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Do you live without regrets? Do you spontaneously follow rules? How did we first know if something is right or wrong? Does moral reasoning always progress in stages? Is this process always culture-relative? Can ethics, then, ever be universal? Must all ethical dualities be collapsed? Does bad become good when slaves become masters? Does our resentment for those with power give us satisfaction? Can we buy goodness? Does morality need faith? Must we behave decently even if existence is absurd? Is the individual always subordinated to the social? If human beings are self centred, then how do empathy, compassion or ‘commitment’ arise? Does self interest precede conventional morality? Can we sacrifice for the (contemporaneous) Other just as we do for our ‘own’ future other? Can moral law be like a law of nature? Is efficiency the principal ethic? Can the requirement of minimal liberty be Pareto inferior? Does ethicality primarily comprise in taking into account the spontaneity and the resistance of the Other? Who/what is the Other? Will everything be perfect in the end? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from social psychology (Prof. Janak Pandey, ex-University of Allahabad, Allahabad), philosophy (Prof. Jules Simon, The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas), & economics (Prof. Sreenivasan Subramanian, ex-Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai). Listen in....

#TBOE (The Beginnings Of Ethics) --- SynTalk

Observe. Which colour do you see? Is blueness in there? Which languages do you speak? Does experience tell us anything by itself? Would language make any sense without it? What is it to be grounded in experience? Does some of our reasoning depend upon it? What makes a concept legitimate? How does science try to make itself less subjective, & more observationally verifiable? Do experiments expand our experience? Do ordinary habits of languages sometimes perpetuate misconceptions? Is it important to distinguish between the reality, the appearance, and the ‘tag’? Why is learning a new language difficult? What is the logical process by which naive concepts become sharper – & does experience play a role in this? When might eye witnesses at a crime scene see different things? Must we defy intuition? Does experience both constrain and free us: how are/were we able to say that simultaneity is not absolute? Is experience really undifferentiated? Will experience remain a logical problem in the future? Would we need to understand both the metaphysics of the Self and the physicality of phenomenology to this end? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from psycholinguistics & coaching (Ravi Bhoothalingam, Manas Advisory, New Delhi), philosophy (Prof. Anil Gupta, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), & physics (Prof. Arvind Kumar, ex-HBCSE-TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in....

#THOE (The Habits Of Experience) --- 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

f(q) = Is soil a definitive sign of life? (#TCAFG)

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