Podcast: The Helix Center

Astrobiology is the study of life on the universe. It uses an understanding of the nature and history of life on this planet to frame expectations for biology beyond Earth. Starting in 1995, astronomers have discovered exoplanets: planets orbiting other stars. Over 5300 have been confirmed, and it’s likely there are more planets than stars in the universe.… read more »

A new movement within Cognitive Psychology, known as 4E Cognition, views thought and behavior as embodied, embedded, enactive & extended. Each of these four strands has a rich (and ongoing) philosophical history. Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Bahktin, Vygotsky and others have drawn attention to the role of action and interaction in (in)forming our experience. … read more »

Daily headlines have been startling and scary: “U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans,” reported The New York Times.  “The Pandemic has Made Homelessness More Visible in Many American Cities,” noted The Economist, while The Guardian  announced “The Latest UN Report is Clear: Climate Change is Here, It’s a Crisis, and It’s Caused by Fossil Fuels.”… read more »

Our panel will discuss the suggestion that we have been living in a sort of metaverse all along. This claim starts with the notion that the Universe evolves as one giant algorithmic computation, and that information is the basic substance. A variation on this line of thought asks the question: could we be living in a simulation à la the Matrix.… read more »

The program GPT-3 can create language that gives the impression that it is thinking. What will our interaction with robots of greater and greater verbal agility mean in the near future? What sort of Other will these robots become, evolve to?… read more »

The humanities deal with the manipulation of ideas. Ideas can be encoded, metabolized, and contribute to cultural evolution. What roles do cultural memes – be they fact, factoid, or fiction – play in what goes on. Does fiction provide any insight into this complex dynamic?… read more »

What counts as true and how we might know the truth in the age of coding. A discussion about misinformation, the decentralization of knowledge, and the struggle to establish what is real. Encoded algorithms help to provide security but also risk an encroachment on privacy.… read more »

How we discover codes, bearers of meaning, and how we reconstruct that meaning in archeology & paleoanthropology, in psychoanalysis, and in neuroscience research on memory.… read more »

Physics being the study of the fundamental properties of Nature, as the name implies, metaphysics investigates the nature of Nature, the what-must-therefore-be-the-case of those discoverable physical properties. For centuries, either explicitly or implicitly, metaphysics created the background and organizing principles for scientific research.… read more »

Neuroplasticity: it’s what our brains do. We alter our minds when we engage with the world and with the people in it. But, of course, when we think of “mind altering drugs” we refer to something else. That there might be a shortcut, a wormhole, a portal to some new and improved state of mind has long held our fascination.… read more »