Syntalk

Are ‘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 the form of ‘spacing out’, then, lead to the possibilities of voluntary or involuntary actions? Does the subject always contain the predicate? Is your worldview dualistic? What is hidden within ourselves? Might action be caused by disembodied intention? What makes crowds mobs? Does the material non-human world permeate our social lives via (say) language and behaviour? Is socia

Are 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) have different criss crossing temporalities? What does endogamy result from/in? Do genes flow like rivers or oceans, & when? How are the Andamanese unique? How might certain diseases ‘hide’ within isolated communities? What circuits does capital need to circulate freely? What does it replace? Is history a planetary thing, & not exclusive to a sovereign sub-part? What

Why 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 they then ‘emit’ entangled radiation? Is floating a ‘kind’ of falling? Is gravity a matter related phenomenon, & not a force at all? Or, are all forces aspects of (geometric) space? How limited is our own experience of the physical world? Does reality sometimes mask itself in other ‘dimensions’? ‘How’ will you take a free kick from 30 metres outside the goal post? How much of gravity is cognizable? Can (dual) objects

Can 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 private spaces? Is ownership necessary? Do you often cross into others’ private spaces? Why not? Is the modern State the only public mode? Are individuals at a technical disadvantage against the collectives? How might social and individual goals be aligned? Will we remain more hung up on our differences? Will we continue to become more cellularized? How will public norms (& Laws) change?

Of 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? Is empathy required in the jungle? Did peasantry play a role in reconfiguring human-animal relationships? Can (all) animals be sacrificed for humans? Do animals have to be attributed with a Being? What do they have in common with us? How do we turn Other humans into animals? Why are inter-species social relationships possible? Do you understand how insects suffer (or, how larvae wait to be captured)? Are we overwhelmingly anthropomorphic? Must species

Are 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? ‘Should’ a sense of moral duty be invoked to keep marriages together? Would anything be lost if we are found to be superficial beings? Is the appeal for individualized consumption less in societies that have collective social aims? Does consumerism work because it taps into our ability to love? Do consumer culture and religiosity go together? Do we need both theory and memory? Would the sites of boredom keep changi

Could 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)? What leads to thin or thick tails? Do rare events need sensitive (&, not robust) models? When does simulation help? Is extinction often followed by speciation? Why did a tree go extinct with the dodos? Do all elk have a certain (statistically significant) ‘elkness’? Do hyper-connected markets or systems increase the overall ruin risk? Would certain blackouts, shutdowns, collapses, and perfect stor

Is 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? Does language often carry traces of the past? When are myths essential? Why was the old found to be necessary for the Meiji Restoration? Is Viśhwákarma Brahmā? Why do Nations want to be timeless? Is the grammar of the evolutionary past neuro-anatomically encoded in us? Similarly, are some vestiges of older social forms always present in the present? What cannot be repaired? Do we really need a ‘new’ future? Is old/new an either/or choice? Must we think of new and ol

Is 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 of the weak (the ruled…)? Could weak ties produce solidarity? Are States and Markets substitutes? Do both of these, however, needs ‘lots of’ Society (i.e. social ties)? Do you need to have friends to succeed in a competitive market? How are couplings made stronger? Can synchronization be lost after strengthening? How do dynamics and structure of networks influence each other? Can a tornado destroy the whole earth? Could seeking extreme effi

Is 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 something to sacrifice? Do those who do not suffer lead shallow lives? Do human beings differ in the amounts they suffer? Do you decide generically? Can the underprivileged be moral heroes, & when? Why does fasting-unto-death sometimes work? Are language and suffering very closely connected? How can one suffer better? Is vulnerability (or the performance of it) potentially a political force? Is a moral life fearle

Are 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 continuous? Are scripts a technology to transmit (natural) language? Is Latin evolving? What role do texts play in language transactions and for context? How is pursuit of chess different from the pursuit of science? Can chess games be said to progress like sentences? Are humans language-using-machines? Is thinking of ‘only’ adjacencies as neighbours limited in most contexts? Are meanings neighbours? Are both humans (also randomly) and machines always changing

What 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 ease straightaway? To what extent can one determine (or estimate?) the identity of an unknown decomposed dead body? Does everything revolve around bones? Could our footprint give our face away? Are fingerprints gendered? How do we identify bird species? Why is image (or, even, sound) search difficult? How much can one disguise oneself? Could one search ambiguously and without, precisely, knowing what one is looking fo

Can 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 organ is regular? Might there even be regularity across species? When/is cancer growth predictable? Can fractals only be approximated (algebraically)? Why can’t biological objects be thought of only computationally? Is it easy to tell irregularity and complexity apart? Is ‘too complex’ as good as irregular? Can irregularity be no-whe

How 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 exposure do to a photograph? Can you make stories out of whatever images you see? If Word is Photograph, then what is Articulation? Is cinema an art of time? Why do we have two eyes? Why is sports photography also physical? Do you bother lizards? Are dreams a field of action? Are still pictures ‘deeper’; why do they hold our gaze? Can only interesting things be perceived? Is high-level, purposive, & affect

Are 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 users’ tactics and the engineers’ strategy? Can technology make us ‘stupid’? However, is technology neither good, nor bad, nor neutral? How did acoustics go from the paradigm of music to engineering? Are wars the mother of all inventions? Can technology be forgotten? Must there be more social actors? What is the future – Will we still have hammers? Would we

Are 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 sticky? Do dryness and roughness go together? How does a wound heal itself, & how ‘heterogeneous’ is the seal? Is surface tension a competition between cohesion and adhesion? Do cells have ‘feet’ to crawl and feel? Are there many ways of sticking? How do cancer cells survive elsewhere? Does the rigidity or fluidity of membranes impact the signaling processes themselves? Can there be a master glue tha

Are 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 revival in interest in the past? What is the opposite of revolution? What changes predictably – science or technology? How do languages die? Does protein misfolding tell us about its past? Are the biasing forces blind? Is friction a memory function? Is swapping like catalyzing? Is speed synonymous with forgetting? How do the ‘same’ human beings exist in different states? Could an umbrella theory uncover secrets

Was 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 that it exists? Are all stars of one kind? Could stars be cubes? Is it easy to add a newly discovered continent to an existing map? Why did the idea of Antarctica come to be? What did we first establish to be ‘real’ – the atom or the Americas? What is the shape of the Universe, & is every point on it unique? Are we bounded in time (& Space?)? Is mapping (always) observer dependent? Can everything be understood in terms of pictures? Would maps (even if some

What 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 givens change (either dramatically or slightly)? How might tea be advertised? Does modernity reference only itself? Do you sell things off you do not use? Why can’t a performance be fully reproduced or archived or described? Do each one of us have our own implicit? Do we always create more implicit? Can Reason make everything explicit? Will we keep pursuing the promise of presence as we attemp

Do 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 value than production? How is rice different from wheat? Have agrarian worlds always been rich exchange environments? Can agriculture generate sufficient surplus to support empires (or families)? Are small-farm farmers always more productive? Why isn’t there economies of scale in production? What makes agriculture so, so, complex? Are farmers becoming workers? Does Nature need to be protected fro