Is grey ‘real’? Is all discretization perspectival? Can there be absolute notions of discreteness and continuity? Is time eternal? Is the world continuous but we perceive it as discrete? Are micro and macro objects continuous, but the meso discrete? Can real numbers be ‘made’ from integers? Are real numbers continuous (analog), & integers discrete (digital)? Do we don’t have access to ‘most’ of the real numbers? Did God make integers – or only 1 (& 0?)? What does Fourier Transform imply?...
Dec 23, 2017•1 hr 17 min
Imagine taking a step forward, then a step to the right, & then a step back – where are you now? Do you have to reason for this, & how ‘far’ can you go? How are diagrammatic reasoning and representation different? Are diagrams for domains that can be represented spatially? Are mental images an internal perceptual representation shared by both internal and external inputs? Do (explicit) symbols make cognition possible? Is our cognitive architecture multi-modal? Can the blind use diagrams?...
Dec 10, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Are you free if thoughts just occur to you? Is alienation – as loss of a sense of belonging and subjectivity – a phenomenon of modernity? Is freedom contra-causal and spontaneous? Is it truly in human nature to be free? Are people ‘already’ free? Do you exercise your freedom in the Market? Is all of production voluntary? Is production a form of fulfillment? Is leisure (without work), then, a threat to freedom? Are you overworked and overspent? Are your desires yours? Are we accumulating ‘garbage...
Dec 09, 2017•1 hr 18 min
Do you trust your translator? How can ‘worlds’ be translated? Where is Tamil when a novelist writes in English about Tamil speaking characters? Are all translations interpretations (judgment?)? Can one ‘read’ Nature? Can mathematics be translated into (natural language) prose? Is translation prior to language, & (therefore) is it in the nature of languages to be translatable? How then are languages different from one another? Can the forces of translation be located within one language itsel...
Nov 25, 2017•1 hr 12 min
Can you be a revolutionary? Might concrete events have causes, but not history? What drives the world? Does history develop (or progress?) in stages? Is the end there at the beginning? Are we moving from ‘less free’ to ‘more free’? Are eras and epochs merely intellectual constructs, & always retrospective? Does human mind create different visions of the same era? How did human wants increase for the formulaic economic human to emerge? What role did trade play? Is creative technology an in-bo...
Nov 19, 2017•1 hr 19 min
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 ‘...
Nov 04, 2017•1 hr 12 min
What is on that side? Where does identity crisis happen? Is interface a neighborhood concept? Can there be interfaces without fences? Are there non-membrane bound life forms? How do we connect computers or networks? How does the human brain communicate with the CPU? What is the dimensionality of interfaces? Can intelligence be encoded into materials? Where is a cell controlled from? Is Wi-Fi physical? Is autonomy difficult? Do different kinds of interactions lead to different kinds of interfaces...
Sep 24, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Do you have a pain of 9? Do you malinger? 'Where' does it hurt, & when? Do you want to be admitted to a hospital? Do you want attention? Are you suffering from loneliness? Do you need morphine? Is pain subjective, & always multidimensional? Is the brain always a part of any pain experience? Is pain a disease? How can it be assessed? Can there be patients without diseases, and diseases without patients? Can groups experience pain? Is treating the pain different from treating the disease? ...
Sep 16, 2017•1 hr 7 min
Are you very well known? Do you live in a ‘small world’? Can connectedness be measured? How did/do books, knowledge, money, voice, & commodities circulate? What is the topological structure of the internet? Is everything connected a network? Do we try to stabilize networks via protocols? Does internet have more ‘filters’ than ‘doors’? What are the effects of media? Is most economic value created via affective infrastructures by measuring & tapping the senses? Are there limits to how larg...
Aug 19, 2017•1 hr 7 min
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'...
Aug 18, 2017•1 hr 12 min
Do people bet on horses when they bet on horses? What does money 'do'? Does money fundamentally deal with the future? Why don't we have a market in people anymore? Isn’t Market an elaborate barter system? How do different things commensurate with each other? Does price make value observable? Is the world created by labour? Can labour be the scale for pricing? Can Market solve ‘all’ problems? Is price always embedded in a broader system of values? Why is Copenhagen's racing different from Delhi’s...
Aug 06, 2017•1 hr 18 min
Do you tip in restaurants you are unlikely to revisit? Why (not)? Have you violated a norm or a 'rule' lately? Do norms (for collective action) and conventions (for coordination) solve different kinds of social problems? Are norms constraints? Are conventions self enforcing? Is the capacity to develop and enforce norms central to being human? Would we have societies without norms? Is it important for societies to 'informally' punish opportunistic behaviour in a decentralized way? What does 'brea...
Aug 05, 2017•1 hr 8 min
]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynToy ]] [[ Context. Concepts. Categories. Conversations. Chance ]] Eternity in 180 seconds. Bird songs. #SynToy_World. Shuffle. Chatter. Incoherente. Questions. Ideas. SynTalkrs. Organic. Many many. Talk. An object is. Episodes. Sense. Images. Tiles. Clouds. Culture. Session. Finite. Because they have done it. Experience. Patterns. As strange. Notes. Subjective. Verifiable. Space. Other. Process. Boundaries. Circuitry. People. One appearing as many. Thinking. Alone ]...
Jul 30, 2017•3 min
Are you civil? When do you put your self interest aside? Does it depend on the ‘evolutionary game’ you are playing? Is justice fairness? Is a fair world impossible? What do markets promote? Is 'price' the magic wand? Can price take all the externalities into account? Do initial endowments always matter? Can social order emerge in a group of only self interested individuals? When can natural selection be said to be occurring? Why aren’t all groups societies? Is there fairness (or even efficiency)...
Jul 29, 2017•1 hr 17 min
Why don’t we misunderstand the number 3? Do you have a private photograph? Is most of perception ineffable? Do propositions capture reality? What cannot be shown? Or, said? How does one describe touch? Or disgust? What/how do you understand if you watch a foreign language film without subtitles? How is it even possible for our thought to be about the world? Does the logical form of a fact and its (corresponding) sentence match each other? Does language 'depict' the world? How does this picturing...
Jul 15, 2017•1 hr 12 min
Does the Indonesian (?) in you love idlis? Are we all (universal) human beings? But, does society narrow our experience of the world? Must we then be spatiotemporally-bound? But, do universal ideas also come from situatedness? Is local, however, also always hybrid? How is a universal regionalized in architecture or literature? What is decidedly local – a consciousness? Does local see itself as hybrid? Is the self-image of your community locally constructed? Does connected mean homogenized? Can t...
Jul 08, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Why don’t you help all your relatives? Why do people marry? Do you know your pedigree? Can relatedness be measured or recognized with precision? Are close relatives the best organ donors? Who guarantees your loans? Who can the closest relative be? Do four first cousins equal one sibling? Would altruism evolve in the absence of kinship? Does the environment impact the benefit/cost of helping? Can organisms self reproduce? Is it possible for males to have neither a father nor a son? Do all off-spr...
Jun 24, 2017•1 hr 15 min
Did H. M. lead an eventless life? How was your last beach holiday? How do languages make events granular? Can events in texts be ‘inferred’ computationally? Do events always occur in the past? Is evental time modal? Are events objects? Are places facts? Is a decaying apple evental? Are all events spatiotemporal? How do recent events become long term episodic memories or facts? Are events and facts stored in the same region? Are space and time encoded differently? What is the role of relevance? I...
Jun 17, 2017•1 hr 13 min
Do chimpanzees play politics? Why do we act spitefully or ‘altruistically’? Is one human being equal to another? Is power without hegemony possible? Is there always an established social order? Is competition for resources scrambles or contests? Is nature a good guide to explain human behaviour? Is culture a result of adaptation? Are orders of dominance always subject to change? When are leaders and subordinates coupled? Does equilibrium selection depend upon whether a game is sequential or simu...
May 27, 2017•1 hr 13 min
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 i...
May 13, 2017•1 hr 12 min
Do you despise your body? Can the body be a source of transcendence? Can one, however, have nothing but only the body? Are we embedded in this world as bodies with other objects, texts, rituals, spectators, and bodies? Is everybody also a biological, physical, social, & political object? Do you see yourself through the eyes of others? Can there be The (disembodied) View from Nowhere? Is it possible to experience the body as the object and subject fused together? Why do we watch dance? Why do...
Apr 29, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Do we often misunderstand ourselves? Can we be aware of everything? Is introspective knowledge reliable? Can we be mistaken about being hungry? Might the gap between successive thoughts be increased until there is complete thoughtlessness; can this be measured? Is introspection voluntary or involuntary? Is awareness a general relational state (& not a 'happening’)? How does global consciousness emerge in the ensemble state of neurons? Do animals develop conceptual self understanding? Why do ...
Mar 26, 2017•1 hr 9 min
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 import...
Mar 25, 2017•1 hr 7 min
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 ...
Mar 19, 2017•1 hr 11 min
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 predicti...
Mar 18, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Do you have difficulty sleeping? Can one dream while sleep walking? What/when/how do we express to ourselves via our dreams? Can painting be dream-like? Do we understand the mechanisms underlying imagination, dreams, and fantasy? Are (conscious) signals below a threshold deactivated when one is asleep, so that the (un/sub-conscious) ‘noise’ becomes signal? Are dreams always replays of thought processes? How graded is sleep? Do cats or platypus or hunting dogs dream? Do we dream every time we sle...
Feb 19, 2017•1 hr 14 min
Is anything isolated? Is comparison essential? Does the entire cosmos consist of a structure of relationships? When comparing, must we think in terms of similarity rather than difference? Is comparison a fundamental way of dealing with complexity in the world? Do you write in a third language? Why is Persian metaphorical (& more so for the non-native speaker?)? Does one have to negotiate the terms of comparison before comparing? Does this depend on the ‘operation’ one is looking to carry out...
Jan 29, 2017•1 hr 8 min
Is life precious? Whose property is it? Is the final act of suicide narratable? Can you tolerate frustration? Rage? Shame? Could one commit suicide without any conscious reason? Is suicide alluring? Do we instinctively long to unite with some deep inanimate part of nature? Are we ‘beings towards death’? Does a suicide bring together both the radical uniqueness and the similarity of death? Why do men commit suicide more than women? Do you identify with your mother? Is suicide a cowardly act? How ...
Jan 22, 2017•1 hr 6 min
Can you be creative consciously? Can verification of an idea be fully worked out in the unconscious state itself? Does P equal NP; & is proving computationally more intensive than verifying? Can a system be called creative if it explores all possibilities (with brute force) before selecting one? What, then, is creativity for machines? Might daydreaming have underlying processes akin to stochastic optimization or simulated annealing? Are there different types of creativity? Can it be defined?...
Jan 15, 2017•1 hr 13 min
Why is your shape what it is? Are shadows 2D? Is matter potentiality, and form actuality? What do shapes mean at different scales? Do shapes evolve? Are only regular 3D shapes stable? Is (the shape of, say) quartz stable, & can equilibrium shapes be derived? Is all matter porous? Why isn't everything spherical? Does nature (topologically speaking) make toruses from spheres? Do forms depend upon whether a system is isotropic or anisotropic? Why are biological shapes always fluctuating? Is lif...
Jan 08, 2017•1 hr 4 min
