SynTalk

Jan 03 2025 199 ep. 68 mins 5.7k
SynTalk Podcast artwork

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.

  Society & Culture
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#TGIP (The Goddesses In Particular) --- SynTalk

Jan 03 2025 77 mins  
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 intersect? How did the sacred geography of the subcontinent evolve? Do Goddesses have an influence on the lives of men (& kings) & women? Where/h

#TDAG (The Dead And Gone) --- SynTalk

Oct 25 2024 76 mins  
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, & it is life that happens occasionally? Does a cell know when it ought to die? When is an organism dead? When can we not dream? Can (certain) tis

#TOOP (The Oxygen Of Publicity) --- SynTalk

Oct 04 2024 73 mins  
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 society constantly transforming itself? What role does capital play? Does media influence human rationality? Are you able to tell real discourse and

#TGFF (The Grounds For Flight) --- SynTalk

Sep 27 2024 63 mins  
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 Wright Flyer I (which made the first sustained manned flight in 1903) actually a very bad design? Do flies fly merely by seeing? Are wings therm

#TOOI (The Order Of Institutions) --- SynTalk

Jun 28 2024 85 mins  
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’ decisions? Are military, markets, prisons, families, religions, borders, languages, & villages coercive in the same way? Are prisons (in reali

#TPOP (The Production Of Places) --- SynTalk

May 24 2024 76 mins  
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 ‘material’ cultures of the past enable excavation sites to be dated? Where do ghosts and Gods live? Do all humans think of a place the same w

#TSOFF (The Susurrus Of Former Futures) --- SynTalk

May 17 2024 77 mins  
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 does a common person today understand the yugas? Who has the ‘need’ to think about the future? How are different time periods squeezed into

#TPHAL (The Punk Hooligan And Lumpen) --- SynTalk

May 08 2024 76 mins  
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 Kabir? Why write obscene poetry? How (& by whom) are the boundaries policed? What leads to the various underground anti-aesthetic movements (such

#TTTC (The Transformations To Complex) --- SynTalk

Mar 22 2024 62 mins  
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 mathematical thinking core to understanding the world? Is complexity always a subjective feature? Do opinions spread in complex random grap

#TLAN (The Learnable And Not) --- SynTalk

Mar 04 2024 69 mins  
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 do you learn to have self respect? Are models a result of learning? What can be learnt by trial and error? Can mere prompts sometimes be enoug