Tag Archives: Artificial Intelligence

AI-Boosted Religion

“AI religions are beginning to emerge as a significant cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This emergent development invites serious scholarly inquiry into the intersection of artificial intelligence, religious cognition, and the deep structures of spiritual longing that have characterized human civilization across millennia.”

Cristian Horgos lives in Romania. After graduating Math and IT, he taught Math-IT for ten years. He currently works for an IT company. Some of his other published articles are: Mathematical equation, hidden in Brâncusi’s Triptych from Târgu-Jiu.

The next frontier is not artificial intelligence, it’s artificial societies

Professor Nick Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of AI, autonomous systems, cyber-security and agent-based computing. He was awarded the 2026 Research Excellence Award by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
His research focuses on developing agentic AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, he is interested in how to endow individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways and with effectively engineering systems that contain both humans and software agents.
Nick is passionate about the real-world impact of research and his systems have been deployed to save lives in the aftermath of disasters, to win Olympic medals for TeamGB, and to monitor the impact of climate change on glaciers.
He has also been involved with a number of start-ups including Aerogility, Darktrace, Sentient Sports, Reliance Cyber Systems, Trans Humanity and is a board member of Midlands Mindforge.

Why AI Makes Us Anxious About Our Own Thoughts

This essay argues that generative AI does not destroy originality but exposes the weakness of the idea that thought can be pure, untouched and entirely self-generated. Drawing on the author’s experience as a hydrologist, it compares AI-assisted writing with scientific modelling: both tools produce outputs that require human judgement, interpretation and accountability. The essay proposes that authorship should be understood not as freedom from influence, but as the responsible transformation of inherited material. Originality, on this view, begins after influence rather than before it.

The Universe May Be Stranger Than Religion Imagined

David W. Falls writes about artificial intelligence, belief, secular meaning, and the future of human identity. This essay explores how human beings have long interpreted strange or unseen experiences as signs, spirits, visitations, or messages from beyond. Its central argument is that science has not made the universe less mysterious. It has made supernatural explanations harder to defend. The unseen may be real, profound, and astonishing without being sacred, personal, or watching us.

The piece moves through perception, pattern-making, grief, ghost belief, religious explanation, and the hidden realities revealed by modern science. It is skeptical of supernatural claims, but not dismissive of the experiences that often give rise to them. My aim is to take mystery seriously without turning it too quickly into doctrine.

Psychedelics and Language Model Temperature

The effect of psychedelics is often described as an increase in fluidity – of being, in some non-specific sense, more free to wander out of usual habit patterns. This essay presents an analogy to a feature of LLMs, namely the temperature parameter, that allows a precise characterisation of this increased fluidity. It begins with a semi-technical description of how this parameter affects the operation of an LLM, and then draws a parallel to how psychedelics affect human experience at multiple levels from perception to thought patterns and life reflections, before concluding by placing this analogy inside a larger project of using the internal mechanism of AI to better understand our own minds.

Reflections on the Evolution of Consciousness

Primarily a visual artist, Paul Forte also writes essays and poetry. Forte’s career as an artist began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s. Influenced early on by Conceptual art, Forte has employed a variety of media over the years to realize ideas, including making and self-publishing artist’s books and related objects.
“An experimental approach to art making coupled with an abiding sense of the poetic are the hallmarks of my art. It is an art that has explored this approach and sensibility through a variety of media and artforms over the years: Word works and poetry, artist’s books and book works, performance art, drawings, collage, montage, and assemblage. Central to much of this work is the use of found or appropriated material.”

Humanism After the Algorithm

This essay examines how artificial intelligence challenges core humanist commitments to reason, moral responsibility, and human judgment. Rather than treating AI as a technical innovation or future speculation, the essay approaches it as a philosophical problem: the emergence of systems whose conclusions increasingly guide human decisions while appearing objective, neutral, and resistant to scrutiny. It argues that the primary risk posed by AI is not replacement of human intelligence, but deference to automated authority. Drawing on themes from epistemology and ethics, the essay explores how algorithmic systems affect moral judgment, empathy, personal agency, and the human search for meaning. While artificial systems may extend human analytical capacity, the essay contends that interpretation, accountability, and ethical responsibility remain irreducibly human. Written for a philosophically engaged, non-specialist audience, the piece defends a humanist framework that emphasizes skepticism, transparency, and responsibility in an increasingly algorithmically mediated world.

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.

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.