The Helix Center

This roundtable explores memory as a dynamic process that shapes identity, perception of time, and our understanding of the future, both within and beyond the brain. It examines how personal, collective, and digitally extended memories influence experience in an age of technology and evolving mnemonic tools.

This roundtable explores 4E Cognition—how thought is shaped by the body, environment, social interaction, and extended tools—and what this means for consciousness and shared reality. It examines these ideas through philosophy, psychology, and cases like psychosis, considering how our experience of the world is constructed and maintained.

This roundtable explores how individuals and society can respond to today’s intersecting crises—ranging from public health and climate change to political polarization and global conflict. It considers how different fields and communities can work together to confront shared challenges and foster resilience in an uncertain world.

This roundtable considers the hypothesis that reality itself may be fundamentally computational or information-based. It explores philosophical and scientific perspectives on whether the universe can be understood as a form of simulation or algorithmic process.

This roundtable investigates the implications of AI systems capable of generating human-like language and behavior. It asks how these systems challenge our understanding of intelligence, agency, realism, and ethical responsibility.

This roundtable explores how fiction and ideas are encoded, transmitted, and transformed within culture. It considers the role of narratives, memes, and metafiction in shaping meaning and distinguishing fact from fiction.

This roundtable examines how truth and authenticity are defined in a digital age shaped by misinformation, decentralized systems, and algorithmic control. It considers the opportunities and risks of technologies that can both verify and fabricate perceived reality.

This roundtable explores how meaning is encoded and reconstructed across fields such as archaeology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. It examines how memory and interpretation allow us to recover and understand lost or hidden information.

This roundtable examines the evolving relationship between physics, metaphysics, and human knowledge of nature, from classical assumptions to modern challenges posed by quantum theory, language, and cognition. It considers how contemporary science and philosophy are reviving metaphysical inquiry by integrating empirical findings with questions about reality, perception, and consciousness.

This roundtable explores psychedelics and neuroplasticity, examining how mind-altering substances can influence perception, consciousness, and emotional states. It considers their historical, cultural, and emerging clinical roles in treating mental health conditions and expanding our understanding of the mind.

This roundtable examines how economics is evolving to address complex global challenges, from behavioral insights to large-scale disruptions like climate change, migration, and pandemics. It considers the field’s expanding role in analyzing social systems, policy, and human behavior in the 21st century.

This roundtable explores the ethical, cultural, and technological implications of modern reproductive science, including genetic screening and selection. It considers how advances in conception technologies raise questions about choice, identity, and the boundaries between nature, science, and tradition.

This roundtable explores the pervasive nature of stress in individual and collective life, examining its biological, psychological, and social effects. It considers how stress impacts the brain, behavior, and society, along with strategies for understanding, managing, and alleviating it.

This roundtable explores the placebo and nocebo effects, examining how beliefs and expectations can influence physical health and medical outcomes. It considers the underlying mechanisms, ethical questions, and what these effects reveal about the relationship between mind and body in medicine.

This roundtable examines the causes and dynamics of populist movements, focusing on tensions between “the people” and political elites. It considers how social, economic, and technological factors—including social media—contribute to the rise of populism and its various forms across political contexts.

This roundtable explores memory as a dynamic, evolving process that shapes identity, consciousness, and our relationship to the past, present, and future. It considers how individual and collective memories are formed, transformed, and experienced, and their significance in understanding the self.

This roundtable examines justice in the age of artificial intelligence, exploring questions of fairness, privacy, and decision-making when algorithms have unprecedented access to personal data. It considers how AI may reshape social equality, legal systems, and ethical frameworks in a world where anonymity is increasingly diminished.

This roundtable explores the evolutionary and biological roots of consciousness and emotion, drawing on Joseph LeDoux’s work to reconsider how emotions arise from fundamental survival processes rather than pre-formed states. It brings together perspectives from biology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy to examine how the brain constructs emotional experience and meaning.

This roundtable examines competing views of reality beyond physicalism, focusing on mathematical Platonism and tiered ontologies. It considers how these perspectives challenge the idea that particles and fields form the sole fundamental basis of existence.

This roundtable explores empathy as a psychological and imaginative process through which individuals “feel into” others and learn from both real and fictional experiences. It considers how empathy shapes identity, emotional understanding, and our ability to navigate relationships and internal conflicts.

This roundtable explores the nature of mathematical proof and the growing role of computers and AI in verifying and potentially producing proofs. It considers whether mathematics is a human practice with intrinsic value or a process that can ultimately be automated and entrusted to machines.

This roundtable explores the nature of truth and lying, examining how statements can be true, misleading, or shaped by omission, belief, and context. It considers psychological and philosophical perspectives on deception, including how and why individuals construct and believe falsehoods.

This roundtable explores status anxiety—what status means, why it matters, and why it drives human behavior. It examines the pursuit of status from historical, psychological, sociological, and biological perspectives to better understand its role in shaping our desires and social lives.

This roundtable explores shame as a social mechanism, examining how it is produced, used, and amplified across interpersonal, political, and technological contexts. It considers the consequences of shame for individuals and society, particularly in the age of social media and data-driven systems.

This roundtable explores the conceptual foundations of our current planetary era and how emerging perspectives challenge traditional distinctions between humans and the non-human world, nature and artifice, and agency and objectivity. It brings together interdisciplinary viewpoints to consider how these shifts inform our understanding of human action and responsibility in times of ongoing global c...