SynTalk

How does rate of change change? Is equilibrium balance, & what happens when there is no balance? Is equilibrium attained when fast processes have done their job, and the slow processes have not started? Do all systems tend towards equilibrium? How are biological, physical, and economic systems different in this context? What would happen inside a closed box of Hydrogen atoms in (say) a billion yea...

Is babble the beginning? Are languages pure, or were they originally mixed? Was Shakespeare writing in English? Are languages negotiated like in a bazaar, & where then does the power lie? Are there areas & languages where mixing is flaunted, & some where it is not? Do you communicate in a mixed language (Hinglish?)? Does the label of language operate in a retrospective manner? What does it mean to...

What is a (hard) problem? Can we know which problems do not have solutions? Is scheduling flights a hard problem? Is assembling cars an easy problem? Theoretically, are there more problems (uncountable) than solutions (countably many)? Are algorithms well defined? Are they a finite description for infinitely many possible inputs & processes? What is not an algorithm? Can processes be algorithmic a...

Is your (everyday) life repetitive and mundane? Does squirming life lie just underneath the layer of banality? Is the everyday always laced with fantasy and/or skepticism? What is the place of mythology in this context? Can a polluted river be a sight to behold, & might it be crucial to hold such ambivalent feelings? What is an event? Can household events be dreadful? What is totally new? Can a fl...

What do you believe ‘in’? Do you hold irrational beliefs? Why is it difficult to revise beliefs? Can it be beneficial to have false beliefs? Do you (objectively) believe that there is Heaven? Can beliefs be like axioms, or are they all (iteratively) based on facts? Are absurd beliefs particularly beneficial in forming a community? Does belief always imply an affect? Do you believe that voting is a...

Have you been stuck in a traffic jam? Is it ‘difficult’ to wear helmets? Can one conceive of one’s own death? Can traffic self organize? Is the ability to reverse, as in certain molecular motors, fundamental to the design of all efficient transportation systems? Are there lanes (microtubules), porters, & ‘bypass roads’ within our cells? Why does the tendency towards order increase as the traffic d...

Why aren’t there ant sized elephants? Or, why aren’t there elephant sized ants? What is small, large or infinite? Are there theoretical limits to size for living & physical bodies? Was the Universe infinite in size even at Big Bang, & how? Is there a center of the Universe? Are there different kinds of infinity? Do different infinities have different cardinalities? What is countably or uncountably...

What are tigers worth? Why is diamond more valuable than water? What is Nature’s role in economic value? Is non-use value also a part of total value? Is valuation always the same as measurement in terms of money? Is value fundamentally a (human) welfare concept? What is the implication of Nature not being ‘in the market’? Does Nature include the moon? How did water and land come to be commoditized...

Are you here by chance? Does probability exist? Can we decide if the world is deterministic? Is probability an outcome of our ignorance, & are we ‘forced’ to model using probabilities? Is there a trade-off between hardness and randomness? How did statistical modeling & probabilistic reasoning help establish irrefutably that smoking causes cancer? Why is Law of Large Numbers true? What does samplin...

Are you addicted to snake poison? Or gambling? Are you an alcoholic? Have you quit smoking? Why are cigarettes so popular? Why are slot machines more addictive than games of skill? Why are we addicted to anything? Is there a threshold? Are some of us (genetically) more vulnerable than others? Is an addict always aware that she is an addict? Does addiction always have both ‘loss of control’ as well...

Is 100% memory loss possible? Is the past ‘preserved by itself, automatically’? Is the notion of decay linked intimately to the concepts of order and memory? Does life grow towards order, even as physical systems go towards disorder? Does maintenance of order require a significant amount of energy? Is there a fundamental unit of order? Are rituals (say) the work required to reproduce social order?...

Does Mowgli have fun? Why do we crack jokes? Why are spoofs enjoyable, & is having fun, fundamentally, an act of subversion? Does having fun require us to be innocent ‘fools’? Is fun the basic objective of human existence? What is it, then, not to have fun? Is it a fact of human existence that most of the time we are not having fun? Is pain the (obvious) obverse of pleasure? How can tragic spectac...

How do chicks fly back to Africa on their own? Is recognition merely re-cognition? What are the different mechanisms for differentiation? How do (say) most new-born insects recognize objects without any social support? How, besides sight and sound, odour-mediated recognition plays a special role in several species? How there is a lot of consistency with smell. We journey into the world of both pre...

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 struc...

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...

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 wom...

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...

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 ev...

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, Ludw...

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 conce...

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,...

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...

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, L...

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....

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, G...