SynTalk

Who writes autobiographies? Is movement a choice for you? Do you plan to go back home? Have you had to leave ‘home’, forever, with fish still frying in the pan? Are you under chronic stress? Are violent people mad? Is poetry only a matter of luxury? What does Art do to our Default Mode Network? Is there a developmental trajectory to how brains develop over a lifetime? Does your brain’s development...

Are you a narr-actor or a spect-actor? Are you best placed to narrate your own story? Why do those things not get talked about? Do narrations create selves? Can one perceive differently than one sees? Are certain narrators to be privileged? Are we all born into a narrative structure? Do spectators change the events? How does one live in a world with competing truths? What if ‘facts’ are absent / s...

How standard are you? What does it mean to be an Individual? Are you a Hutterite? Must charities be voluntary? What about orphans? Should the State tell us what to do? What might absence of State lead to (in various domains)? Is self sacrifice a virtue? Are welfare states justified in the real world? What does one need to be autonomous? Does anyone have a right to demand that other people support...

Has it always been the Anthropocene? Do you care about the ‘powerless’ Nicobar? How old is biodiversity? Why does anyone want to be a conservationist? What is the kind of variety that we wish to preserve? What is a unit of diversity? Do different parts of the world think differently today about the ‘species vs habitat’ question? Is agency distributed throughout nature? What did Tibbles do? Are the...

Are our brains log-normal? Why is breathing rhythmic? Why is there a hum in the universe? Do our hearts beat chaotically? Are the (stock) markets random and ‘unbounded’? What is a market? How is Mercury perturbed? What has sleep-wake cycles? Must you go up and down with the sun? What causes whirlpools in a smooth flowing river? Where do rhythms reside? Is there an equivalent of homeostasis in the...

Are you a born criminal? Is genocide ever justified? Is meritocracy a ‘garbage’ concept? What are the entitlements that you have by virtue of being a human being? Do rights exist because the State exists, & vice versa? Are rights sometimes anti norms? Do nomadic and sedentary societies think differently of rights? Are rights always a product of struggle? Are you 42 and a communist? Are all rights...

How many meals do you have time for? Why do sweets make you happy? Does fruit sugar (fructose) need insulin? Why does sugar spike? Are oranges and grapes differently sweet? Has sugar always been a transnational commodity? How did Europe get sugar? How did the first sweet shops come up? How did we end up milking animals? Is time the fourth factor in nutrition? Are apples autochthonously sweet? Do s...

How do you look at women? Do Goddesses follow Gods? Is the ultimate Reality an ‘It’? What’s the relationship between matter and energy? Are dualities necessarily conflictual? Is Eve inferior to Adam? Where do the Cosmos and the Body intersect? How did the sacred geography of the subcontinent evolve? Do Goddesses have an influence on the lives of men (& kings) & women? Where/how did patriarchy exis...

Do you have neanderthal DNA? Is your body your identity? What makes the knowledge of death possible when no one alive has experienced it first hand? How does dying feel? What are your schemas for understanding death? Is death the default, & it is life that happens occasionally? Does a cell know when it ought to die? When is an organism dead? When can we not dream? Can (certain) tissues and organs...

Are you a lobby strategist? Do you negotiate with yourself? Which taste group do you belong to? What are you allowed to see? Do you pay to publish? Do the algorithms that serve you change with you? How are counterpublics generated? Is society constantly transforming itself? What role does capital play? Does media influence human rationality? Are you able to tell real discourse and propaganda apart...

What do you expect to see on windy islands? Can you soar? Are there a finite number of ways of flying? Did we glide before flying? Do birds & insects fly like planes, & vice versa? How are the lift-off forces and moments generated? Was the Wright Flyer I (which made the first sustained manned flight in 1903) actually a very bad design? Do flies fly merely by seeing? Are wings thermo-regulatory dev...

How do the disposable get marked out? Which institutions have cognitive control over you? How do you develop railways in Argentina? Who changes institutions? Is it always from ‘within’? Do institutions help us with the ‘higher order’ decisions? Are military, markets, prisons, families, religions, borders, languages, & villages coercive in the same way? Are prisons (in reality) chaotic? What’s the...

How ‘deep’ would a 1,000 years be? Is all space place? How do use, identity, value, law, power, or (‘imaginative’) memory hold them together? Do we live in layers? Are all human beings historical? Are all places relational? How do ‘material’ cultures of the past enable excavation sites to be dated? Where do ghosts and Gods live? Do all humans think of a place the same way? Can power structures lea...

What happened in the 6th century BCE? Can a non-human (robot? dog?) have a soul? Does God’s time move from the past to the future? Is the present, in a sense, always avant-garde? How are bureaucratic orders made to perpetuate in time? How does a common person today understand the yugas? Who has the ‘need’ to think about the future? How are different time periods squeezed into a single register in...

Who does the kidnapping and raping? Are you a parasite? Is your politics in the service of capital? Do the lumpen form one group/class, or is it a general disposition? Are the punk ‘anti-social’ disruptors? Was Namdeo Dhasal punk? Was Kabir? Why write obscene poetry? How (& by whom) are the boundaries policed? What leads to the various underground anti-aesthetic movements (such as punk music, & an...

Is pencil complex? Is computationally hard complex? Is ‘i’ a weird number? Why wasn’t Hamilton able to multiply triples? Are we just a bunch of neurons and connections? Is our ability to think (& do mathematics) an emergent phenomenon? Is mathematical thinking core to understanding the world? Is complexity always a subjective feature? Do opinions spread in complex random graph-like patterns? How i...

Are you a master of your emotions? How do banks learn to loan better? Is king less queen = boy less girl in the word2vec world? Does your ‘body’ sometimes feel inferior even when you do not think so? Do humans learn only cognitively? How do you learn to have self respect? Are models a result of learning? What can be learnt by trial and error? Can mere prompts sometimes be enough to learn vast new...

Do you have the courage of a Spartan? Are we all partly anarchists? What are we truly? What do we value? Are Reason and Nature entangled? Is there a hierarchy of beings above/below human beings? What do Gods have that humans don’t have? Does Nature offer us moral guidance? How do plants imitate Gods? How much does human nature vary with (say) geography, culture, language, & time? Are we more (or,...

‘How’ are you hearing what you are hearing? Is hearing decoding? Do you already know what’s next? Would it have helped to have an accompanying video? Do we ’need’ to be able to differentiate at the level of sound to be able to ascribe different meanings? Why do a few hear Yanni, & a few Laurel? Do frogs need to see each other when croaking? When does the ear begin to form? Is the ear also a vestib...

Does randomness lie in the eye of the beholder? ‘What’ is music? Why is ordering often a consequence of scaling? Is there such a thing as non-repetitive music? Do there need to be ‘types’ for there to be repetitions? Are there patterns out there independent of us? What would a Kantian say? Are fundamental algorithms at the heart of Nature? Does this conflict with fundamental laws of physics? Why c...

Are your attachments secure? Are you disabled? Have you ever lost your mind? Is there a link between Being, becoming, experience, & location? Are all spaces places? Could one be at ‘home’, & yet ‘out of place’? Does your place give you too much identity? Must actors be models? Is your help a part of your family? Are you able to put yourself in another’s shoes? How do actors / writers / psychothera...

Are humans statistical systems with random biases? Is the world fundamentally discrete, & the continuum an emergent property? Or, is the quantum world foamy? Should black holes be a part of the Standard Model? Does the Standard Model (surely) undergird the periodic table? Is space-time merely a causal ordering of events? Where does physics end, and chemistry begin? Can the shape of water molecule...

Do you talk to your toaster? Do you think of ‘your’ bacteria as yourself? What self-replicates? Do organisms age during hibernation? Does the hybrid presuppose the pure? Can artefacts be made without thinking about their environments? Are our bodies at least somewhat mechanistic? Will we always live with the categories of the 1600s? Which deviations are aberrational? Do life and non-life lie on a...

Do you live with animals? Are your summers busy? Could a 1000 metres apart be several hours apart in the hills? How does that define culture? Could there be multiple places in one hill? Do you have a simple dream of having a kitchen with a granite sink? Are hill people traditionally more cohesive? What do hills do to States? How do/did sovereign Godlings rule their territories in the mountains? Ha...

Were there thoughts >80,000 years ago? Can you say what you feel? How is your Broca’s area? ‘Where’ is the mind? Is it individuated? &, insulated? When did our ancestors first create art? Are human beings incorrigibly abstract? Are social minds more emotional? Are single cell bacteria social? Who is accountable for a mob? How do social values get revised or (sometimes) resisted? Is the mapping bet...