Syntalk

What 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 based? Does more feedback make systems more stable? Can supervision be complicated? Can there be (non-physical) interfaces between faster and slower moving parts of a system? Are biological systems optimal? Are cars more complex than planes? Will highly automated systems have more rare events? Will biological systems assimilate the logic of computing interfaces in the dist

Do 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 problems be redressed at hospitals? How does torture work? Why do we suffer? Is our body socially constructed? Do you go to the gym? Can pain be addictive? Are inequality and pain really connected? Could changing the nature of work reduce pain in the world? Can self hypnosis work for unrelenting chronic pain? Might a woman’s endometrial pain (say) (sometimes) be called illegitimate, & why? What is the purpose of pain? Can one

Are 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? Why can networks be made to crash (only?) by overloading? Do networks always depend on how they have grown? Do different kinds of networks transform different kinds of information? Is energy management at the heart of network management? What causes climate change? Does everything influence everything? What if the sensational is ‘valuable’ but harmful? How would an ethic of network

How 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 undecidable? Is uncomputability a consequence of self reference? Can discrete cardinality be higher than real numbers’? How did quantum probability uncover the hidden assumptions behind the quantum paradoxes? Is the quantum collapse (still) a physical phenomenon? What is computing? Are paradoxes pictures? Is a paradox free conception of the world possible? What is common knowledge? Are all paradoxes counterintuitive, & will we alw

Do 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 speculate? Can production itself be speculative? Why is bajra inexpensive? Are mortgages human capital derivatives? Is value objective in a sociological (emergent) kind of way? However, are all of us equal price takers? Could/do price theories incorporate the notion of 'moving' time? How (relatively) large can the non-basic goods economy be? Is a world without speculation likely? Are we always going to misprice? Would everythi

Do 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 in the long run; how? Can tragedy of the commons be averted via norms? Are norms fragile structures and nearly impossible to recover? How is culture sustained and reproduced? What function do the extra musical conventions serve? Why are we willing to punish? Are norms often enmeshed with the idea of self image? How are common property and open access different? Can codifying norms in

]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynToy ]] [[ Context. Concepts. Categories. Conversations. Chance ]] Eternity in 180 seconds. Bird songs. #SynToy_World. Shuffle. Chatter. Incoherente. Questions. Ideas. SynTalkrs. Organic. Many many. Talk. An object is. Episodes. Sense. Images. Tiles. Clouds. Culture. Session. Finite. Because they have done it. Experience. Patterns. As strange. Notes. Subjective. Verifiable. Space. Other. Process. Boundaries. Circuitry. People. One appearing as many. Thinking. Alone ]] [[ SynToy is (a kind) of living semi-autonomous toy ]] [[ SynToy (http://www.syntoy.com) being created as a technology enabled and algorithm-driven personal resource for thinking, & playing with ideas and concepts. Available soon in your app stores ]] [[ (( dream )) ]]

Are 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 civilization? Would reciprocity be built into any just society? Why don’t all efficient markets (or equilibria) exist? Can order and disorder appear in cycles? Does enlightened self interest lead to common good outcomes? Do we get exactly what we select for? Is there often a disconnect between the individual, sub-group, & group levels? Are larger groups likely to be less fair? Would an 'equal' world (even if) be stable? Can there be a The

Why 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 there a limit to what can be said in filmic narration? Can tautologies or contradictions only be shown? How do you show? Can a shot of an ocean have a narrative arc? Are films more compatible with the way we form memories? Which shots stay in your mind? Is cinema closer to immediate perception? Are propositions always abstract? Can we speak about just about anything? When do descriptions fail? What would a world of on

Does 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 potentially make the new more recognizable? How do we resolve disputes? Does Sartre have a Kannada version? Do we need history to live in the world? Is the eye always more patient with an alien image than the ear is with an alien sound? Are buildings a part of the linguistic culture? Can buildings then be thought of a la language? Are buildings always glocal? How can a cit

Why 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 there an elementary unit of kinship? Is outbreeding a ‘superior’ natural selection method? Does a certain kind of exchange economy and an idea of ‘difference’ emerge with marriage? Do phases of a-/sexual reproduction (equivalent to in-/outbreeding?) alternate in certain cultures and species? What is a joint family? Are identical twins clones? C/would we clone ourselves in the future? Does marriage have a great future? Wo

Did 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 remember (or even annotate) orders and intervals? How do we relate to events in stories? Could certain events be like knots in time? What renders an event impossible? Do some surprises (trauma?) get encoded 'elsewhere’? Do our brains work in reverse gear in a dream (generating images 'from' thoughts)? What would the new kinds of events in the future be? Will we get nothing from everything? How would we tend to the right signa

Do 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 their domination? Are some equilibrium stable even if the initial conditions (e.g. scarcity) change? Does strategy mutate? Are dominance systems (from egalitarian to despotic) species-specific? How does bloody or bloodless rebellion occur? What makes threats credible? Is it rational to be selectively irrational? Can social systems change suddenly? Is hierarchy overturne

Have 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 filters designed? Do signals always have a continuity property? Why is it so difficult to factorize into two large prime numbers? Can individuality be dissolved (in, say, a mob)? What is the opposite of a mob? Can certain systems be made nearly impossible to partition? What is the future of separations and partitions: Will quantum computing force change in encrypt

Do 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 body be ‘nationalised’? What makes martial arts, yoga and dance similar? Does the body ‘do’ the thinking, & can it (though perishable) think about the eternal (soul)? Is there a homologous relationship between the body (pinde) and the cosmos (brahmand)? If we imprison the body long enough do we also end up imprisoning the mind? Is it possible to leave a manual for dance and martial arts? Is life information? What is the very long term

Do 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 have linguistic features such as pronunciation and syntax? Can introspection sometimes get to concepts parallel to those reached via scientific empiricism? Does awareness necessarily involve directed representations of reality? Does introspection need distance? What is the structure of inner awareness? Would there be more

Observe. 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 which naive concepts become sharper – & does experience play a role in this? When might eye witnesses at a crime scene see different things? Must we defy intuition? Does experience both constrain and free us: how are/were we able to say that simultaneity is not absolute? Is experience really undifferentiated? Will experience remain a logical problem in the future? Would we need to

Do 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 ‘commitment’ arise? Does self interest precede conventional morality? Can we sacrifice for the (contemporaneous) Other just as we do for our ‘own’ future other? Can moral law be like a law of nature? Is efficiency the principal ethic? Can the requirement of minimal liberty be Pareto inferior? Does ethicality primarily comprise in taking into account the spontaneity and the resistance of the Other? Who/

How 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 analyses? Would natural history be more predictable if there were no astronomical events or human beings? Do very rare events (like 'zero day attacks’) often go undetected? Can we even predict if (and where) life might be elsewhere in the universe? Why is it so difficult? Will we know if/when aliens invade the earth? Could we be gone in the blink of an ey

Do 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 necessarily haphazard, with no sound or word presentation? Why don't we snap from the wakeful state into sleep? Are all the different states of consciousness fluid? Does non-REM sleep always precede REM sleep, & can we sleep directly into a dream? Would we dream if didn't have any desires or memories? Can the dreamy state be induced? Can dreams be fiddled with? Do we always dream in (timeless) frag