SynTalk
Society & Culture
About
f(q) = When does simulation help? (#TIAU)SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.
Episodes
- #TEOEE (The Echo Of Extreme Experiences) --- 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…
- #TNATP (The Narrator And The Proscenium) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TTEHOW (The To-Each-Her-Own World) --- SynTalk
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 sacri…
- #TPLOD (The Plunge Lines Of Diversity) --- SynTalk
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 di…
- #TRAP (The Rhythms And Perturbations) --- SynTalk
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 cycle…
- #TEOR (The Effects Of Rights) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TEST (The Entangled Sweet Tooth) --- SynTalk
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 ge…
- #TGIP (The Goddesses In Particular) --- SynTalk
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 inters…
- #TDAG (The Dead And Gone) --- SynTalk
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,…
- #TOOP (The Oxygen Of Publicity) --- SynTalk
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 soci…
- #TGFF (The Grounds For Flight) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TOOI (The Order Of Institutions) --- SynTalk
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’ decis…
- #TPOP (The Production Of Places) --- SynTalk
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 ‘materia…
- #TSOFF (The Susurrus Of Former Futures) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TPHAL (The Punk Hooligan And Lumpen) --- SynTalk
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 Kabi…
- #TTTC (The Transformations To Complex) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TLAN (The Learnable And Not) --- SynTalk
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 d…
- #TEHN (The Eternal Human Nature) --- SynTalk
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? Do…
- #TAOTA (The Audition Of The Audible) --- SynTalk
‘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 diff…
- #TRIC (The Repetitions In Compositions) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TOOPP (The Out Of Place People) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TSSM (The Sub Structure Mosaic) --- SynTalk
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 (sure…
- #TOAH (The Organism Artefact Hybrids) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TSOH (The Sandbox Of Hills) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TMIE (The Mental In Environmental) --- SynTalk
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…
- #TWATA (The Witness And The Analyst) --- SynTalk
Can you meta point? Do you celebrate objectivity? Is there a lot happening that is ‘undocumentable’? Are facts and values entangled? Are several valuable things tangible but not measurable? Are we ourselves instruments? Can ‘fact’ have var…
- #TBOD (The Biography Of Defiance) --- SynTalk
Can one become English? What does this have to do with the Suez Canal? Are you white? Are we free? Is it good to be obedient? Is the Other always an enemy? Or, could it be a reference group? Did everyday defiance (say, by the peasants) pla…
- #TSOTA (The Stories Of The Anonymous) --- SynTalk
Who are you? Would you like to have a new name? Were there many Kalidasas? Have you ever been with a mountain? Does your family have recorded history? Why are authors often anonymous in ancient Indian texts? Is the desire to be known akin…
- #TROO (The Reification Of Objects) --- SynTalk
Why do we reify? When are you able to read others' minds? Is this a pedestrian? Are sensation and perception tied together? How are new mental templates formed? Are priors 'necessary' for categorization? How do we know, in a badly lit plac…
- #TCATC (The Creator And The Created) --- SynTalk
Are you a romantic genius? Are artists incapable of understanding their own creations? Where does inspiration come from? Is Nature divine? Can art divide? When/why does a creation become property? Are you the owner of your own Self? When d…
- #TIBB (The In Between Binaries) --- SynTalk
Are you expected to reproduce? Where is hell? Should patriarchy be ‘smashed’? Are brains masculine or feminine? Are biological and social factors deeply enmeshed, & is the body also socialized? Is Nature mutable? Is sex different from gend…
- #TLWW (The Leashes We Wear) --- SynTalk
Do you respect the bones of your forefathers? Are your hands free? Were the hunter gatherers happier? Are nomads now likely to be criminals? Are you a willful nomad? Why don’t we live on trees anymore? How did ‘I-ness’ emerge? What is ‘I’?…
- #TPLB (The Past Laid Bare) --- SynTalk
Is the past ‘all over the place’? Is it the stories that keep buildings and communities alive? Are stories mental artefacts of the past? Did H.M. have expectations? Is understanding the past a process of comparing the unknown and the known…
- #TNMS (The Non Main Stream) --- SynTalk
Are you a middle-roader? Is Jai Santoshi Maa a mainstream film? Are you exposed to world cinema? ‘What’ is popular? Are dialects non-standard? Does writing / scripting / printing legitimize the process of standardization? Are scripts discr…
- #TATS (The Absent Turn Seven) - - - SynTalk
Many sorts of things don't happen. Plans are made and deferred. Films are left undeveloped. Subjects are avoided. Dreams are un-dreamt. Planes take off empty. Priests are marked absent. Building floors get skipped, and boats go missing. Tu…
- Uhntākshurry - A Soupçon Of Seas (Vol VI)
The Antakshari Scene: The antakshari scene located mid-film is a prime example of the intertextuality found in MPK and the originality that comes in part from the film’s recontextualization of various fragments from pop culture. Even thoug…
- Jocelyn - A Soupçon Of Seas (Vol V)
The intensity of celestial sources passing over the fixed field of radio receivers was recorded on strip charts and had to be analyzed by visual inspection. This task fell naturally to the graduate student of the group, Jocelyn Bell. On Au…
- Subjectivity - A Soupçon Of Seas (Vol IV)
One of the central theses underlying the phenomenology of body is that of bodily subjectivity. It might appear as though by speaking of “bodily subjectivity” one is in effect assimilating “body” into “consciousness,” so that instead of the…
- Hypochondria - A Soupçon Of Seas (Vol III)
Frankfurt, 1797: at twenty-seven, Hegel plunged into a profound crisis. He no longer knew what he thought; he no longer knew what to think. The republic and the revolution had collapsed under the repeated blows of German history. Several y…
- Commencement - A Soupçon Of Seas (Vol II)
Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice: “Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all. Speak, Jacques Five!” The mender of roads…
- Scenes - A Soupçon Of Seas (Vol I)
“What do you do at his place? What do you and he talk about?” asked Stolz. “You know, it’s so proper and cozy at his place. The rooms are small and the sofas are so deep, you sink so far down no one can see you. The windows are quite cover…
- #TCCD (The Change Called Development) - - - SynTalk
Are you able to realize your potential? Is your country under-developed? Is development a kind of gradual unfurling? Could it then be an infinite, deliberate, process? Is urbanization industrialization? Is industrialization development? Is…
- #TCAFG (The Coarse And Fine Grained) --- SynTalk
How do you like your Matcha? Why do fine and coarse materials behave very differently? Is surface texture usually a sign of sub-structures? How does rock become clay? Is dry clay enough to understand wet clay? Could tea be smoked? Is it si…
- #TFON (The Formation Of Nations) --- SynTalk
How old are passports? Are you a resident citizen? Are nations primeval or modern? Were the colonizers, such as England, the first nations? Are all countries multi-ethnic/multi-religious? Are there phases, then, in the process of the abstr…
- #TROE (The Religion Of Eating) --- SynTalk
Should Aristotle have also cooked? Would you eat dog meat? What does your food say about your conception of Reality? How is our gut first colonized? What are you allergic to? How/why do cultures select what to eat? Where are taboos found?…
- #TIAR (The Interactions And Reactions) --- SynTalk
How quiet is the sea? Do you want to mine manganese? What makes certain interactions reactions? Are there reactions happening in your room? How is heat different from light? What does new Law come from? Can oceans ‘retain’ certain informat…
- #TOLOA (The Outer Limits Of Adaptation) --- SynTalk
Have we over-adapted? How fit are you? Are our adaptive responses often too private? Is any fitness measure also always about the environment? How efficiently do you communicate with the changing environment? Are cultures always born on th…
- #TAOC (The Afterlife Of Colonies) --- SynTalk
Do you aspire to write good English? What was Ranjit Singh’s official language? Where do your narratives come from? Is it possible to think rationally while living in a village and practicing caste? Was India (only) a land of static isolat…
- #TURU (The Un Regulated Underbelly) --- SynTalk
Are you a part of the underworld? Would you like the society to applaud you? Do you gamble? Or, consume illicit liquor? Is the disorderly the underbelly? Will you inherit property? How has dowry existed in many societies for centuries? Wha…
- #TWATW (The Word And The World) --- SynTalk
Are words valuable things? When did you last search for a word? Is the seed of language also the seed of the world? How does art work? Is direct (unmediated) observation possible? Does language have a (biological) organ that works with oth…