SynTalk

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, Freud, Saussure, Peirce, Derrida, Foucault, Le Corbusier, McLuhan, Debord, & Baudrillard, among others. Can concepts or conceptual entities come to be without language? What are the links between rock art, and speech, script, words, entoptic phenomena, induced phosphene images, catenary curves, ‘scene of experience’, & language? Do 100,000+ years old rock arts provide a promising clue to how meaning gradually emerged from the pre-conceptual pre-representational ‘cauldron’? Are letters and pictures interchangeable, and have they always been so? How images come from very ancient times and how they thrust forward from without and from within? Do we dream in images? Is there any logo which is non iconic? How the core pursuit of advertising is to give form to an abstraction. How does advertising tackle different media, & how an advertisement in the print necessarily needs to be ‘processed in the mind’? How do you create the concept of ‘Friday dressing’? How Jarawas (from Andamans) have come to use words from English or Hindi. Does extinction of languages lead to death of concepts, & the attendant phenomena of amnesia and aphasia? We discuss Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Greek, & Chinese scripts. How icons (& further images, diagrams & metaphors), index & symbols are different from each other? How is a notion different from a concept? Is there conflict and cooperation always at play between images (of say, Batman, Hanuman, Manga, or Anime), & are images conquering the world? Where do specters and ghosts come from? Is there an incessant mass-ification of images (via ‘procession of the simulacra’) ongoing and ahead of us, & are images the long term future of language? Are images & meanings going to be increasingly crowd sourced in the future? Is a technology-driven ‘master narrative’ taking over the visual arts, cities, & forests, and is the ‘visual landscape’ shrinking? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. K. K. Chakravarty (art, public administration, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi), Santosh Desai (advertising, strategy, Futurebrands, ex-McCann-Erickson, Delhi), & Prof. Franson D. Manjali (semiotics, interdisciplinary, JNU, Delhi).

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 Hoyle, Maxwell, Dirac, Planck, Godel, Bohr, Einstein, H G Wells, Wheeler, Feynman, Prigogine, Landauer, Roy Kerr, Everett, Novikov, & Zeldovich, among others. How has the notion of time changed with digital watches? What is ‘logical time’, & the importance of multiple systems synchronizing with each other? What would happen if we hit an electron with a hammer? Do we get ‘it from bit’, and what is the possible link of time with (quantized) information? Can neurons be thought of as being probabilistically synchronized oscillators? We also discuss the concept of Planck’s time as the fundamental unit, & the resultant notion of whether time is discrete or continuous. What is the link between causality and time? We discuss the fascinating links of time with thermodynamics, entropy, ‘action at a distance’, & closed / open systems. What would happen, surprisingly, if a hot star were to be connected with a cold star via a conducting wire? The nature of neurological time, and its links with octopuses, crabs, speeding cars, a ‘cache of situations’, & reflex actions. How do (memory) space & time tradeoffs impact computer algorithms? Can time be lost? How ‘branching time’ creates possible worlds that are not known a priori? Is time travel possible (via a worm holes), and does it need a conception different from ‘state-based’ time? Do animals ‘have’ time? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Jayant V. Narlikar (astrophysics, IUCAA, Pune), Prof. Krithi Ramamritham (computer science, IITB, Mumbai), & Prof. Sisir Roy (theoretical physics, NIAS, IISc, Bangalore).

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, Korzybski, Saadat Hasan Manto, & Feynman, among others. Is the cell membrane (say) a boundary, and how does it help the organ know about the world? How does a (physical) boundary of pebbles operate ‘within’ the river Ganges? How there is a robust (crisp) line separating the solvable and the unsolvable. How is the notion of the border different from the real border (in the Gaza ‘brown strip’)? We explore the fascinating journey of ‘empires with frontiers’ to ‘nation states with militarized borders’ over the last several centuries. Is there ultimately a certain ‘life force’ behind creation of real & virtual boundaries? How does one trust a neighbor? What is the nature of boundaries around ‘languages’ & ‘species’? How do statistical systems have upper and lower bounds, and how is it possible to predict the reliability of a system with a ‘confidence interval’? Is a statistical mean similar to the center of a set? Is there a gradual inevitable dissolution of the definitiveness of borders, even if borders have been paid for in blood? How an emergent or an imposed hierarchy introduces the vertical and distorts the lateral? What is no man’s land? Is there a convexity (with inside and an outside) for a malware? How is the notion of the border, mediated by the colonial experience of certain countries? We invoke themes illustrated by, among others, Israeli-Palestinian, Indo-Pakistan, Dutch-German, Indo-Myanmar, Chinese-North Asian borders. How are the maritime borders different? What is the long term future of the borders in context of the universal human condition? The SynTalkrs are: Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar (defence studies, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi), Prof. K.P. Mohanan (linguistics, critical thinking, IISER, Pune), Prof. Sanjeev V. Sabnis (probability, IITB, Mumbai), & Prof. R.K. Shyamasundar (computer science, TIFR, Mumbai)

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 Aristotle, Galileo, Laplace, Newton, Halley, Oersted, Faraday, Maxwell, Mach, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Higgs, Max Jammer, & Karplus / Levitt / Warshel (2013 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners), among others. How is the world held together by the various forces? What exactly is a force field? Can there be force without matter (Yes)? Does matter create its field, or can a field be its own source? How to think of Maxwell’s equations in ‘free space’, and why we need matter (as sources for (say) microphones & radio)? How do forces act at a distance? Why do we try to create early universe conditions in large colliders, and study strong & weak forces? How did the forces separate (gravitation, electromagnetism, weak & strong forces, in that order) as the universe cooled down? Why don’t bodies simply move in a straight line, and links with the concept of ‘natural motion’? Is it (even) possible to know why forces exist? Is Big Bang the new ‘prima mobilia’, and how much more do we conceptually know about forces now? How do strongly interacting (uncertain) electrons / atoms get confined in a classical body, and links with concepts of multiscaling (QM/MM; Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics) and the mesoscopic world? Why an electrical circuit is difficult to understand in terms of electromagnetic field theory. How forces bind parts together and why / how a different whole sometimes emerges? How the degrees of freedom get frozen as the number of bodies increase. Why did Bohr’s premise of simply quantizing angular momentum did not work for many-electron atoms (beyond hydrogen-like atoms)? Link of the grey zone (‘interface region’) between quantum mechanics & classical mechanics with drugs, proteins, buildings, brain, cricket ball, polymers, spark plug, steering wheel, effective theory, & wave-particle duality. How does a magnet defeat the earth and pull a piece of iron, and its links with gauge theory (with all three forces, except gravity) and the possibility of gravity as an entropic or emergent force? Are market, political, or life forces similar entropic forces? Why is gravity difficult to unify with the other forces? Has ‘force’ replaced ‘energy’ since mid 19th century (after the energy-ists)? Are a different set of forces likely to govern dark matter and dark energy? Is force just a defined concept and not purely fundamental? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. S. D. Agashe (electrical engineering, history & philosophy of science, IITB, Mumbai), Dr. Sourav Pal (quantum chemistry, NCL, Pune), Prof. Sreerup Raychaudhuri (particle physics, TIFR, Mumbai).

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 formed, and is this one of the biggest open questions today? The continuing journey after the big bang from the physical to astrophysical to chemical to biological to social evolution (across all species via, say, pollination) way into the distant future. The concepts are derived off / from Darwin, Crick, Watson, Hoyle, Prigogine, Manfred Eigen, Delbruck, Maturana, & Stuart Kauffman, among others. Is it possible to create synthetic life in a laboratory, and does the clue to this possibility lie in the (chemical?) nature of a virus? How does speciation happen? The core significance of the cell being a ‘phase separated structure’ with organizational closure. Is the cell the unity of life? How we do ‘not’ really know where biology ends and chemistry begins. Is life a physical state (just as liquid is a state of water)? The definition of life via replication (DNA, tRNA), metabolism (metabolic charts, glucose) and energy transduction. We discuss the role of glucose as a key molecule for all life, and wonder what it is like for glucose (& other bio molecules) to be ‘outside’ life. How does self organization arise in both physical and biological systems, and how (for example) phospholipids (with hydrophobic tails and hydrophilic heads) organize itself in water? How affinities can emerge between two DNA strands. How life is a dialogical state, and neither the physical equilibrium (oxidized state like carbon dioxide) nor the state of chemical death (‘petroleum state’). How virus ‘lives’ on the border of life and non-life. How all living stems can be characterized using unique chemistry, biochemistry, structure, & function. Why life originated from water? What is the role of weak bonds (in, say, the colloidal state of protoplasm)? How does ‘conscious cognition’ arise in living systems, & what are the links with ‘emancipated reflexive motor actions’, microtubules, dance, lizard, play, & consciousness (Mind from Matter). How does a living system talk to itself (why does a child suck its thumb)? How the feeling of ‘free will’ gives an (illusory) advantage. How life has multiple answers, and an inherent capability to change. How life is an expression of abundance. How a bio molecule is not like a sphere. The future with artificial life, cognitive robotics, & ‘languages in nature’ (of animals & languages). Why we can’t wear a full body armour anymore? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Pushpa M. Bhargava (molecular biology, CCMB, Hyderabad), Prof. Nagarjuna G. (philosophy of science, HBCSE, Mumbai)

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 cannot be named (what is between green and blue?), and is the process of naming ever complete? How a massive chunk of the world cannot be named. How is the process of naming different for a computer compared to a human being? Is naming or un-naming a neutral process? Why it is essential to name a musical note (why Re, Komal Re, & Ati-Komal Re?). How the cognitive significance of a name tells us something about frequency of occurrence. Is it possible to experience the musical notes without knowing the names of the notes? Does the object or the new born child suggest its own name, and how does baptism (or naming samskara) happen? How arbitrary is naming, and what do conventions, programming aesthetics, gestures, & culture have to do with it? What role does a neither-accepted-nor-rejected legacy play in the process of naming? How names transfer during language contact? How names represent the world from a trans-historical perspective? Can names be equated to a cluster of descriptions or are their modal profiles different? How we can name by not naming (say in taboo, euphemisms, ellipsis). Are names links between two or more face to face ‘pointing’ interactions? How does one discretize a (variably grained) conceptual world? How all Proper Names need not be proper nouns (what is water?). How Named Entity Recognition (NER) is central to the process of machine translation or transliteration, & how does one (generally speaking) shift from ‘low gaze’ to ‘high gaze’ to interpret the world? How names are not nouns but noun-phrases? Does sign language need to have names? Are names independent of language? Can you guess someone’s name by looking at her? The links between names, horses, feminist movement, caste system, homonymy, & globalization. How short will names get in the future? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya (computer science & engineering, IITB, Mumbai), Dr. Girish Nath Jha (computational linguistics, JNU, Delhi), & Dr. Avinash Pandey (linguistics, Mumbai University, Mumbai)

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.S. Mill, Hobbes, Burke, Wendell Holmes, Hannah Arendt, Nozick, Fukuyama, Chomsky, James C. Scott, Douglass North, & Snowden, among others. How have we reached a state where (for most parts) the citizen is the principal and the State is the agent? What is the rule of law, & does the State have an absolute or comparative advantage over violence? How does (sacred) constitutionalism emerge out of nowhere? What is the ideal tax/GDP ratio, and do different models of statehood just compete for greater populations and GDP? Have States formed more easily in fertile plains with surplus? Does a State have a need for legitimacy, and where does it derive its morality from? How the consciousness about the concept of a nation inform the development of the Modern State. How authoritarian States run out of people, and why civilizations can’t climb hills. What is the difference between ‘doing justice’ and ‘applying the law’. What is minority, and how minority is not a person but a position? How did UK rule the world, and is modern terrorism a counter to the violence of the State? What happens when a perfectly legitimate State commits immoral acts? Are all at war with all (a la Leviathan)? Is statelessness or a Minimal State possible or desirable? Who wins a democratic contest? Should / does a State create feedback loops and structures of accountability? Does an individual really think for the others, and what is general will and public good? Will the construct of the State change in the long term to have other agglomerations come between the State and its citizens? Does the State withdraw only to (often) reappear? What is the likely impact of globalization and technology. Is the future DIY? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Saroj Giri (political science, Delhi University, Delhi), Prof. Ajay Shah (economics, National Institute of Public Finance And Policy, Delhi), & Dr. Harsh Vardhan (strategy consulting, Bain & Company, Mumbai)

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’), Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis) & Isabelle Stengers (‘ecology of practices’), among others. What is soil to a farmer, and can soil be male or female? How / when did nature become natural resource? How a certain non-modern conception of ‘owning’ (of, say, land) go together with ‘owing’, and not remain linked to the concept of property. How the power (thought of as work done per unit of time) of modern & traditional industries differ? How is the non-natural linked to a certain power-led deviation away from equilibrium & ambient conditions? Power as the nature and manner of valuing & validation, and an ecology of practices. Does a certain Will to Power underwrite both natural and human forms? Is ‘symbiosis’ a possible thematic countertrend to the Will to Power? Are the paradigmatic logics of ‘social being’ and ‘dominant knowledge’ separable from each other? How the modern panchayat systems are different from the traditional panchayat system in its political structure? What is Radical Ecological Democracy (or swaraj, or sumak causay, or el buen vivir, or Solidarity)? The significance of endogenous modeling over (seemingly) indigenous ones. How some communities conceive of themselves as earth citizens (sharing the planet with ~50 million other floral & faunal species). Do we need a certain ecological reconceptualization to include the inanimate as well. How do we all fly planes in a sustainable world? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Sasheej Hegde (sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), Ashish Kothari (ecology & conservation, Kalpavriksh, Pune), & Sunil Sahasrabudhey (philosophy, science, Vidya Ashram, Varanasi)

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, Zilsel, Conan Doyle, Popper, Polanyi, D’Ambrosio, McLuhan, Gettier, Febvre, Needham, Ellul, Monge, Vance Packard, Chomsky, Said, and Kancha Ilaiah, among others. How do we really know today that the sun is in the centre of the solar system, & links with Sherlock Holmes, realism, & positivism. How keeping earth in the centre became mathematically unwieldy. What is knowledge, reason, belief, and Justified True Belief (JTB)? How did hierarchy set in between (say) pottery and weaving? Is cognitive differentiation produced via social differentiation of labour? What is the impact of loss of agriculture as a form of life? Does / how artisanal knowledge lead to abstract knowledge, and what is the interplay between theory and praxis? How does media decide what is worth knowing (agenda setting), and is the internet selfish with a will of its own? How technologies produce skepticism. Does something exist if it is not on internet and big databases (why grant patent for neem)? What is ‘generalized calculus of all curves’ a product of, and is mathematics also embedded within social norms? The new modes of production of knowledge. Does more information on candidates change voter behaviour? Will knowing remain ‘centered’? Will all knowledge become some kind of folk epistemology (with limited ethnocentrism?)? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Amit Basole (economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston), Prof. Dhruv Raina (history & philosophy of science, JNU, Delhi), & Dr. N. Bhaskara Rao (social sciences, media studies, Center for Media Studies, Delhi)

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, S Chandrasekhar, Brandon Carter, and Susskind, among others. Do camels see mirages in the desert? How does dark matter and galaxies lead to formation of virtual images? Does a rainbow exist? Why does a sun appear oblate sometimes? How are electrons and humans aware of the rest of the universe (Mach’s principle, anthropic principle), and how does it get its information, habit or lawfulness? Is Maya related to the concept of measurement? ​Are (say) Maxwell’s and Newton’s laws ‘an extremely well worked out myth’? Is there an Absolute Truth? Is time an illusion, and its possible links with ‘trikal drishti’ (triple time vision) and steady state theory? How Lord Indra created vowels, consonants, and grammar from eternal sound. Is fear like dark matter? How the ‘concept of truth’ (model making) is different from the truth. The difference between ‘the truth’ and ‘my truth’. How can I experience you? Is there a link between empathy and telepathy, and is telepathy possible? How Truth has an asymptotic character. What is Knowledge by Identity? The parable of the larvae and dragonflies (“Not lost but gone before”) and the rumour attributed to a frog. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. S. M. Chitre (astrophysics, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, ex-TIFR, Mumbai), Dr. Matthjis Cornelissen (psychology, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry), & Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik (mythology, writing, Mumbai)