You changed the aperture, & cleaned the lens. Looked up the books, analyzed, & (also) reclassified. Called up some friends. Stared, absentmindedly. But the picture is hazy (#TPIH). Still.

#TPIH (The Picture Is Hazy) --- SynTalk Album

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)

#TNOAN (The Name Of A Name) --- SynTalk

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)

#TBBAF (The Borders Boundaries And Fences) --- 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).

#TICAW (The Images Concepts And Words) --- 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, Hilbert, Godel, Bourbaki, Abraham Robinson, Weinberg, Stanley Fish, Lawvere, & Stephen Wolfram, among others. How all physical theories have a desire to predict & look into the future. How mathematical theories, however, do not need to predict and have no role for evidence. Further, how theories in literature are an attempt to explain the process of interpretation? Are there theories that are finished pieces of work (test: when all true statements are provable)? Are some theories destined to be incomplete? Will we ever have a complete theory for poetry? Is all of mathematics just a theory? Do all theories (real numbers, classical mechanics) have limits? Is everything that is there to be known about a triangle now known? How a theory comes to be conceived in areas far far removed from available knowledge, via a leap of imagination or (even) an act of faith. How ‘non-logical axioms’ when put into the magical black box of ‘logic’ churns out a list of ‘provable statements’. How crystalline & elegant axioms are often identified after years of calculations. Can we, for instance, axiomatize the notion of space or theorize about some currently ill understood domains of gravitation at the largest scale? How logic specifies a grammar for construction. How double negation may not work in some systems (what is not true is not necessarily false). May the idea of the observable or the ways of seeing itself be theoretical constructions? Can finished theories have parallel ways of thinking (say, lines of force, fields of force, or electromagnetic potential)? The links between theoreticity and abstraction, & is (even) man a theory (‘the proper study of mankind is man’?). Are (electrical) circuit laws completely autonomous of the fundamental Maxwell equations? Are Laws the robe and Theory the wardrobe? The links between dog star, functor, earthquake, QCD, ‘mortal grossness’, Nile floods, fluxions, video games, chariot, White Males, synthetic differential geometry, love-dove-&-shove, & the salt doll. How theories wax & wane with the consensus and dissensus of interpretive communities. Are there universal truths? Can we simulate the answer to any question with extremely efficient computation without theories? Will theory itself come to an end in the long run? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Partha Pratim Ghosh (mathematics, ISI, Tezpur), Prof. Pramod K. Nayar (literature, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & Prof. Urjit A. Yajnik (physics, IIT Bombay, Mumbai).

#TEOT (The Everything Of Theory) --- SynTalk

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. Is all truth temporal? The difference between systematic (in one direction) and random (in both directions) errors with respect to the true value. Do things fail in the (non-human) natural world or they just ‘happen’? Is failure about an unfolding process while errors are more punctual? How (measurement) errors are inextricably linked to the notion of standard conception and expectation. Is there a trade-off between safety (not making mistakes) and liveness (making progress) for reactive systems (that interact with the environment)? How did a perfect Being create an imperfect world, and is it possible to have a ‘theology of failure’ (via, say, the demiurge)? How we pose the existence of a creator via notions of making, design or performance of the world (as an object). Is it likely that (software) modules that are individually correct give an error when put together? How in languages that are self referential & expressive it is impossible to prove if a program is correct. How some flawed universal notions can be much more intuitive. The (deeply counterintuitive) equivalence of uniform motion and rest. How there is often a striking similarity between students’ flawed conceptions and the history of ideas. Is limited experience the main source of errors? How computer programs non monotonically learn from experience, and the accompanying process of belief revision? Is consistency the virtue of an ass? What is the opposite of failure? Does one experience profound existential nothingness when one encounters failure? How (fortunately?) utopias – the perfect social & political models of the world – fail, and links with expectations and game theory? The links between ‘the world going to the dogs’, violent movement, bugs, chess, God, invariants, flight controllers, voting, winners & losers, exponential blow up, theory of vision, clocks, the original sin, bicycle, & the verifying compiler. Is it possible that there are ‘hidden variables’ in the physical world that makes even the quantum world completely certain? Would becoming perfect be the end of everything, & should we stay imperfect? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Costica Bradatan (philosophy, Honors College, TTU, Texas), Prof. Arvind Kumar (physics, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, ex-HBCSE TIFR, Mumbai), & Prof  G. Sivakumar (computer science, IIT Bombay, Mumbai).

#TEMAF (The Errors Mistakes And Failures) --- SynTalk

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 sampling mean in a world with Big Data? Is Brownian motion invariance principles manifesting themselves in a different space? Is probability theory merely a mathematical model which fits the world ‘very often’? In what sense is quantum mechanical uncertainty different? Can probability help gather knowledge about the world without intervention? Can randomness be generated? Is the best estimate of tomorrow’s (Markovian) weather today’s weather? Is the (need for the) probability of missing the train going to be different in the future? Is DNA sequence random? Would understanding biological systems using probability be a key endeavour for the future? Is it also important to regain a sophisticated understanding of probability besides just calculating? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from computer science (Prof. Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, TIFR, Mumbai), mathematics (Prof. Rahul Roy, ISI, New Delhi), & philosophy (Dr. Federica Russo, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Listen in....

#TCOP (The Cause Of Probability) --- SynTalk

Is Nature logical? Is uncertainty hardwired into Nature? Where do the paradoxes or aporia lie? Might paradoxes exist in the object (& not in the thinking)? What is the ontological status of mathematical objects? Are laws of Nature really written in the language of mathematics? Is mathematics a form of philosophical speculation? Did mechanization precede mathematization? Are axioms more pragmatic than theoretical? Can all mathematics be reduced to (but not derived from) logic? 'How' is mathematics able to explain reality? Can the quantum or the cosmological scales be visualized using Euclidean geometry? Does theoretical physics sometimes invent its own mathematics to make progress? Can (sub/un-conscious) thoughts or dreams be concretized? Is pure mathematics an extension of deductive logic, & always incomplete? Can mathematics be semi empirical (as: axioms + data)? Is a causal explanation always necessary? Is it possible to have a theory of everything for anything? What is the future of the limits (& uncertainties) of mathematics? Would large scale collaboration and computation help push the limits? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from theoretical physics & mathematics (Prof. Rajesh Gopakumar, ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore), statistics (Prof. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, ex-University of Calcutta, Kolkata), & philosophy (Prof. Babu Thaliath, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in....

#TLOM (The Limits Of Mathematics) - - - SynTalk

Is 29 absolutely prime? Are the 26 letters of the English alphabet arbitrary? Can you learn a word in isolation? How are children able to learn languages without being taught? Why are there patterns at all, & which are more likely? Do objects with more symmetries occur more often? Can patterns be understood via distributions? (How) are constellations in the sky invariant? Are relations more fundamental than entities? Are prime numbers randomly distributed? Is transformation possible only in invariant systems? Which patterns are transitory? How is the multiplicative (rotation?) operation different from the additive (translation)? Do we know which computer program is most likely to produce a certain binary string? Are all languages equally complex? Do numbers (or, numerals) emerge from a language? Why is decimal number system efficient? How are vowels and consonants distributed? Can human language be 'random'? Can there be patterns of change too? Is there a likely master program creating the Universe around us? How do we see beauty in (grammatically incorrect) poetry? Are nuances (really) rules? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from mathematics (Prof. Krishnaswami Alladi, University of Florida, Gainesville), computer science (Dr. Manoj Gopalkrishnan, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & linguistics (Dr. Avinash Pandey, University of Mumbai, Mumbai). Listen in....

#TPAD (The Patterns And Distributions) --- SynTalk

How unpredictable are we? Do our desires and constraints make us more detectable? Is data collection (somehow) always human? What’s not predictable? Can terrorist behaviour be predicted with consistency? Must data be balanced? Are cheats (terrorists, hackers, spiders, bots) more easily detected only if they are in the minority? Must predictions necessarily have explanatory power and granularity? Would tsunamis become completely predictable in the long run, as solar eclipses now are? Are predictions, like for gravitational waves, sometimes very difficult to confirm? Must we sometimes capture 'all' the data (say via sky surveys) even before deciding on all the analyses? Would natural history be more predictable if there were no astronomical events or human beings? Do very rare events (like 'zero day attacks’) often go undetected? Can we even predict if (and where) life might be elsewhere in the universe? Why is it so difficult? Will we know if/when aliens invade the earth? Could we be gone in the blink of an eye? Is it comforting to know (…precisely) how the night sky would look on 14th September 2400 AD? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from statistics (Prof. G. Jogesh Babu, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania), natural history (Dr. John Mathew, IISER, Pune), & computer science (Prof. V. S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, Maryland). Listen in....

#TFOP (The Future Of Prediction) --- SynTalk

Have you ever received a partly garbled email? Might mixtures be made of mixtures? Are you a separate being? Do you stand ‘in’ history? How is coming-together different from mixing? Is it possible to separate out the constituents from a mixture without knowing what they are? Why does the chiral environment of the body matter? How difficult is pure separation, & why? Can separation or decoding be done in real time? Is separation trivial after mixing? Do different groups constrain individual identities differently? Can partitions be constructions? Why is vote-to-seat conversion so difficult in elections? Does noise have statistical properties? How are filters designed? Do signals always have a continuity property? Why is it so difficult to factorize into two large prime numbers? Can individuality be dissolved (in, say, a mob)? What is the opposite of a mob? Can certain systems be made nearly impossible to partition? What is the future of separations and partitions: Will quantum computing force change in encryption? How would enantiomers be separated? Would entry and exit barriers be lower in several contexts? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from chemistry (Prof. Ravi Bhushan, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee), mathematics & statistics (Prof. Rajeeva L. Karandikar, Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), Chennai), & social sciences (Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in…

#TSAP (The Separations And Partitions) --- SynTalk

How does your tongue taste? What do you take for granted? Can you create randomness? Do you act in the continuum? Can you then reason about racing a tortoise ahead of you? Is there something common to most paradoxes? Can all paradoxes be ‘stated’? Do paradoxes owe something to the nature of Reality? Are dilemma, doubt, disbelief, paradoxes, & contradictions in the same class? Do we necessarily need faith before reasoning? Is there a reasoning process that does not lead to paradoxes? Why isn't Gödel's Theorem a Law? Are all paradoxes connected to language? Can a logic be complete but undecidable? Is uncomputability a consequence of self reference? Can discrete cardinality be higher than real numbers’? How did quantum probability uncover the hidden assumptions behind the quantum paradoxes? Is the quantum collapse (still) a physical phenomenon? What is computing? Are paradoxes pictures? Is a paradox free conception of the world possible? What is common knowledge? Are all paradoxes counterintuitive, & will we always keep running into them? Is there likely to be a ‘Law of Reasoning’ in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from mathematics (Prof. Luigi Accardi, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy), computer science (Prof. Supratik Chakraborty, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & philosophy (Prof. Navjyoti Singh, IIIT, Hyderabad). Listen in....

#TPAC (The Paradoxes And Contradictions) --- SynTalk

Are more than a third of you crooks; could you arrive at a consensus? When do we need to work together? Can introducing uncertainty (or randomness?) get rid of certain equilibria? Is coordination necessary for resource access by multiple agents? Is building synchronous hardware difficult? Is it even possible to say whether motor proteins are coordinating? Are systems with heterogeneous agents more likely to coordinate; & when? Can you move your lips; how? Can all problems be decoupled into ‘n’ pieces? Do process ‘geometries’ and communication systems matter? How does the central bank help firms coordinate? When is central planning essential? How is the brain different from the central bank? Is more information always better? Is being precise good? Can plasticity be built? How do proteins decide which ‘track’ to choose? How do (non-intelligent?) machines coordinate? Is the dynein of the yeast better than ours? Does the ‘size’ of payoffs determine whether coordination happens? Might we be able to think of coordination as a ‘field phenomena’ using the physical notions of order parameter, thresholds, and phase transition? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from computer science (Prof. K. Narayan Kumar, Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), Chennai), biology (Prof. Roop Mallik, TIFR, Mumbai), & economics and game theory (Prof. Debasis Mishra, ISI, New Delhi). Listen in....

#TCOA (The Coordination Of Affairs) --- SynTalk

f(q) = How old are passports? (#TFON)

SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.