Podcast: The Helix Center

Sat
Sep 26th
2020
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Ethics & AI

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.
Sat
Feb 29th
2020
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How Deep Do We Go? Behavior, Mind, and The 4-Billion-Year History of Life

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.
Sat
Oct 5th
2019
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Mechanization of Math

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.
Sat
Sep 21st
2019
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Lying

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.
Sat
Jun 8th
2019
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Status

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.
Sat
May 18th
2019
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Shame

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.
Sat
Apr 27th
2019
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Living in the Anthropocene

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 crisis.