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 crisis.

In this roundtable, we will explore the notion of life in the universe and what it might look like elsewhere.

This roundtable explores whether mathematics has a unifying essence analogous to “life” in biology, and what that might mean for the discipline as a whole. It considers the role of mathematical language, analogies, and connections in shaping the coherence and perceived beauty of mathematical ideas.