Produced for Cvtá Street fest in the semi abandoned village of Civitacampomarano, Italy.
Parts of this town have been closed off for years due to landslides, and it’s in these areas you see the strength and speed of how fast nature reclaims its space. This piece is a tribute to the power of living alongside nature.
EXHALE, a multi-site mural project spanning the remote Norwegian island Utsira and mainland city Stavanger.
EXHALE explores our connection to nature, a notion Utsiran locals are well accustomed to – the small community lives in respectful harmony within the surrounding scenery’s cycle of growth, bloom and decay. SNIK’s interest in the natural world and its timeless encroachment into our lives found poignancy in that intertwinement.
Video produced by film maker Doug Gillen.
Drawing on Copernican tradition, philosophers argue for plausibility of other kinds of sentient life
Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood?
The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.
In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, assert that consciousness is likely possible in life forms made of much different stuff. Think of the five-limbed alien with a rock-like exterior in the recent blockbuster movie “Project Hail Mary.”
Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness. Instead, they proceed from the premise that it’s a real and recognizable phenomenon, and pose a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?
The paper comes at a time when the prospect of conscious artificial intelligence looms large, fueling utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. The authors, who touch just briefly on the matter, do not take a firm position either way — and, in fact, diverge in their views. But the arguments they advance leave open the possibility that AI could be conscious, though perhaps not in its current form.
At the heart of the paper’s argument is the philosophical notion of “substrate flexibility.” As the authors explain it, a “target property,” such as being a cup, is substrate flexible if it can be achieved with different kinds of materials. A cup is substrate flexible; it can be made with glass, plastic, or many other substances. Similarly, a book can be printed on paper or stored electronically, and a records can be encoded on vinyl or on compact discs.
Consciousness, Schwitzgebel and Pober argue, is also substrate flexible.
“The universe may contain minds stranger than we can imagine,” Schwitzgebel said. […]
Continue reading: https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2026/06/10/consciousness-likely-not-unique-earthlings-paper-says
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