Reflecting

Issue 91 October 2025

On ‘Liquid Reflections’

In 1958, talented and fearless and eighteen years old, Liliane Lijn left her family home and moved to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. Based on personal diaries from the time, ‘Liquid Reflections’ is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure. A revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman. In this interview with Richard Bright, she discusses ‘Liquid Reflections’, revealing her experiences in an era when sexism was the norm.

God’s AI Reckoning: The Final Revelation

As artificial intelligence grows more capable, it’s reshaping how humanity confronts belief. This essay explores how machines now pose questions once reserved for prophets and philosophers—disrupting spiritual traditions, simulating consciousness, and reinterpreting faith as a cognitive inheritance. From data-driven skepticism to the algorithmic search for meaning, AI isn’t just analyzing religion—it’s participating in the inquiry. Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and cultural reflection, the piece asks: when machines illuminate what was once unknowable, does divinity fade… or evolve?

Grabbing the Tiger by The Tail: Holding On For Dear Life to The Part of Myself that AI Will Never Replace

AI uses expansive memory to make accurate predictions of the next word in a series of words. Memory and talking are fundamental to being human, and we fear that AI will replace them. But because memory and talking have built-in limits, human life extends beyond them to a part of ourselves that AI cannot replace. We have called this our “higher” or “true” self, but it is simply the part of ourselves outside of memory. AI challenges us to fully embrace this part of ourselves, since we’re in the process of turning over our talking- and memory-selves to the machines.

A Psychedelic Mind: Metaphysics and Psychiatry

This article examines whether “mind altering” substances transcend the experiences of consciousness or are they mere chemicals that release or inhibit the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. The central question would be to investigate the metaphysical nature of mind-altering substances and whether they truly are ‘revelations’ transcending the crisis of existence or whether they prevent us from seeing our normal reality and thus are a delusional escape. The phenomenological account of a drug induced substance would allow for the transcendental or ‘higher’ self-consciousness felt during such an experience to be real and the research on the use of psychedelic substances in psychiatric therapy might prove drugs to be a novel means of discovering the metaphysical and neurological realities of consciousness. Thus, my aim is to study if psychedelics help us reach the limits of our experience in time and space and enter into the mystical and metaphysical realms of the nature of the ‘self’, its consciousness, realism/ anti realism of its existence and the world experienced by it.

Beyond the “Fake”: Martyna Marciniak’s Artwork, Anatomy of Non-Fact, Explores Synthetic Images

Joël Chevrier has been a Physics Professor at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) since 1998. This article discusses artist Martyna Marciniak’s work, ‘Anatomy of Non-Fact’, which uses images moving from optical images (photography as it comes out XIX century) to non-optical images or synthetic images as generated by AI.

Time as Spiral: The Fibonacci Architecture of Reality

This article, Part 2 of ‘The Inward Spiral of Time’, deepens the theoretical foundation laid in the first installment by connecting the spiral model of time to the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio, revealing recurring mathematical and biological patterns that mirror our proposed cognitive and cosmic spiral framework. It ties together concepts from cosmology, human cognition, AI development, and evolutionary dynamics.

This work was written in collaboration with Omni Intelligence AI, continuing our effort to bridge logic, consciousness, and emerging systems science through innovative models of thought.

HumanNature

NastPlas are an international artistic duo formed by Fran R. Learte and Natalia Molinos.

“We explore the relationship between humans and the natural environment by merging advanced technology with handcrafted processes. Combining digital tools such as artificial intelligence and 3D modeling with traditional techniques like ceramics, we create hybrid pieces that bridge the digital and physical worlds.”

In Petri Dish We Sing

Through the lens of a stem cell clinic in the year 2135, ‘In Petri Dish We Sing’ envisions a world where embryonic stem cells (ESCs) become a raw, sustainable material that forms the very fabric of the city’s infrastructure. Inspired by MIT’s research on the Lemon Skin Chair and Yarli Allison’s exploration of the healthcare system and gender health gaps, the film envisions a society reconstructed from this regenerative substance, one that carries the traces of cellular memory.

At the heart of ‘In Petri Dish We Sing’ are three intertwined lives: the healer, inspired by Yarli’s uncle, who left his prestigious gynaecology career to return to inherited ancient healing practices that Western medicine cannot identify; a granny who, at 79 wishes to be pregnant again, made possible by stem cell echnology; and a grieving man who uses his late loved one’s stem cells to grow furniture. Their encounters unfold within the speculative infrastructure of a stem cell clinic, where care and repair could be reimagined.

Collaboratively imagining the future can bring people closer together in the present

Zoë Fowler is a graduate student at the State University of New York, Albany in the Gaesser Lab.
“I am broadly interested in the intersection of social cognition, morality, and memory and imagination. My specific interests include empathy and its influence on morality as well as the role of imagination in the formation and maintenance of social bonds. Prior to SUNY Albany, I attended Emory University where I began as an undergraduate research assistant at Yerkes National Primate Research Center.”

Brendan Bo O’Connor (Bren) is a cognitive scientist, scholar of imagination, and outsider artist. As an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University at Albany he directs the Imagination & Cognition Lab, using psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to explore the relationship between imagination, empathy, altruism, and morality. As an artist, he is the creator and director of the Lucid Dream Minigolf project, an existential traveling minigolf course funded by the Alliance of Resident Theatres New York and New York State Council on the Arts. Before UAlbany, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Boston College. He received his B.A. from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

What’s it like being a raven or a crow?

Walter Veit is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Philosophy at the University of Reading, where I am also the director of the PPE program as well as the philosophy MA program.
“Furthermore, I am an external member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. My interests are broad, but I work primarily in and at the intersections of (i) the Philosophy of Cognitive and Biological Sciences, (ii) the Philosophy of Mind, and (iii) Applied Ethics. Much of my recent writing has been on animal minds, welfare, and ethics, as well as evolution. My first monograph titled ‘A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness‘ integrating this research into a coherent whole has been published with Routledge. I received my PhD in 2023 from the School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney. I also spent time during my PhD as a visiting student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford, before I moved on to a post-doctoral position at the University of Bristol.”

Heather Browning is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton.
“My primary research interests are animal welfare, ethics, and consciousness. I completed my PhD at the Australian National University, with a thesis on the measurement of animal welfare.
I have previously worked as a researcher in animal sentience and welfare at the London School of Economics, as part of the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. I was part of the research team who produced a report for DEFRA reviewing the evidence of sentience in cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans, leading to an amendment of the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act to include their protection.
I also worked for many years as a zookeeper and zoo animal welfare officer, interested in the practical application of animal welfare measurement.”