#TOAH (The Organism Artefact Hybrids) --- SynTalk

SynTalk

Do you talk to your toaster? Do you think of ‘your’ bacteria as yourself? What self-replicates? Do organisms age during hibernation? Does the hybrid presuppose the pure? Can artefacts be made without thinking about their environments? Are our bodies at least somewhat mechanistic? Will we always live with the categories of the 1600s? Which deviations are aberrational? Do life and non-life lie on a continuum? Are only the animate living? Should doctors be haunted by the realization that their whole paradigm might change someday? Does psychology need physics? Could interactions between matter produce something of a different kind? How do a bunch of non living things come together to create living things? Is there a unit of life? Is the mitochondria living? Do robots ‘need’ ergonomic designing? Is there affordance between the non-living? Do stents & implants change us? Are robots akin to virus? Can Egyptian mummies be revived? Is objectivity context specific? Are processes involving the living fundamentally different? Can artefacts learn? Can environment change make enzymes evolve? What will organisms of the future be like? &, will we categorize differently? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from cultural studies (Dr. Anirban Das, CSSSC, Kolkata), systems design (Dr. Vivek Kant, IIT Kanpur, Kanpur), & cell biology (Dr. Sunil Laxman, DBT-inStem, Bangalore). Listen in...