SynTalk

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, Hil...

]] __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. Man...

]] __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. Man...

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, Donal...

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 b...

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 significan...

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...

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, Mendele...

SynTalk thinks about different facets of music, including its ever changing relationship with ‘place’ and time. We explore how blocks of noise, sound, consonants, melody, & ‘intention’ come together to create music. How does music exploit the spatial dimension? How does the envelope of quality (timbre) emerge? The concepts are derived off / from Panini, Kant, Bakhtin, Chomsky, Kumar Gandharva, Bis...

SynTalk thinks about the (sometimes?) subterranean world of things, and wonders how the world might look from the standpoint of the Thing. We also tentatively wonder if things indeed have a social life, and if the composite affair of thingness is highly linked to the notion of permanence. The concepts are derived off / from Akka Mahadevi, Rumi, Marx, Coomaraswamy, Heidegger, Adorno, Thomsen, Derri...

SynTalk thinks about the tantalizing cocktail of poisons, toxins & venoms, and wonders if ‘what does not kill us makes us stronger’. We also constantly explore the striking similarity (in many ways) between medicine and poison (a la the vagueness of the word pharmakon). The concepts are derived off / from Sant Eknath, Parikshit, Derrida, & RG Macfarlane, among others. We peek into the world of sna...

SynTalk thinks about the meanings, implications and the future of coexistence between & amongst the several biological species on earth. The interaction space between species is explored via known strategies such as symbiosis, predation, parasitism, antagonism, mutualism, commensalism, & competition, while constantly wondering if ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of ‘selfishness’...

SynTalk thinks about collective sentiments and its antipode, Reason, and constantly wonders if this historically naturalised dichotomy is perhaps at the root of the phenomenon of ‘hurt sentiments’. We simultaneously wonder if the realm of sentiments and affect have somehow been pathologised. The concepts are derived off / from Abhinavagupta, Plato, Descartes, Hume, Dayanand Saraswati, Marx, Gandhi...

SynTalk thinks about the disenchantment of the world, & wonders if it is possible for there to be multiple metaphysics for the connection between human beings and nature. Is there always something in excess of what we know & experience? We discuss disenchantment and re-enchantment via contexts of boredom, capitalism, death, art, lullabies, adivasis, rag-picking, '​tuning of a tanpura​'​, pilgrimag...

SynTalk thinks about the deep historical and ongoing interrelationships between (the all pervasive & incessantly productive) images, and concepts & words. We make the widely sweeping journey from ancient rock art to the Coca-Cola logo to images on monitors in hospitals, to possible futures (say) a 1000 years out. The concepts are derived off / from ‘Lingo Dev’, Aristotle, Hippodamus of Miletus, Fr...

SynTalk thinks about the unidirectional nature of time and wonders if time is a separate ‘category’ at all. We dip into cosmology, computer science, neuroscience, quantum physics, & philosophy. We wonder whether time is essentially a (background) variable. Is time nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at the same time (a la Wheeler)? The concepts are derived off / from Newton, Fred...

SynTalk thinks about (real, virtual & abstract) boundaries and wonders why some boundaries are crisp while others are fuzzy (fixed centers but no boundaries). We discuss boundaries and borders using concepts from computer science, geopolitics, defence studies, philosophy, mythology, linguistics, statistics, biology, & mathematics. The concepts are derived off / from Zeno, Darwin, Turing, Chebyshev...

SynTalk thinks about the dynamic nature & origins (since the big bang) of fundamental & emergent forces in the universe. Was there only one force at the time of big bang? How did human beings first recognize & understand both the forces of nature (shamanism, magic, storms, lightning) and the forces more in their control (combat, weapons, hunting, push & pull)? The concepts are derived off / from A...

SynTalk thinks about the key conditions that characterize and create ‘biological’ life while constantly wondering whether life is a random accident, and if we are alone in the universe (because of a singularity?). What is the future of life? How aliens (if any) are also likely to be carbon and water based, but could be completely different morphologically and functionally. How was the first cell f...

SynTalk thinks about the act and the modality of naming ourselves and the (undifferentiated flux of the) world around us, & constantly wonders whether the world gets created when we name it. The concepts are derived off / from Panini, Frege, Russell, Premchand, Zipf, Searle, Kripke, & Probal Dasgupta, among others. Are variables or pronouns (‘this’ & ‘that’) or verbs born before the names? What ca...

SynTalk thinks about the characteristics of the State, and explores its ontological claims, contradictions, & morals both normatively and positively? The link between bandit kings, violence, sovereign, private property, law, justice, hot water bath, modern production methods, corporations, religion, Darwinian evolution, and the general will. The concepts are derived off / from Kant, Locke, Hume, J...

SynTalk thinks about the power-ecology-knowledge triad with a certain anticipatory emphasis on ecology & modernity and their crises in a broad sense. The discussion attempts to understand each of the three concepts from the vantage points of the other two. The concepts are derived off / from Nietzsche (will to power), Mahatma Gandhi (swaraj, oceanic circles), Schumacher (‘small is beautiful’), Lov...

SynTalk thinks about the concept and process of ‘knowing’ and tries to understand ‘how we know what we know’. What is common knowledge (lokavidya), and is it largely phenomenologically acquired? If science is born out of common knowledge, then how do counterintuitive concepts come to be known? The concepts are​ derived​ off / from Kant, Marx, Pramatha Nath Bose, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Poincare, Zilse...

SynTalk thinks about illusions from an all encompassing (cosmological) perspective. In a sense the conversation ventures into the outer (sun, galaxies, quasars, black holes, WIMPs) and the inner worlds (Brahman, consciousness), while constantly wondering what separates the ‘real’ from the ‘illusory’. The concepts are​ derived​ off / from Vedas, Bhagwad Gita, Marconi, Mach, Einstein, Sri Aurobindo,...

SynTalk thinks about the mystery of 'existence' and 'consciousness’. In a sense the conversation alternates between perspectives vis-a-vis ​human beings (meditative, wakeful, dreamy, comatose, paralysed, anaesthetised, unconscious, unarousable, dying, vegetative, & dead), a zygote, fictional characters, amoeba, bats, dust particles, ​tables, the sky, plants, ​and rocks. The concepts are​ derived​...