...
2018-07-211h 18
SynTalk#TMBA (The Murmurs Before Arrival) --- SynTalkDo you forget names and words? Are you going to get Alzheimer’s soon? Is any experience fundamentally conditioned by time? What cannot be anticipated? Can murmurs function like (unprocessed?) signs? Why are multi-parameter signals very difficult to ‘observe’ ahead of time? Is knowing all the initial conditions the primary source of difficulty? How are social systems different? Can beauty be ‘a’ number? Are nucleation events always stochastic? Does growth of protein aggregates ‘fit’ the equations more easily in a test tube than in the human body? Is change of phase akin to change of model equations? Do magnets, markets, fluids, or (ev...
2018-07-141h 18
SynTalk#TJAG (The Just Almost Games) --- SynTalkWhat’s your kill count? Do cats and dogs play to win? Do you like running and racing? Does play express freedom while pushing at the boundaries of reality, materials, & rules? Does normal life lend solidity to games, even though they may be interrupted by reality? Are literature and games both forms of cultural simulation? Would a Martian visiting Earth be able to distinguish work from play? Why can games only be enacted (& not narrated) in real time by the player? Must players be aware of their effects on each other for a situation to be a game? How does na...
2018-06-301h 14
SynTalk#TTAT (The Types And Tokens) --- SynTalkAre you unique, even though you are of a certain type? What kind of a tree is the tree of life? Are all organisms, languages, and substances in the world distinct? 'Can' languages be genetically interpreted? How do we know if we have an origin common with (say) bacteria? Are types always fuzzy, and tokens always particular? Do types exist, & are they like classes? Does our craving for understanding lead us to structures, or does the World 'have' a structure? Are all languages tokens of a meta-language? Is Japanese (language) an isolate and therefore both a type and a token...
2018-06-091h 21
SynTalk#TCAO (The Chaotic And Orderly) --- SynTalkWhich side of the separatrix are you? Does self-interaction make systems chaotic? Have you ever experienced turbulence? Do you have an intuition for chaotic behaviour in various realms? Is chaos always fecund? However, can chaos also be ‘produced’? Is noise the same as chaos? Can very simple systems be chaotic? Can solids, circuits, and solar systems be chaotic? How do laminar (periodic) systems transition to aperiodic chaos, & vice versa, when (say) flow happens inside a pipe? Did chaos come first, & is everything thereafter a result of its coming together with Gaia and Eros? Is it possible for the future to dete...
2018-06-021h 10
SynTalk#TUUC (The Ultimate Ultimate Causes) --- SynTalkDo we die ‘because’ we stop breathing? Is it possible to say how ‘a’ cancer is caused? Do causes exist? Are they (always) universal, uniform, & a priori? Are all phenomena eventually multi-causal and probabilistic? Might cause be a feature of the mind? Is the ‘concept’ of cause essential? What explains changes in the world? What role do (say) our senses, culture, technology, institutions, & chance play? Why do grasshoppers jump randomly once in a while? Can randomness also have causes? Is the effect invalid without the (correct) cause? Does technology (the ‘how’) often precede science (the ‘why’)? Is understanding of causality, however, both benefi...
2018-05-261h 11
SynTalk#TCAOS (The Closed And Open Systems) --- SynTalkCan the ocean be boiled? Is the aquarium a closed system? Is the Universe an open system? Are all systems conceptual (& arbitrary?)? Do systems always have components? Can an individual body have a temperature? Why does the temperature not change ‘during’ the process of freezing? What describes volume? Might we have closed (idealized) theories to understand otherwise open systems? How do bodies ‘turn’ inactive? Is openness always a question of degree given (say) the strength of interactions and/or the dimensional scale? Is classical theory an approximation of quantum theory? What would your little protest do? Can closed societies stay closed f...
2018-04-211h 09
SynTalk#TSTP (The Survival To Posterity) --- SynTalkWhat’s posterity ever done for you? What survives in the long run? How did (public) museums come to be from private collections? Who owns the past? Do we transact with the invisible sacral world via these accumulations? How is the integrity of (say) sounds preserved and meanings imbued in them? What makes chants memorable? Can objects be looked at as mere postulations? Are ‘art’ objects pointers to a certain moment in time in the artist’s life? How stable are museums – do objects sometimes end up in a bonfire there? Can art survive only by including the possibility of its own ch...
2018-04-151h 13
SynTalk#TGAM (The Gestures And Movements) --- SynTalkDoes your neck hurt? Do you allow yourself to be moved? What is your relationship with gravity? Are ‘bodies moving in space’ the fundamental units of meaning? Do we shape the space around us geometrically? Is dance a way of generating numbers from the metaphysical space (…from the stars?)? Is our body, also, linear and planar? Is your body interconnected? Can you feel your fascia? Could gestures ‘disturb’ language? Is a static body always lifeless? Is movement (intention?) life, & is only displacement movement? Do notions of stability and movement go hand in hand? Do our thoughts change when we change our postur...
2018-03-311h 09
SynTalk#TIOP (The Implications Of Poverty) --- SynTalkCan inequality kill you? Are poorer brains smaller? Is poverty (= inequality + deprivation) the mother of all diseases? Do the rich lead shorter lives in unequal countries? (Why) does Law, with its attempted neutrality, often criminalize poverty? How is theft by a rich person different? Can/should the State demand actions off the poor for them to access ‘benefits’? Is providing opportunity enough, or must inequality of agency also always be addressed? Would you drink water from any well? Are there economic benefits of having a socially cohesive society? Does our brain respond to the environment more than any other body part...
2018-02-171h 11
SynTalk#TWOC (The Workings Of Clocks) --- SynTalkDo pilots experience jet lag? Why are there different types of rhythms? What does your heart beat ‘to’? Is all of life periodic (because of the sun)? Is there a master clock to everything, & are all clocks analogous? Does each cell have its own (genetic) clock? Do clocks help us stay in phase with each other? Do ‘autonomous’ (hardware) clocks always drift? How do clocks correct themselves? Are computer network clocks eventually physically anchored (in, say, Caesium clocks)? How are atomic clocks made to keep solar time? How is time served on networks? Is temporal constancy of fundamental constants, even, possible...
2018-02-031h 12
SynTalk#TMOC (The Matter Of Cities) --- SynTalkDo villages grow up to be cities? Do you have piped water? Is your city your home? Do you feel free? Or, abandoned? Or, anonymous? Why do people come together and cohabit in large numbers? Does this itself create new possibilities (& externalities)? How ‘natural’ is a city? Can there be villages within a city unit? What is called urban? Are cities heterogeneous and diverse, but also internally hierarchical? Why do ghettoes, slums, & suburbs emerge and persist? Do cities mirror the modern nation state or the medieval empires? Can cities transform agricultural practices? Can a city sustain itself even as it dest...
2018-01-201h 12
SynTalk#THOTT (The Higher Order Thought Tools)--- SynTalkWhat’s a thought? Could that chair have been water? Does perception precede production? What does it mean to know a language? How & why did humans end up acquiring the very complex (& ‘discontinuous’) linguistic capacity? How do we carry meaning detached from the real physical world? Do we reason axiomatically or algorithmically? Is semantics logical? Do non-human animals care about reasons? How different is our brain from the primates ‘right behind us’? Do the ‘number’ of brain areas matter; why? Does language have a tendency to structure itself? What is one innate with when one is born? Is the linguistic faculty infere...
2018-01-071h 12
SynTalk#TEMM (The En Masse Media) --- SynTalkAre you looking at a small screen now? Do you like following news ‘stories’ and soap operas? Why are the processes of media production always getting homogenized? Is the content often ‘more of the same’ – why? Is media a creature of the market? Are humans innately in the narrative mode both for communicating and sense-making? ‘Or’, do we now increasingly take in the world impressionistically? What does individuation of choices lead to? When do individuals make ‘good’ choices? Isn’t wholesome entertainment great? Can media be used to consciously produce social change and potentialities? Must social messages be entertaining? Is free press possible...
2018-01-061h 09
SynTalk#TDAC (The Discrete And Continuous) --- SynTalkIs grey ‘real’? Is all discretization perspectival? Can there be absolute notions of discreteness and continuity? Is time eternal? Is the world continuous but we perceive it as discrete? Are micro and macro objects continuous, but the meso discrete? Can real numbers be ‘made’ from integers? Are real numbers continuous (analog), & integers discrete (digital)? Do we don’t have access to ‘most’ of the real numbers? Did God make integers – or only 1 (& 0?)? What does Fourier Transform imply? What is the most fundamental signal? When does sampling not lead to loss of information? Can the sense of touch be discretized? Can surgeries be per...
2017-12-231h 17
SynTalk#TCOD (The Constraints Of Diagrams) --- SynTalkImagine taking a step forward, then a step to the right, & then a step back – where are you now? Do you have to reason for this, & how ‘far’ can you go? How are diagrammatic reasoning and representation different? Are diagrams for domains that can be represented spatially? Are mental images an internal perceptual representation shared by both internal and external inputs? Do (explicit) symbols make cognition possible? Is our cognitive architecture multi-modal? Can the blind use diagrams? How do we know what is extraneous in diagrams? Are diagrams often socially constructed? Do shapes lie somewhere between speech and scripts? Can a chil...
2017-12-101h 14
SynTalk#TAAF (The Alienation And Freedom) --- SynTalkAre you free if thoughts just occur to you? Is alienation – as loss of a sense of belonging and subjectivity – a phenomenon of modernity? Is freedom contra-causal and spontaneous? Is it truly in human nature to be free? Are people ‘already’ free? Do you exercise your freedom in the Market? Is all of production voluntary? Is production a form of fulfillment? Is leisure (without work), then, a threat to freedom? Are you overworked and overspent? Are your desires yours? Are we accumulating ‘garbage’? Why don’t consumers go on strike? Are we biologically and socially constrained? Is there a connection between langua...
2017-12-091h 18
SynTalk#TFOT (The Fantasy Of Translation) --- SynTalkDo you trust your translator? How can ‘worlds’ be translated? Where is Tamil when a novelist writes in English about Tamil speaking characters? Are all translations interpretations (judgment?)? Can one ‘read’ Nature? Can mathematics be translated into (natural language) prose? Is translation prior to language, & (therefore) is it in the nature of languages to be translatable? How then are languages different from one another? Can the forces of translation be located within one language itself? How are scientific texts different? Is symbolization a form of translation? Is science a form of storytelling? Are both equations and poetry essential & point-like? Do you read...
2017-11-251h 11
SynTalk#TEAE (The Eras And Epochs) --- SynTalkCan you be a revolutionary? Might concrete events have causes, but not history? What drives the world? Does history develop (or progress?) in stages? Is the end there at the beginning? Are we moving from ‘less free’ to ‘more free’? Are eras and epochs merely intellectual constructs, & always retrospective? Does human mind create different visions of the same era? How did human wants increase for the formulaic economic human to emerge? What role did trade play? Is creative technology an in-born element of life? Why isn’t there progress for ever? Is each epoch about an understanding of Being? Is future an...
2017-11-191h 18
SynTalk#TCOA (The Coordination Of Affairs) --- SynTalkAre more than a third of you crooks; could you arrive at a consensus? When do we need to work together? Can introducing uncertainty (or randomness?) get rid of certain equilibria? Is coordination necessary for resource access by multiple agents? Is building synchronous hardware difficult? Is it even possible to say whether motor proteins are coordinating? Are systems with heterogeneous agents more likely to coordinate; & when? Can you move your lips; how? Can all problems be decoupled into ‘n’ pieces? Do process ‘geometries’ and communication systems matter? How does the central bank help firms coordinate? When is central planning essential? How is t...
2017-11-041h 11
SynTalk#TROI (The Role Of Interfaces) --- SynTalkWhat is on that side? Where does identity crisis happen? Is interface a neighborhood concept? Can there be interfaces without fences? Are there non-membrane bound life forms? How do we connect computers or networks? How does the human brain communicate with the CPU? What is the dimensionality of interfaces? Can intelligence be encoded into materials? Where is a cell controlled from? Is Wi-Fi physical? Is autonomy difficult? Do different kinds of interactions lead to different kinds of interfaces? Can a physically imposed political boundary create different spaces? Are the number of interfaces in HCI systems increasing? Is all logic language...
2017-09-241h 14
SynTalk#TKOP (The Kinds Of Pain) --- SynTalkDo you have a pain of 9? Do you malinger? 'Where' does it hurt, & when? Do you want to be admitted to a hospital? Do you want attention? Are you suffering from loneliness? Do you need morphine? Is pain subjective, & always multidimensional? Is the brain always a part of any pain experience? Is pain a disease? How can it be assessed? Can there be patients without diseases, and diseases without patients? Can groups experience pain? Is treating the pain different from treating the disease? Do only pain killers relieve pain? How does pain reinforce itself? Can social or economic or political...
2017-09-161h 07
SynTalk#TFOC (The Faces Of Connectedness) --- SynTalkAre you very well known? Do you live in a ‘small world’? Can connectedness be measured? How did/do books, knowledge, money, voice, & commodities circulate? What is the topological structure of the internet? Is everything connected a network? Do we try to stabilize networks via protocols? Does internet have more ‘filters’ than ‘doors’? What are the effects of media? Is most economic value created via affective infrastructures by measuring & tapping the senses? Are there limits to how large networks can be? Are all large networks hierarchical? Is your memory layered? Does the human brain have hubs? Must local rules always be simple? W...
2017-08-191h 07
SynTalk#TPAC (The Paradoxes And Contradictions) --- SynTalkHow does your tongue taste? What do you take for granted? Can you create randomness? Do you act in the continuum? Can you then reason about racing a tortoise ahead of you? Is there something common to most paradoxes? Can all paradoxes be ‘stated’? Do paradoxes owe something to the nature of Reality? Are dilemma, doubt, disbelief, paradoxes, & contradictions in the same class? Do we necessarily need faith before reasoning? Is there a reasoning process that does not lead to paradoxes? Why isn't Gödel's Theorem a Law? Are all paradoxes connected to language? Can a logic be complete but undec...
2017-08-181h 11
SynTalk#TPAV (The Price And Value) --- SynTalkDo people bet on horses when they bet on horses? What does money 'do'? Does money fundamentally deal with the future? Why don't we have a market in people anymore? Isn’t Market an elaborate barter system? How do different things commensurate with each other? Does price make value observable? Is the world created by labour? Can labour be the scale for pricing? Can Market solve ‘all’ problems? Is price always embedded in a broader system of values? Why is Copenhagen's racing different from Delhi’s? Is capitalism also gambling? Does risk, as such, 'produce' profit? Does only the capitalist speculat...
2017-08-061h 18
SynTalk#TNAC (The Norms And Conventions) --- SynTalkDo you tip in restaurants you are unlikely to revisit? Why (not)? Have you violated a norm or a 'rule' lately? Do norms (for collective action) and conventions (for coordination) solve different kinds of social problems? Are norms constraints? Are conventions self enforcing? Is the capacity to develop and enforce norms central to being human? Would we have societies without norms? Is it important for societies to 'informally' punish opportunistic behaviour in a decentralized way? What does 'breaking the rule' mean in (say) classical music? Is there, however, also a convention of breaking the norm? Do some conventions become norms...
2017-08-051h 08
SynTalk#TIIH (The Invisible Invisible Hand) --- SynTalkAre you civil? When do you put your self interest aside? Does it depend on the ‘evolutionary game’ you are playing? Is justice fairness? Is a fair world impossible? What do markets promote? Is 'price' the magic wand? Can price take all the externalities into account? Do initial endowments always matter? Can social order emerge in a group of only self interested individuals? When can natural selection be said to be occurring? Why aren’t all groups societies? Is there fairness (or even efficiency) in the animal world? Is despotism or nepotism the price that we pay for having a civiliz...
2017-07-291h 17
SynTalk#TSAS (The Saying And Showing) --- SynTalkWhy don’t we misunderstand the number 3? Do you have a private photograph? Is most of perception ineffable? Do propositions capture reality? What cannot be shown? Or, said? How does one describe touch? Or disgust? What/how do you understand if you watch a foreign language film without subtitles? How is it even possible for our thought to be about the world? Does the logical form of a fact and its (corresponding) sentence match each other? Does language 'depict' the world? How does this picturing take place? Is saying helpless without showing? Is seeing believing? Are films merely audiovisual? Is th...
2017-07-151h 12
SynTalk#TLGAG (The Local Global And Glocal) --- SynTalkDoes the Indonesian (?) in you love idlis? Are we all (universal) human beings? But, does society narrow our experience of the world? Must we then be spatiotemporally-bound? But, do universal ideas also come from situatedness? Is local, however, also always hybrid? How is a universal regionalized in architecture or literature? What is decidedly local – a consciousness? Does local see itself as hybrid? Is the self-image of your community locally constructed? Does connected mean homogenized? Can the local be fully evacuated? What is your style of experiencing the world? How can you experience darshana? Does being attuned to the local memories po...
2017-07-081h 13
SynTalk#TKAK (The Kith And Kin) --- SynTalkWhy don’t you help all your relatives? Why do people marry? Do you know your pedigree? Can relatedness be measured or recognized with precision? Are close relatives the best organ donors? Who guarantees your loans? Who can the closest relative be? Do four first cousins equal one sibling? Would altruism evolve in the absence of kinship? Does the environment impact the benefit/cost of helping? Can organisms self reproduce? Is it possible for males to have neither a father nor a son? Do all off-springs have mothers? Do plants have relatives? Is incest prohibition the Universal Law of Kinship? Is...
2017-06-241h 15
SynTalk#TPOE (The Properties Of Events) --- SynTalkDid H. M. lead an eventless life? How was your last beach holiday? How do languages make events granular? Can events in texts be ‘inferred’ computationally? Do events always occur in the past? Is evental time modal? Are events objects? Are places facts? Is a decaying apple evental? Are all events spatiotemporal? How do recent events become long term episodic memories or facts? Are events and facts stored in the same region? Are space and time encoded differently? What is the role of relevance? Is the amount of encoding directly proportional to the amount of surprise? How accurately do we reme...
2017-06-171h 13
SynTalk#TDOD (The Dynamics Of Dominance) --- SynTalkDo chimpanzees play politics? Why do we act spitefully or ‘altruistically’? Is one human being equal to another? Is power without hegemony possible? Is there always an established social order? Is competition for resources scrambles or contests? Is nature a good guide to explain human behaviour? Is culture a result of adaptation? Are orders of dominance always subject to change? When are leaders and subordinates coupled? Does equilibrium selection depend upon whether a game is sequential or simultaneous? Why is it difficult to give a non-patterned response to the leader? Are there compensations for being subordinated? Do subjects contribute to thei...
2017-05-271h 13
SynTalk#TSAP (The Separations And Partitions) --- SynTalkHave you ever received a partly garbled email? Might mixtures be made of mixtures? Are you a separate being? Do you stand ‘in’ history? How is coming-together different from mixing? Is it possible to separate out the constituents from a mixture without knowing what they are? Why does the chiral environment of the body matter? How difficult is pure separation, & why? Can separation or decoding be done in real time? Is separation trivial after mixing? Do different groups constrain individual identities differently? Can partitions be constructions? Why is vote-to-seat conversion so difficult in elections? Does noise have statistical properties? How are...
2017-05-131h 12
SynTalk#TCOE (The Conundrums Of Embodiment) --- SynTalkDo you despise your body? Can the body be a source of transcendence? Can one, however, have nothing but only the body? Are we embedded in this world as bodies with other objects, texts, rituals, spectators, and bodies? Is everybody also a biological, physical, social, & political object? Do you see yourself through the eyes of others? Can there be The (disembodied) View from Nowhere? Is it possible to experience the body as the object and subject fused together? Why do we watch dance? Why do dancers dance, & is any movement dance? Why get into tough postures? Why touch? Can the...
2017-04-291h 08
SynTalk#TGOI (The Grounds Of Introspection) --- SynTalkDo we often misunderstand ourselves? Can we be aware of everything? Is introspective knowledge reliable? Can we be mistaken about being hungry? Might the gap between successive thoughts be increased until there is complete thoughtlessness; can this be measured? Is introspection voluntary or involuntary? Is awareness a general relational state (& not a 'happening’)? How does global consciousness emerge in the ensemble state of neurons? Do animals develop conceptual self understanding? Why do we have the introspective faculty? Do introverts and extroverts introspect differently? Is introspection culture-bound? Do you feel your body during silent speech? Is inner speech unstructured or does it...
2017-03-261h 09
SynTalk#THOE (The Habits Of Experience) --- SynTalkObserve. Which colour do you see? Is blueness in there? Which languages do you speak? Does experience tell us anything by itself? Would language make any sense without it? What is it to be grounded in experience? Does some of our reasoning depend upon it? What makes a concept legitimate? How does science try to make itself less subjective, & more observationally verifiable? Do experiments expand our experience? Do ordinary habits of languages sometimes perpetuate misconceptions? Is it important to distinguish between the reality, the appearance, and the ‘tag’? Why is learning a new language difficult? What is the logical process by w...
2017-03-251h 07
SynTalk#TBOE (The Beginnings Of Ethics) --- SynTalkDo you live without regrets? Do you spontaneously follow rules? How did we first know if something is right or wrong? Does moral reasoning always progress in stages? Is this process always culture-relative? Can ethics, then, ever be universal? Must all ethical dualities be collapsed? Does bad become good when slaves become masters? Does our resentment for those with power give us satisfaction? Can we buy goodness? Does morality need faith? Must we behave decently even if existence is absurd? Is the individual always subordinated to the social? If human beings are self centred, then how do empathy, compassion or ‘co...
2017-03-191h 11
SynTalk#TFOP (The Future Of Prediction) --- SynTalkHow unpredictable are we? Do our desires and constraints make us more detectable? Is data collection (somehow) always human? What’s not predictable? Can terrorist behaviour be predicted with consistency? Must data be balanced? Are cheats (terrorists, hackers, spiders, bots) more easily detected only if they are in the minority? Must predictions necessarily have explanatory power and granularity? Would tsunamis become completely predictable in the long run, as solar eclipses now are? Are predictions, like for gravitational waves, sometimes very difficult to confirm? Must we sometimes capture 'all' the data (say via sky surveys) even before deciding on all the an...
2017-03-181h 14
SynTalk#TDSS (The Dreamy Sleepy States) --- SynTalkDo you have difficulty sleeping? Can one dream while sleep walking? What/when/how do we express to ourselves via our dreams? Can painting be dream-like? Do we understand the mechanisms underlying imagination, dreams, and fantasy? Are (conscious) signals below a threshold deactivated when one is asleep, so that the (un/sub-conscious) ‘noise’ becomes signal? Are dreams always replays of thought processes? How graded is sleep? Do cats or platypus or hunting dogs dream? Do we dream every time we sleep? Are memories ever lost? Do dreams have a duration, & can we narrate them sequentially? Are dreams solely pictorial and nece...
2017-02-191h 13
SynTalk#TSFC (The Strategies For Comparison) --- SynTalkIs anything isolated? Is comparison essential? Does the entire cosmos consist of a structure of relationships? When comparing, must we think in terms of similarity rather than difference? Is comparison a fundamental way of dealing with complexity in the world? Do you write in a third language? Why is Persian metaphorical (& more so for the non-native speaker?)? Does one have to negotiate the terms of comparison before comparing? Does this depend on the ‘operation’ one is looking to carry out? Is a plane (say) an analytic as well as an algebraic as well as a geometric object, among others; How? Can...
2017-01-291h 07
SynTalk#TLOS (The Lure Of Suicide) --- SynTalkIs life precious? Whose property is it? Is the final act of suicide narratable? Can you tolerate frustration? Rage? Shame? Could one commit suicide without any conscious reason? Is suicide alluring? Do we instinctively long to unite with some deep inanimate part of nature? Are we ‘beings towards death’? Does a suicide bring together both the radical uniqueness and the similarity of death? Why do men commit suicide more than women? Do you identify with your mother? Is suicide a cowardly act? How coherent is the Self? Can the killer and the killed be one? Is suicide a breakdown of the...
2017-01-221h 05
SynTalk#TCOC (The Cusps Of Creativity) --- SynTalkCan you be creative consciously? Can verification of an idea be fully worked out in the unconscious state itself? Does P equal NP; & is proving computationally more intensive than verifying? Can a system be called creative if it explores all possibilities (with brute force) before selecting one? What, then, is creativity for machines? Might daydreaming have underlying processes akin to stochastic optimization or simulated annealing? Are there different types of creativity? Can it be defined? Is a non-obvious step essential? Can a software program be granted a patent? Is Transfigured Night still surprising? Can one be technically incompetent, and yet...
2017-01-151h 12
SynTalk#TSAF (The Shapes And Forms) --- SynTalkWhy is your shape what it is? Are shadows 2D? Is matter potentiality, and form actuality? What do shapes mean at different scales? Do shapes evolve? Are only regular 3D shapes stable? Is (the shape of, say) quartz stable, & can equilibrium shapes be derived? Is all matter porous? Why isn't everything spherical? Does nature (topologically speaking) make toruses from spheres? Do forms depend upon whether a system is isotropic or anisotropic? Why are biological shapes always fluctuating? Is life always out of equilibrium? Are kinetic (growing or moving) shapes different? Do swarms, liquid crystals, & bacteria colonies act like magnetized systems...
2017-01-081h 03
SynTalk#TAOD (The Agency Of Design) --- SynTalkAre you proud of your buckets and combs? Is a cup culture-specific? What's typical? Are objects a part of your identity? Can empathy be created? Can buildings foster (multidimensional) equity? What is bad design? Do the best designs (try to) do many things simultaneously? Does a challenging design problem always involve trade-offs and incentive conflicts? How do evolving needs, preferences, and available resources lead to new categories? Why do non information intensive products (such as debt) catering to perennial needs stay central for a very long time? How sharp or fuzzy are the boundaries between different products? Why don't we...
2016-12-181h 09
SynTalk#TPAD (The Patterns And Distributions) --- SynTalkIs 29 absolutely prime? Are the 26 letters of the English alphabet arbitrary? Can you learn a word in isolation? How are children able to learn languages without being taught? Why are there patterns at all, & which are more likely? Do objects with more symmetries occur more often? Can patterns be understood via distributions? (How) are constellations in the sky invariant? Are relations more fundamental than entities? Are prime numbers randomly distributed? Is transformation possible only in invariant systems? Which patterns are transitory? How is the multiplicative (rotation?) operation different from the additive (translation)? Do we know which computer program is most...
2016-12-171h 09
SynTalk#TMOM (The Magic Of Making) --- SynTalkIs all making curating? Is the location of a maker a fiction? Are there always rules to making? Is any expression preceded by an act of repression? How, then, is black magic different from magic? Is alchemy possible? Why can’t every molecule be made? How are some isomers easier to make? Can experience be created without materials? Does architecture help us carve an address in this vast universe by housing rituals in space? Are films different because it is a temporal medium and does not ‘exist’ in nature? How was Vitamin B12 synthesized? Are chemical reactions (always?) rhythmic and minimal...
2016-12-041h 10
SynTalk#TDAL (The Darkness Around Light) --- SynTalkWhat does a bee see? Do we see light? What are we blind to? Is the universe dark? Does darkness have a physical basis? Is light a wave or a particle or both or something else? Does this depend on the nature of the detector? Is light (like a) photon for living systems? Are photons wave packets? Why haven’t all the contradictory theories of light been permanently overthrown? Is the discipline reorganized differently when we revisit it after several centuries? How is heat different from light? Is it probable that there is life somewhere vis-à-vis another (non overlapping) wav...
2016-11-271h 05
SynTalk#TDOG (The Decisions Of Groups) --- SynTalkDo you have a default tendency to say: ‘Yes’? When do you abandon your own information and follow the herd? Can herds form because of individual selfish interests? How do bee colonies decide? Are all social animals herd animals? Is there no good way to ‘independently’ aggregate group preferences without a ‘dictator’? How does aggregation of preferences and information differ from each other? Must a jury consider everyone’s opinions? Does the nature of the problem (whether cognition, coordination, or cooperation) influence group decision making? Can majority decision making be completely chaotic? Do group sizes and social hierarchies matter? When can small grou...
2016-11-061h 05
SynTalk#TLOM (The Limits Of Mathematics) - - - SynTalkIs Nature logical? Is uncertainty hardwired into Nature? Where do the paradoxes or aporia lie? Might paradoxes exist in the object (& not in the thinking)? What is the ontological status of mathematical objects? Are laws of Nature really written in the language of mathematics? Is mathematics a form of philosophical speculation? Did mechanization precede mathematization? Are axioms more pragmatic than theoretical? Can all mathematics be reduced to (but not derived from) logic? 'How' is mathematics able to explain reality? Can the quantum or the cosmological scales be visualized using Euclidean geometry? Does theoretical physics sometimes invent its own mathematics to...
2016-10-301h 13
SynTalk#TTOT (The Tricks Of Transmission) - - - SynTalkHow is an entity able to copy itself? How do the four DNA base (A, T, C, G) molecules function like ‘symbols’ leading to the entire genetic code? Why can’t a neuron be treated as a symbol? Are genetic and linguistic codes analogous to each other, with common notions of letters, words, sentences, grammar, and (even) punctuation marks? Is all DNA ‘useful’? How do proteins derive their meaning (function?), & how are they regulated? Does a sentence derive its value from the non linguistic realm? What is the interplay of syntax and semantics for transmission? Is the genetic language highly similar ac...
2016-10-231h 02
SynTalk#TVOP (The Varieties Of Punishments) --- SynTalkAre we trustworthy? Are you being watched; by whom? How is punishment in the personal sphere different from that imposed by Law? Does Law reason, & permit discretion? Is re-offence rampant? Is punishment a necessity (& a utility?) in a social ordered system? Does society punish for its own sake? Must punishment be just and proportionate, and not merely efficient? Does it need to be accompanied by a moral event in the perpetrator? Can one buy one’s way out of capital punishment? Must causation be separated from correlation to understand if deterrence works? Are moral systems to be kept out of le...
2016-10-231h 05
SynTalk#TGATJ (The Garden And The Jungle) --- SynTalkIs dingo in danger? What are forests and gardens 'for'? Is the wilderness a place where humans are absent? What is the history of the conception of wilderness? Can nature be sculpted? Are gardens a space on a continuum between the city and the jungle? Why do we build gardens? What do you introduce into gardens? Are visually remarkable species preferred in this process? Why are only certain trees planted? Are there 'local' plants and animals? Are starlings American? Are potatoes Indian? Why aren't all alien species invasive? Are we an invasive species? When does adaptation succeed, & why are animals...
2016-10-081h 08
SynTalk#TPDP (The Path Dependent Paths) --- SynTalkAre you using a QWERTY keyboard? Why do all clocks go clockwise? Can some systems get locked into sub-optimal states? Why are some processes path dependent and some not? Does the number of variables or the ‘direction’ of change matter? Can future be memory-less, & depend only on the present and not on the past? Can one ‘ensure’ that systems escape unstable equilibria? What role do initial conditions and noise play in arriving at one of multiple possible equilibria? When do systems have unique point convergence or an invariant probability distribution curve? Given enough time, do all systems visit all possible states...
2016-10-031h 05
SynTalk#TMFC (The Models For Consciousness) --- SynTalk'What' gives rise to conscious experience? How can we know if consciousness is fundamental, and if can we model it? Why aren't sticks and stones, & tables and chairs, manifestly 'conscious'? Do we really know? Is consciousness the capacity of a system to integrate information? Why is information processing by us (often) accompanied by conscious experience? Why is consciousness generated only by certain parts of the brain? How does one measure consciousness? 'How' does pain exist? Is reality singular or plural? What are the different modes of experiencing? Are only conscious things intentional? Can consciousness be subdivided into different modes? When...
2016-10-011h 07
SynTalk#TNTW (The Need To Work) --- SynTalkDo you have others working for you? Is the need to work a curse? Or, is work life? Does work establish the relationship between the ‘body’ and nature, economy & society? Do we realize and socialize ourselves via work? Are work and leisure complementary (but only when work is socially configured)? What is leisure for the self employed? How & why is much of production ancillarized? Why are most jobs made idiot-proof? Is a life with only short-term flexible jobs meaningless? Can we, then, have an automatic society (where there is no need to work)? Was the labour in the 19th century more...
2016-09-041h 04
SynTalk#TFOD (The Fate Of Diseases) --- SynTalkIs your disease human? Are you infected? Do you have an orphan or a rare disease? Has (the) polio (virus) been eradicated? ‘Can’ vaccines be made for all infectious diseases, & is eradication for ever? Why was there an epidemic of measles after the collapse of Soviet Union? Can anything be done about the strong genetic predisposition to (say) Huntington’s Chorea? Is diabetes non-communicable? Does society create different kinds of disabilities? Is all blindness treatable? Why aren’t radical interventions possible on the brain? Do infection, disease and mortality rates always follow a pattern across time? How does childhood variously influenc...
2016-08-281h 04
SynTalk#TNAM (The Niches And Monopolies) --- SynTalkCan one stay in a hole through one's entire life? Is a system always embedded in another? How large can (or should) the smaller system be? Is the market a free floating entity? Is it difficult to understand when a system has been monopolized? Do almost all communities have skewed abundance patterns? Are niches always n-dimensional hypervolumes? Can there be a qualitative difference between two forests with the same amount of timber generated and harvested? Is niche fundamentally a ‘fund’ (& not a ‘stock’) concept? Are niches inherited? Can inheritance also happen mimetically? How are niches constructed: what role do key innovati...
2016-07-241h 04
SynTalk#TCND (The Cellphone Named Desire) --- SynTalkSynTalk thinks about the Cellphone (the object & the metaphor). The links between multiple human identities (avatars) & social spaces, (terrestrial) fantasy, boredom and ‘shape-shifting’ performative aspects of life are explored from the lens of the Cellphone. SynTalk also examines if there is an addiction-like neurological (pathological) phenomenon afoot as we interact with our phones almost continually, and whether it is possible to understand the rise of ‘Selfie’. The concepts are derived off / from Rizzolatti (mirror neurons), Dunbar (Dunbar’s number), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI; ‘HHI’, UX, Usability), Granovetter (social networks, weak ties-strong ties), neuroscience (labile memory, somatosensory cortex, PFC, Dopamine, Oxytocin), McLuhan (medium & the m...
2014-07-191h 00