Syntalk

Is 2+2 inevitably 4? Is it grue? Is it true? Is it true that facts do not live on their own? What is The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages? How logic chases truth up the tree of grammar? Is truth the same across languages? If we used different languages would the facts be different? What comes first: truth or meaning? Is every sentence true or false? Does truth always have the IF-THEN structure? What can computers not prove, & why? What the nature of logic and probabilities does to the notion of truth, & how there need not be one logic? Can there be heuristics of ‘interestingness’ when forward chaining for a proof? Might all mathematics be done by proof checkers and Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs)? What is a candidate for a conjecture? Why is logical contradiction the ultimate no-no? Why is stock market news more difficult to write than Shakespeare, for a ‘Bayesian-monkey’? ‘Tell me what you are interested in, and I will tell you what the truth consists in’. Do (?) counterfactuals change the world by

Do you feel at home? What is the other of home – the world? We think of home variously as culture, a memory, an identity, a language, a terrain of materiality, a landscape, the zone of affect, an idea, a gharana, & a family? How the sense of belonging (to, say, a gharana) has nothing to do with place? Have all homes been founded on the basis of some principles? How is the notion of home different for the refugees and the diaspora? Can you carry your home with you? Why do we need a home, & can one make multiple homes? How ideas, often, have multiple homes. What happens, however, when a certain musical tradition (a home for some) is appropriated by the market economy? What is the home of Hakuna matata? What is the significance of land, & where our ancestors might be ‘buried’? We also explore, using the Israel/Palestine case & other instances of settler colonialism, whether it is possible to have a home without a homeland. Is home where we can debate, converse and have access to new ideas? What is the future of

Do you hate beggars? Can one think of the above-below topography using both perspective as well as relationality? Is there an invisibilisation and dispersal of the hegemons? What does it mean to be at the very bottom? Is there a social responsibility of capital? Why does the below always have a hidden character, & why is there no giving of dignity to a full corporeal person? Why does a musahar woman own a broken-up dis-assembled bicycle? Are we as a society actively at war against the destitute – why? Are we actively creating destitution (& dispossession)? Is there always a dialectic unity between prosperity and misery? Who is the primary client of the state? How do you view taxes? Do we need to identify with the below? Is it possible to lose the above below through a new imaginary? What are the limits of solidarity? Is solidarity expensive? Why do moral arguments have so little traction? What is the universe of those with whom we are willing to share? Why are there The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? It’s al

Are you angry? Do we have a terrible love of war? Is it possible to think of violence without the teleological means-end schema? Why don’t we have a phenomenology for it? Is it because violence is the ground shared by enemies? Why don’t we manage to look inside ourselves for the source of violence, and often project it on to the Other? Why do even the worst of perpetrators represent themselves as being the victim? Does violence lie at the end of speech? Is today’s victim tomorrow’s offender? Do shame and humiliation turn us towards violence? What then is the agenda of punishment? How can we open up the victim’s silence? How can we access the scene of violence? Is the aggressive drive essential to human survival? Why do the under-trials expect the Judge to at least hear them out? Is hatred a revolutionary sentiment? Does militarism (love for war?) run across modes of production? Is crime (merely) an act by which one runs the ‘risk’ of taking punishment? What is the future of the act of policing? What is the di

What comes first - matter or space or time? What is the structure of space? Why did Paul Cezanne go 'flat'? How did Picasso turn the artistic conception of space on its head with cubism? Is there a link between colour and space? What is it like to be in Matisse's The Red Studio? What happens when you walk into a room that you have not been in before? Are there specific neurons in your brain for every space that you have ever been to? How do place cells within the hippocampus represent the physical space as a cognitive map? Is space the same everywhere in the universe? Is it possible to represent empty space? How does an artist create the pictorial space on a 2-dimensional canvas? Is the perception of space always relative to matter (& objects)? Is episodic memory anchored in space (the 'where')? What is space like at sub atomic scales? Does nature really have more than 3 dimensions? Has theoretical physics completely missed incorporating gravity of all the matter in the universe? Is matter essentially primary

SynTalk thinks about the provocative questions of spectres, spirits, & ghosts, as themselves and as signifiers, while constantly wondering if they are an unnecessary residue. Can we think of the repressed voices in places of violence and ruin, using ideas of ghosts and haunting? What is the thing that haunts? What is the big deal about the ghosts? The concepts are derived off / from Plutarch, Ludwig Lavater, Thomas Lodge, Shakespeare, Nicholas Rowe, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Levinas, Tagore, Amos Tutuola, Derrida, Kurosawa, Arjun Appadurai, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean-Michel Rabaté, & Avery F. Gordon, among others. How the juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar creates the uncanny? Would something entirely unfamiliar be uncanny or just plain strange? Can the spectral be defined at all? How hauntology potentially challenges ontology? Do ghosts represent a world order where things are not arbitrary, and where actions have repercussions? How Shakespeare added a sense of wonder and mystery to the f

SynTalk thinks about insanity, madness, and mental illness, & its links with questions of medicine, physiology, freedom, control, knowledge and power. We weave together both theoretical explication as well as purely personal reflections to try and understand madness, and journey in and out of mental asylums a few times. Can we understand madness ‘itself’ as a truth beyond any discussion? The concepts are derived off / from Descartes, Auguste Comte, Philippe Pinel, Owen A. R. Berkeley Hill, Jal Dhunjibhoy, Durkheim, Amartya Sen, & Jeffrey Masson, among others. What makes a (happy, purposeful, & successful) human being go mad, & can there be a master narrative? Would you prefer to be called mad rather than mentally ill? Is the core question the need (or not?) for defining the ‘abnormal’? Why & how are the mental disorders categorically or syndromally diagnosed across multiple axes? Is the DSM atheoretical, and might it be linked to our, often only partially organized, deeply held beliefs? Is the naming and for

SynTalk thinks about information, while constantly wondering about its physical nature and computability. Is there information in the universe irrespective of human beings or life? Does all the meaning come from a protocol, and what if there is no shared language? Does a protocol or a context need to pre exist? The concepts are derived off / from Laplace, Carnot, Boltzmann, Shannon, Ronald Fisher, Kolmogorov, T S Eliot, Warren Weaver, & Nørretranders, among others. We retrace the journey of the notion of information within (say) thermodynamics, electrical engineering, neurolinguistics, mathematics, and computational systems, & notice how the core departure was to think of it as measurable? Does the universe speak in one language? Does ignorance go down when information is received, and is ignorance analogous to disorder? Is entropy an anthropomorphic principle, as it assumes an underlying notion of order? How, in language, the norm (order) can be identified directly from a close study of the deviation from th

SynTalk thinks about the past, present and the future of water, and its dialectical relationship with Earth and life. We enter the worlds of rain, snow, ocean, monsoon, subterranean & surface rivers, dams, volcanoes, canals, lakes, estuaries, mountains, polar regions, and drains. What exactly is a river? Is water the same everywhere? The concepts are derived off / from Thales, Anaximander, Pierre Perrault, & Edme Mariotte, among others. We think of water both as an element and a compound. What would water be as a ‘ground’ of design and thinking, given that we are so wedded to the fixed dimensions of terra firma? How water is open, fluid (in space & time), and relative, and always retains its identity (?). Why are maps blue only somewhere, when water is everywhere? Do we privilege one moment in time (as rivers) in the hydrological cycle? Can we challenge ourselves to live in moments of (say) the rain or evaporation? Is there a need to include soil moisture in our imagination? How the sun is the essential drive

SynTalk thinks about narratives & stories, while constantly wondering whether it is the stories that ‘make us up’ and give us our self-hood. We delve into the worlds of literature, film making, video games, philosophy, cognitive sciences, and linguistics to explore why & how we tell & understand stories. The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Coleridge, Diderot, Georges Polti, Hitchcock, Labov, E M Forster, Lumière brothers, de Beauvoir, Augusto Boal, Chomsky, Salim-Javed, David Lodge, & Dennett, among others. How identity, time, memory, & emotions are knotted together by fiction. Is story telling like a flight simulator, with most of the rewards but none of the risk? How narratives however, are not synonymous with fiction and, cover both fact & fiction. Do we remember narratively, & create causal links (with mnemonic durability) between the past, present and the possible futures? The difference of a story from a (film) script, & the importance of the dramatic centre? Is narrative experience a (playfu

SynTalk thinks about errors, while constantly wondering if they are innately hardwired into nature. Are error free domains possible or desirable? Would we stop making history if there were to be an error free world? The concepts are derived off / from Gnosticism, Aristotle, Alhazen, Galileo, Kepler, Thomas More, Lord Kelvin, Heidegger, Cioran, Gödel, Piaget, John Bell, & Tony Hoare, among others. Is all truth temporal? The difference between systematic (in one direction) and random (in both directions) errors with respect to the true value. Do things fail in the (non-human) natural world or they just ‘happen’? Is failure about an unfolding process while errors are more punctual? How (measurement) errors are inextricably linked to the notion of standard conception and expectation. Is there a trade-off between safety (not making mistakes) and liveness (making progress) for reactive systems (that interact with the environment)? How did a perfect Being create an imperfect world, and is it possible to have a ‘theo

SynTalk thinks about quarrels (in a general sense), while constantly wondering whether there is a civilizational ‘need’ for it. Is it possible to have a sustainable theory for interactions (and by extension, quarrels)? What are the links with language structure and language usage? The concepts are derived off / from Upanishads, Bhagwad Gita, Sarala Das, Oliver Goldsmith, Locke, Bertrand Russell, Grice, Nozick, & Chomsky, among others. Can we think of an idealized quarrel? How do we understand sentences & discourses that have non literal (suggestive) meanings? How only the non-obvious counts as information. The maxims of quantity, quality, relation, & manner for ideal conversations, and how these cooperative principles break down in quarrels. How in a legal context the adversarial system is used to resolve difference of views. Are spoken quarrels different from the written, and whether norms, conventions and several para lingual aspects are lost (& sanitized) when written? What is the difference between intere

SynTalk thinks about theories & theorizing, while constantly wondering whether theories are explanatory as well as speculative (‘what-if’). Are all theories, in a sense, artistic creations and inventions (rather than discoveries)? Can we take the human out of the equation? The concepts are derived off / from Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Robert Hooke, Boole, Faraday, Maxwell, Gauss, Hilbert, Godel, Bourbaki, Abraham Robinson, Weinberg, Stanley Fish, Lawvere, & Stephen Wolfram, among others. How all physical theories have a desire to predict & look into the future. How mathematical theories, however, do not need to predict and have no role for evidence. Further, how theories in literature are an attempt to explain the process of interpretation? Are there theories that are finished pieces of work (test: when all true statements are provable)? Are some theories destined to be incomplete? Will we ever have a complete theory for poetry? Is all of mathematics just a theory? Do all theories (real numbers,

]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynTalk ]] 13.8 billion years in 150 seconds. All sound, no music. Hypnopompic. A little weird. Sometimes noisy. Bittersweet. Disorienting, & meekly harmonic. Incessant. Drone. Dawn. The Big Bang, after all. CMBR. 4.5 billion years ago. Earth. Earthquakes. Murmurs (of volcanoes). Pulsation. 3.5 billion years ago. & then life. Heart beat(s). Organic. Thud. Bird songs. Many many. Green grass & trees; swaying. Lawns. Bright sunshine. Oh, cars. Highways. Asphalt. That’s us. Human beings. Bird songs. People. Poised. Alone ]] ]] __end__ [[ The __begin__ soundtrack ‘back masked‘. Rewind in 150 seconds, & replay. Bird songs. Speeding cars. People. Mynahs. Less weird. May be. Hypnagogic, & drowsy. Life to non life. Crescendo. Inorganic. Infinite loop. Swirling whirlpool. Singularity. The Big Crunch ]]

]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynTalk ]] 13.8 billion years in 150 seconds. All sound, no music. Hypnopompic. A little weird. Sometimes noisy. Bittersweet. Disorienting, & meekly harmonic. Incessant. Drone. Dawn. The Big Bang, after all. CMBR. 4.5 billion years ago. Earth. Earthquakes. Murmurs (of volcanoes). Pulsation. 3.5 billion years ago. & then life. Heart beat(s). Organic. Thud. Bird songs. Many many. Green grass & trees; swaying. Lawns. Bright sunshine. Oh, cars. Highways. Asphalt. That’s us. Human beings. Bird songs. People. Poised. Alone ]] ]] __end__ [[ The __begin__ soundtrack ‘back masked‘. Rewind in 150 seconds, & replay. Bird songs. Speeding cars. People. Mynahs. Less weird. May be. Hypnagogic, & drowsy. Life to non life. Crescendo. Inorganic. Infinite loop. Swirling whirlpool. Singularity. The Big Crunch ]]

SynTalk thinks about interpretation and understanding of the self & the other, while constantly wondering why & if it is difficult to truly understand another culture. What more do we need besides translation and interpretation? The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Homer, Aquinas, Omar Khayyam, Descartes, Akbar, Marx, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Gandhi, Edward Said, Huntington, Derrida, Donald Davidson, Fredrik Barth, Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, Janet Abu-Lughod, Bernard Williams, Immanuel Wallerstein, Aitmatov, & S. N. Balagangadhara, among others. Has one culture interpreted and described all others, & are all cultures cognitively understandable? Is a meta theory of cultural understanding possible? Are cultures ‘configurations of learning’, with both teachable and learnable components? Is ‘cultural-difference’ (& not culture or difference) the a priori (somewhat) like space-time, & how does the process of saliencing some domains (such as morality) work? Can pristine nature be scary? The long historical p

SynTalk thinks about the interrelationships between wholes and parts in natural and conceptual systems, and wonders whether the part is inferred from the whole. Does a part (somehow) imply or expect the whole? The concepts are derived off / from Abhinavagupta, Newton, Kepler, Boltzmann, Boyle, Saussure, Turing, Manfred Eigen, P. W. Anderson, Chomsky, & Morris Halle, among others. In interactions between words, fundamental particles, molecules, cells, & phonemes, why are most combinations void? How do a finite number of parts create a dizzying array of wholes, and links with concepts such as historical contingency, surplus, entropy, sequencing, emergentism, & auto-catalysis? Why are transitions in biological, physical, ecological, social, and linguistic systems so tentative and statistical? Has the physics of the material world achieved a special kind of climax in the biological unit of life, & how the cell is not simply a bagful of chemicals. How the cell is both a part and a whole, & the context of cell divi

SynTalk thinks about health & healing, while constantly wondering whether health has a fixed meaning. Is health an anxiety? The concepts are derived off / from Hippocrates, Charaka, Patanjali, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Foucault, William Osler, BKS Iyengar, Dean Ornish, & Atul Gawande, among others. When & why did the health of the population become a concern for the state, and why was this a significant historical turn? How, when & why did health enter national budgets, and create an industrial force? What is the difference between healing (subjective?) and cure (objective?)? Is healing largely phenomenological, & subjectively realized? Is ‘cure sometimes, relief often, and comfort always’ a possible underlying ethical principle? How the ‘breath’ (prana), as the universal entity within us, unifies the body and the mind when both have a history (situated in time), and are ‘ours’? Is the body a river of energy, & is it possible to understand this energy more specifically & at the molecular level? Does the medical sy

SynTalk thinks about dying & death from medical, ethical, existential, legal, & sociocultural perspectives, while constantly wondering how & why death is important. Is death ‘master-able’? The concepts are derived off / from Socrates, Glaucon, Epicurus, Jesus Christ, Hobbes, Stalin, Sydney Brenner, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Woody Allen, & Aruna Shanbaug, among others. How the hope for immortality is conceptually similar to the hope for justice? Can we avoid death before old age? How difficult is it to call someone dead, & is death an objective event? How life has changed from being ‘brutish, nasty and short’ a few centuries ago, & how the 20th century was in many ways the century of life. How is mortality different across age groups, and the role played by sanitation, vaccination, and oral rehydration over the years? Is death becoming more medicalized and protracted? Are more people now dying in hospitals? Why is it important to fight child mortality, and why is it likely that this global battle might be won

SynTalk thinks about the phenomenology of getting an idea, and wonders about the fine ‘thinness’ of an idea’s form. We discuss lively, apt, inapt, frustrated, injurious, abstract, failed, & wrong ideas, and understand how an idea can sometimes (but only rarely) run away with reality. The concepts are derived off / from Plato, Guru Nanak, Kabir, Leibniz, Hume, William Blake, Peirce, Dalton, Mendeleev, Allama Iqbal, Tartakower, & Kasparov, among others. Are ideas always driven by a sense of necessity, and how necessity fundamentally deals with form (& not content)? Is the world of the sensible (matter) and the sensitive (mind) different from the (autonomous) world of ideas? Is the material world a corruption, then, of the realm of ideas? In what sense is the idea of (say) justice or table-ness enworlded? The modes of recollection, doubt, introspection, induction, deduction, or abduction. Why a solution or an idea sometimes hits one as a bolt out of the blue? Are problems also ideas? Why an epiphany can (& shoul