#TROO (The Reification Of Objects) --- SynTalk

Why do we reify? When are you able to read others' minds? Is this a pedestrian? Are sensation and perception tied together? How are new mental templates formed? Are priors 'necessary' for categorization? How do we know, in a badly lit place, if something is a wire or a snake? Are mental images ‘sharp’? Should stochastic processes (also) be understood via their higher-order moments? How are interiors of opaque objects (metal spheres to stars) pictured? Do you internally ‘model’ various parts of your own body? Does our mechanical body ‘produce’ words? Do virtual worlds also need a degree of veridicality? Do verbal and visual systems interact during encoding? How were gravitational waves detected? Is reification language dependent? Does brute force of computation help? When does (sub-symbolic) chairness become a (symbolic) chair? Is the notion of an ‘object’ generalizable across domains/languages? Can stars’ magnetic fields be plotted as precisely as the HR diagram? ‘Are sun-like stars like the Sun’? Do we need the body to conceptualize? Will computer systems need bodies? Are eyes like cameras? How do shrooms work? &, will ’everything’ tie up? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from astrophysics & machine learning (Dr. Shravan Hanasoge, TIFR, Mumbai), computational linguistics (Dr. Inderjeet Mani, Hua Hin) & cognitive psychology (Dr. Varsha Singh, IIT Delhi). Listen in...