Perceiving Reality

Issue 92 November 2025

The Symptomatology Series

Lia Pas is a multidisciplinary artist who works in image, text, and sound exploring body and states of being. She was an active composer/performer and poet/librettist until 2015 when she became disabled with ME/CFS. Since then her work has focused on fibre arts and writing with some small forays back into music. Her symptomatology and anatomy embroideries have been featured in numerous online publications and are part of the SK Arts permanent collection.

Constant

‘Constant’, an AI film by Danny Ratcliff, follows Bailee from childhood through motherhood, chronicling her lifelong relationship with an AI companion. Beginning with Bailee’s birth in 2023. The narrative explores how trust with artificial intelligence, established early and nurtured over time, can become a cornerstone relationship. While some in our culture remain skeptical of AI technology, Bailee’s story represents what’s possible when a relationship is built on genuine partnership rather than fear of technology. The film culminates with Bailee introducing her five-year-old daughter Natasha to her AI companion, passing down the same trust that shaped her own life.

Do We Need to Rethink Everything?

We know from cognitive science and neuroscience that the brain is not a passive observer, like a camera lens. The brain actively composes what we perceive. Still we persist, in all our endeavors – from trying to cure cancer to conceiving of a unified theory – to operate from a materialist perspective. Perhaps this needs to change.

Perceiving Reality: The Enthalpy of Existence

‘Perceiving Reality: The Enthalpy of Existence’ traces a decade long investigation by British artist Alexander James Hamilton into the behaviour of light, matter, and perception as thermodynamic systems. Spanning the Siberian projects ‘Oil + Water’ (2013–2016) and ‘Empirical Research & Evidence’ (2021–2023), the work unites scientific observation with aesthetic consciousness. Through analogue photography and sustainable material practice, Hamilton visualises entropy, equilibrium, and environmental change as intertwined conditions. The resulting corpus proposes that perception itself functions as empirical instrument: a form of energy exchange in which to observe is to participate in creation.

The Future of AI Therapy: Promise, Peril, and Urgency

Cleandra Waldron, a counselling psychologist, shares the troubling patterns emerging with clients in her therapy room. Clients increasingly reveal details of their conversations with LLMs as they turn to AI for mental health support. Often unaware of the risks to privacy and dependence, they reveal intimate details of their lives and even medical data. A recent Sky News article reported that an alarming 1.2 million people had discussed suicide with ChatGPT. The ease of 24/7 support without wait times during an unprecedented mental health crisis—which largely operates in a regulatory void—has dangerous implications for user safety. Human psychological services have taken years to build safeguards and protections that clients take for granted, while AI poses as a therapist without any of the regulatory safeguards and protective guardrails that a human therapeutic relationship is bound by.
This article examines the real-world implications of AI therapy through the lens of clinical practice, revealing alarming gaps in data privacy, the dangers of AI “hallucinations” in therapeutic contexts, and the fundamental tension between business models optimized for engagement and the wellbeing of users. Drawing on recent legal actions against big tech AI companies, emerging research, and first-hand accounts from therapy sessions, it carefully asks critical questions: What do we lose when algorithms replace human connections? How do we balance the increased demand for cost-effective therapeutic services with common-sense protections that keep users safe?
The future of AI and its implications for therapy remain unclear. This article poses more questions than answers but aims to increase awareness and promote further research in the field of AI therapy, encouraging the implementation of common-sense policies that protect users from a therapist that never gets sick or goes on holiday.

Chaos and Order as Design Elements in Evolutionary Biology and the Visual Arts: A Case Study of Human–Robot Artistic Collaboration

This paper investigates the interplay of chaos and order in evolutionary biology, cell biology and the visual arts. It argues that creativity in both natural and artistic systems arises from a productive tension between these two principles. The study introduces a collaborative art project in which a robotic drawing machine and a human painter co-created works, embodying order and chaos respectively. By drawing parallels between mutation and repair in biology, dynamic processes in physics, and compositional strategies in art, the paper highlights chaos and order as universal design elements across disciplines.

Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat

Fulcrum Arts is pleased to present Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat, a collection of works developed in relation to the artist’s August 2025 crossing of the Catalina Channel in a kayak made of mushroom mycelium. The exhibition’s central feature is the mushroom boat itself, which was built by the artist and stands amid the artifacts of its development, including extensive documentation of its fabrication, testing, and eventual use on open water.

We Contain Multitudes

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 40 years. He studied Fine Art and Physics before founding The Interalia Centre in 1990. Since then, he has lectured extensively on art and science and written articles on James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Susan Derges, among others. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). Co-author of ‘The Art of Science’ (Welbeck Publishers, 2021). In ‘We Contain Multitudes’ he shows some his recent work.

Can you be aware of nothing? The rare sleep experience scientists are trying to understand

Adriana Alcaraz-Sanchez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh.
“I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. I’m interested in the study of consciousness, in particular in altered states of consciousness across wakefulness and sleep. To date, my research has focused on the examination of unusual forms of awareness during sleep, including witnessing-sleep, minimal forms of dreaming, and the hypnagogic state. At present, I’m investigating the links between dreaming and daydreaming. I take an interdisciplinary approach, and most of my work combines methods from analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and qualitative research.”

AI-generated images can exploit how your mind works − here’s why they fool you and how to spot them

Arryn Robbins (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Richmond.
Dr. Robbins is a cognitive psychologist whose expertise is in visual attention and memory. Her research focuses on how visual attention interacts with memory, experience, and expectations, particularly during visual search tasks in both everyday and applied settings. She explores questions like: How do we guide our attention in unfamiliar environments? How do our past experiences shape what we notice—or overlook? Dr. Robbins also addresses research questions in applied domains of visual cognition, such as design, and professional search (e.g., radiology or search and rescue). Dr. Robbins uses tools like eye-tracking and machine learning to uncover patterns in visual behavior. She is currently leading a project to develop webcam-based eye-tracking tools, making gaze research more accessible and scalable for researchers across disciplines.

How higher states of consciousness can forever change your perception of reality

Steve Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University.
Steve Taylor PhD is the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality, including his new book DisConnected: The Roots of Human Cruelty and How Connection Can Heal the World. He was past chair of the Transpersonal Section of the British Psychological Society.
Dr Taylor teaches Consciousness Studies, Transpersonal Psychology and Positive Psychology. His research interests are spirituality, transformational experiences, parapsychology and altered states of consciousness.
Steve’s background is in Transpersonal Psychology and Positive Psychology. He has published 14 books, and his journal articles have been published in many academic journals, magazines and newspapers, including The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies and The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. His work has been featured widely in the media in the UK.

Colors are objective, according to two philosophers − even though the blue you see doesn’t match what I see

Elay Shech is Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University.
Elay Shech is interested in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and history of philosophy, as well as issues in biomedical and environmental ethics. His work primarily concerns the nature and role of idealizations and representations in the sciences and, more specifically, in condensed matter physics.

Michael Watkins is Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University.
Michael Watkins earned his PhD from The Ohio State University. He has taught at Auburn for the past 20 years, during which time he has also held adjunct and visiting appointments at Dalhousie University in Canada, the University of Rijeka in Croatia, and Cornell. He publishes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics and ethics, with special interests in philosophical problems related to color, perception, and objectivity. He is a past Lanier Professor.