Syntalk

How 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 spatiotemporal, & does proximity (often) strongly imply relatedness? Are real estate prices continuous? Are context and history key to understanding spatiality? Are interactions and relations primary, & location or identity secondary? Do cities emerge to manage (or control?) exchanges at scale? When are places hybrids? Why do Gaussian processes work for multidimensional interpolation? Can we understand spatial

Do 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 (even) society display some signals (say, susceptibility or compressibility) before a transition? Is it possible for a laser pulse to exit before it has entered? Does the stimulus to transform always come from the outside? Are all misfolded proteins similar the way all chairs are similar? Does recognizing new patterns need languages (& neologisms), & what happens when forms dissolve?

What’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 nature make its moves? Are the rules of a game arbitrary though not irrational? Can legal moves be illogical and/or unethical? How ‘large’ games can be, & must they be conclusive? Can several mathematical proofs be thought of as (systemic and/or narrative) turn-based games? Are all perfect information games winnable? How are games with imperfect or incomplete information different? Can anything be learnt via play? Why doesn’t game-play develop as fast as the

Are 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? Are all facts structural facts? Can there be tokens that do not belong to any type? How do new types come to be? What is language itself a type of? Is the Chomskyian Universal Grammar evolving? Did (inner) language precede speech? Is our thinking overlapping, and speech ordered? Do animals think? What is inherited? Can it be said, for a certain function (or a disease), how many types we are? Would we all have precision medicine available f

Which 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 determine the present (or the past) – is this provable (bit.ly/2xCZdPF)? Can events be a part of a process, & what causes it? Is history chaotic? Do chaotic systems’ sensitive dependence to initial conditions prove that the World is non deterministic? Are all deterministic systems necessarily predictable? Can a very ‘small’ cause lead to a very ‘large’ effect? However, do some things just happen spontane

Do 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 beneficial and satisfying? Can certain pockets of genome or organisms be more mutation prone? Do hotspots of innovation emerge in a similar fashion? What is the ultimate cause of risk taking? Might heightened resilience lead to lesser disruption? Why do certain honey bees go to certain flowers? Are ultimate causes eventually evolutionary? Was the world always as it is tod

Can 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 forever? Do dynamics of interactions matter? Can phase transitions happen in closed systems? Can living cells become inert (yet viable) spores? Does atom-ness exist? Are we, as human beings, components of systems? How do political systems take shape? Is it possible for ideas to be closed? Does our changing knowledge keep even the past unclosed? Is anything closed at all?

What’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 change (& even death)? Does making something also allow one to move forward? What is not heritage? Do narratives precede collection? What do we look past? How does a proverb work? Why do non-Brahmins chant? How are histories localized? What happens outside museums and galleries, & how is that taken ‘in’? Are devotion and detachment different? Does the present need the past; & is the past always ‘here’? Are we worried about forgetting? Wi

Does 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 posture? How articulate is your torso? How universal are gestures and what they ‘signify’? How do factors such as climate, culture, technology, art, & division-of-labour enter our movements? How much of the space around you is yours? Do you like being touched? How does language enter us, & are gestures a language of some sort? ‘Where’ do you put your accents? Is it difficult to move slowly? What is the futur

Can 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? Why are the poor kids in schools often not learning? Should poverty be defined within the context of communities (& not externally)? What do all the poor have in common? How can policy account for the heterogeneity of responses by different people to any given situation? However, can the poor be thought of as mere individuals? Can deprivation be eradicated in the future? Can striving for

Do 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 to measure? What makes a clock more accurate and/or robust? Does digital hardware ‘need’ a pulse trigger? Is time an artefact, & less ‘fundamental’ than frequency? Do clocks primarily help manage transitions, & is time keeping, therefore, state keeping? Why do the blind have shorter lifespans? Can causality exist without the notion of time? Will we do more things in the same amount of time in the fut

Do 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 destroys the river (say) on which it was set up? Are homeless poor people capable of looking after themselves? Can cities ever be taken over by slums? How large can they get? Is a lot of urban planning (paradoxically) ‘anti-urban’? Can the Market or the State fulfill peoples’ dreams? Are urban (efficiency-driven) and rural (productivity-driven) properties very differently organized? Is the future of agricult

What’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 inferential? Do languages, thoughts, artefacts and organisms co-evolve? How can’t language be? Do birdsongs carry information without grammatical structures? Can culture cause genetic changes? Is artificial language reflexive? How does a language talk about itself? Are non-human animals very serious? Can all languages express all thoughts? Are there thoughts that language cannot express? Can crows (

Are 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, & where? Is information truly an equalizer? What circulates, & what is excluded? ‘What’ & how does/might digital media disrupt? Does media innovation always change social order? Does digitization have revolutionary ‘potential’? What is the future of meta narratives and narrators (authors)? Is the media of the future likely to be more real? What is the ultimate constr

Is 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 performed remotely? Does discretization happen in Nature? Is noise always continuous? Is speech predictable even if the underlying phonemes seem discrete? Do all manifolds lie on a continuum? Is making linear (analog) circuits difficult? Are higher order infinities deeper forms of ‘silence’? Does mathematics understand the ‘ambiguous’ ways in which things are (sometimes…) equal? Woul

Imagine 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 child learn to ‘read’ spontaneously? Are scripts arbitrary? However, are diagrams always homomorphic with ‘reality’? Are there links between the evolutions of geometry, logic, & diagrams? Can we make a diagram of ‘yesterday’? Or ‘not raining’? Can the absence of non-existent objects be represented? What if diagrams didn’t ‘exist’? Does language mimic diagrams? Would diagrams be sign

Are 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 language and freedom? Are you able to put together disjoint concepts out of a context? Does language create possibilities? Can notions of freedom also be propagandized? Do you think of the mountains as Gods? Is freedom (along with the ability to act) essential for survival of the human species? Is it sufficient to think that one is free to be free? Is it necessary (?) to end Capital, as we know it, to save o

Do 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 poetry with footnotes? Must the translated text do all the work on its own? Could a 20-page commentary on a 2-line sutra be considered a faithful translation? Does the specific history of interpretative communities always matter? Can Quran be translated and read as Ovi Marathi poetry? Did colonization happen via translation? But, is all translati

Can 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 embryo in the womb of the past? Are we merely articulators of what is emerging? Are humans themselves a resource now? What separates eras? Are there ‘natural’ breaks; or universal periods? Are there gaps in memory or history? Can personal whims and thoughts create history? Do epochs always grow, mature and then fade away? Are transitions driven by a distress or might it result from aleatory play? Are great civ

Are 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 the brain different from the central bank? Is more information always better? Is being precise good? Can plasticity be built? How do proteins decide which ‘track’ to choose? How do (non-intelligent?) machines coordinate? Is the dynein of the yeast better than ours? Does the ‘size’ of payoffs determine whether coordination happens? Might we be able to think of coord