# [[The Psychedelic Image]] [[Nick Young]] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4041-801X [[Enrico Terrone]] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1975-8319 ## Abstract In this paper we argue that [[psychedelic aesthetics]] can be modeled on pictorial aesthetics. Both pictures and psychedelics generate distinctive perception-like experiences that can be aesthetically appreciated in two ways: for the scenes they present (scene-oriented aesthetics) and for [[the relationship between]] their physical elements and what these elements depict (design-oriented aesthetics). Drawing on the [[predictive processing]] framework, we demonstrate how psychedelics relax the brain's priors, creating unique perceptual experiences that go beyond merely enhancing existing [[aesthetic properties]]. We show how psychedelics offer distinctive ways of seeing that parallel pictorial experience, and how they create a partial opacity of perceptual processes that reveals something about how perception itself is constructed. While psychedelic experiences vary across individuals, they instantiate recognizable patterns that can be shared and discussed, providing a basis for genuine [[aesthetic appreciation]]. ## Keywords [[psychedelic experience]], [[aesthetic appreciation]], pictorial aesthetics, [[predictive processing]], perceptual priors # # [[The Psychedelic Image]] ## [[Introduction This]] paper explores [[the relationship between]] [[aesthetic experience]] and psychedelic experience. Intuitions might pull either way here. On the one hand, people who have taken psychedelics will very often speak about their experiences in aesthetic terms. On the other, one might place LSD, magic mushrooms, in the “mindless hedonism” category: tripping is not, in and of itself, aesthetic, in the same way that getting drunk is not, in and of itself, aesthetic. A skeptic might try to make their complaints more acute by asking us to consider two connected questions. First, what are the objects of an aesthetic psychedelic experience? We typically think of the targets of aesthetic appreciation as shareable (you and I can both appreciate the same painting or landscape, for example). But psychedelic experiences vary considerably across individuals and occurrences. Neither does it seem plausible to say that the objects of appreciation are the psychedelic artifacts themselves insofar as the perceivable properties of a tab of acid (size, shape, taste) are not that much different from a postage stamp. This leads to the second question: how do we appreciate whatever it is we are appreciating? Traditional models of aesthetic appreciation often involve perceptual attention to external objects. However, given that experiences elicited by psychedelics are, to say the least, nonstandard, it is not obvious whether a similar model is plausible for psychedelic aesthetics. Here we suggest that both questions can be answered by considering psychedelic aesthetics as a peculiar type of *pictorial aesthetics.* Both pictures and psychedelics share a common function of creating distinctive sorts of perceptual experiences, although this need not be their only function. By “perceptual,” we mean “perception‐like”: experiences having a sensory format that imposes itself on the perceiver similarly to paradigmatic perception, rather than paradigmatic imagination. Pictorial and psychedelic experiences are perceptual in this basic sense. People often engage with pictures specifically to enjoy perceptual experiences of a particular kind, just as they might use psychedelics to induce similarly distinctive perceptual experiences (among other, possibly non-perceptual effects). Our focus here is solely on this shared perceptual function: if pictures and psychedelics both generate distinctive perception‐like experiences, then perhaps they can also be appreciated aesthetically in similar ways. ### Two Questions To understand how psychedelic experiences function as a form of pictorial aesthetics, this paper examines two dimensions of the latter. Pictures can be appreciated aesthetically in (at least) two ways. First, we can appreciate pictures for the scenes they enable us to perceive—the content they depict, whether landscapes, people, or objects. Let us call this “scene-oriented aesthetics”. Second, we can appreciate pictures for the relationship between their physical elements (brushstrokes, colors, textures) and what these elements depict—what Nanay calls *design‐scene properties* (2016 pp. 59–62). For example, when looking at a Cézanne painting, we might appreciate how particular brushstrokes create the impression of pine needles, attending to both the physical marks and what they represent. Let us call this “design-oriented aesthetics”. When we extend this model to psychedelics, two questions emerge: First, how can we understand scene‐oriented aesthetics in psychedelic experiences? Appreciating pictures for their scenes can itself take several forms. At the most basic level, pictures might simply show us beautiful real‐world objects, with the beauty belonging to the object rather than the picture itself. One might object that psychedelics remain at this basic level since they merely enhance aesthetic experience like a lens or microscope would do—they simply allow us to see existing beauty more clearly or intensely. The beauty belongs to the objects perceived, not to the psychedelic experience itself. Second, how can we understand design‐oriented aesthetics in psychedelic experiences? In pictorial art, we appreciate the relationship between physical marks on a surface (the design) and what those marks depict (the scene). But it is not obvious that there is anything analogous in psychedelics or in psychedelic experiences. Neither the features of psychedelics that cause our experiences—chemical properties—nor the features of the brain that realize our experiences—neural processes—are the sort of thing that we can perceive or attend to. In this paper, we will address both challenges, showing how psychedelics can be the objects of both scene‐oriented and design‐oriented aesthetic appreciation. To do this, we will draw on the predictive processing framework, which Letheby (2021) has applied to understand the nature of psychedelic experience. We extend this application to explain how psychedelics can be proper objects of aesthetic appreciation. ## 1\. Predictive Processing On the predictive processing framework, perception is not a passive, bottom‐up process of building representations from incoming sensory data. Instead, perception involves the brain actively generating predictions about what it expects to encounter, then comparing these predictions with actual sensory input. Any mismatch between prediction and input generates *prediction error,* which the brain tries to minimize. This prediction error minimization happens across multiple levels of a hierarchical system. Higher levels in the cortex generate abstract, categorical predictions (like recognizing a “tree”), while lower levels produce more specific predictions about expected sensory features (shapes, textures, colors). Higher‐level predictions flow downward through the hierarchy, while prediction errors—signals representing mismatches between predictions and sensory input—travel upward, gradually updating the brain’s models of the world. The brain has multiple ways to minimize prediction error. Most obviously, it can revise its predictions to better match sensory input. However, it can also adjust how much weight it gives to different predictions versus sensory signals through a mechanism called *precision‐weighting.* This process determines how much influence a given prediction error has on updating our models. High‐precision prediction errors significantly impact our perceptual models, while low‐precision errors are effectively ignored. This precision‐weighting mechanism serves as the brain’s way of handling uncertainty—giving more weight to reliable information and less to unreliable information. For our purposes, precision‐weighting is particularly important because it helps explain how attention works in the brain. When we attend to something, we are effectively increasing the precision of prediction errors associated with that object or feature, allowing those signals to have greater influence on our perception. As we will see, psychedelics appear to alter these precision‐weighting mechanisms, which helps account for their distinctive effects on perception and experience. Another important feature of the predictive processing framework is what Letheby (p. 111\) calls “priors” and characterizes as “abstract, domain‐general beliefs that reside toward the highest levels of the brain’s hierarchical predictive models.” Priors, in other words, are the fundamental principles on which the brain relies to generate predictions about what it expects to encounter. The content of those predictions will then possibly be amended depending on the received sensory input, but the structure of those predictions, which is fixed by the priors, will always hold. Priors will always shape experience regardless of its sensory contents. As Letheby (p. 119\) puts it, They encode our most abstract, fundamental beliefs about self and world—our bedrock, largely unconscious, domain‐general assumptions concerning space, time, and causality, the laws of logic, and the existence of the self. Philosophers have repeatedly noted the existence and significance of these foundational beliefs. Riding roughshod over important subtleties, we might liken them to Kantian categories, to Wittgensteinian ‘hinge’ or ‘framework’ propositions, to the constituents of a Kuhnian paradigm, or to the central nodes of a Quinean web of belief. In ordinary cognition, these ‘hyperpriors’ play a crucial role in constraining the brain’s hypothesis space, drastically limiting the kinds of world‐models that it can generate, and thereby making the process of probabilistic inference computationally tractable. Priors thus yield apparently indispensable features of both experience and its objects. Yet, Letheby (p. 121\) points out that psychedelics can somehow “relax” such priors, thereby enabling us to perceive things in a way that is surely beyond the reach of our ordinary experience: “Hyperpriors constrain cognition by deeming many logically possible (and, indeed, logically impossible) worlds so improbable that they become cognitively and phenomenologically impossible. By diminishing the brain’s confidence in its foundational axioms, psychedelics expand the phenomenological possibility space.” Psychedelics, in this sense, challenge the apparent indispensability of priors to experience and its objects, thereby making room for an expansion of the phenomenological domain that may also have an aesthetic import. We argue that the predictive‐processing framework provides what we need to address our two questions. For scene‐oriented aesthetics, predictive processing helps explain how psychedelics create distinctive ways of seeing that go beyond merely enhancing the appreciation of preexisting aesthetic properties of the perceived objects. For design‐oriented aesthetics, it offers a way to understand how psychedelic experiences can make perceptual processes themselves partly available for aesthetic appreciation, yielding an analogue of the design‐scene features that are crucial to the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. In the following sections, we’ll develop both of these approaches in detail. ## 2 Scene Aesthetics ### Scene‐Oriented Appreciation in Pictures Pictures can be aesthetically appreciated for their scenes in multiple ways. At the most basic level, pictures show us beautiful objects that exist in the world. A photograph of a lion might be valued because lions are beautiful, with the picture merely serving as a perceptual surrogate. Scruton (1981) has questioned whether this constitutes a genuine aesthetics of photography—the beauty seems to belong to the object rather than the picture, much as we wouldn’t say eyeglasses are beautiful for letting us see beautiful things. Pictures like paintings, however, can also show us things that do not exist, like unicorns or fictional landscapes. Since these objects have no reality outside the picture, the beauty must belong to the picture itself. The painting is beautiful by virtue of eliciting the experience of something beautiful. This challenges the mere surrogate view, as the picture generates rather than merely transmits beauty. Furthermore, pictures can be aesthetically appreciated also in virtue of enabling distinctive ways of seeing even when, as in the case of photography, they do not enable us to perceptually enjoy nonexistent things. In their replies to Scruton, Lopes (2003), has argued that pictures, even photographs, do not limit themselves to giving us perceptual access to what they portray. When we look at a picture, we experience the depicted scene differently than we would in direct perception. Pictures present scenes as detached from our egocentric space—we do not experience the depicted content as physically present around us and capable of causal transactions with us. They freeze moments in time, unlike the continuous change and unrepeatability of ordinary perception. And they present scenes within defined frames rather than as part of an open‐ended visual field. These qualities create a distinctive pictorial phenomenology that contributes to aesthetic appreciation beyond the content itself. ### Scene‐Oriented Appreciation in Psychedelic Experience The first question we must address regarding psychedelic aesthetics concerns whether psychedelics merely enhance perception like a microscope or magnifying glass—allowing us to see existing beauty more clearly or intensely, but adding no aesthetic value themselves. Letheby calls this feature of psychedelics “*intensification.*” On this view, the beauty belongs entirely to the perceived objects, with psychedelics serving only as tools for better accessing it. However, this view fails to account for two important aspects of psychedelic experience. First, psychedelics generate novel content that does not correspond to properties in the external world. In Letheby’s terms, psychedelics generate not only “intensification” of perception but also “alteration” and “novelty.” On the one hand, *alteration* occurs when psychedelics modify the appearance of real things; for example, “one fascinating species of alteration occurs when subjects see other people, or their own reflections, in various guises: for instance, they may see the supervising therapist, or themselves, in the visual guise of mythical or archetypal figures, or with features emphasized and altered to present the appearance of belonging to a particular culture or time period.” (Letheby, p. 41). On the other, *novelty* occurs when psychedelics enable us to experience things that do not exist: The most common type of visual novelty, or stimulus‐independent imagery, consists of ‘closed‐eye visuals,’ which often take the form of elementary or complex geometric patterns, usually colored and dynamic, seen with the eyes closed \[...\] Sometimes completely novel percepts are seen with the eyes open, integrated with the rest of the environment. (ibid.) Psychedelic experiences, in this sense, can include geometric patterns superimposed on surfaces, objects appearing to move when they are static, and impossible color combinations. The beauty of these experiences cannot belong to external objects, as they have no counterparts there. Like paintings of unicorns, psychedelics create rather than merely reveal beauty. Furthermore, psychedelics provide distinctive ways of experiencing that parallel how pictures offer distinctive ways of seeing. The mechanisms behind this can be understood through our predictive processing framework. As previously explained, ordinary perception relies on certain priors—assumptions about how the world works that constrain our experience. Psychedelics relax these priors, creating new kinds of experiences. In ordinary perception, we deploy priors like “objects have a place in the space that surrounds me and they can change in time,” and “the perceiving self is something distinct from what is perceived.” These priors usually operate transparently, shaping experience without themselves being noticed. Psychedelics relax these priors, creating experiences that seem to break these rules—scenes may feel detached from egocentric space, objects may seem to exist outside time, and the boundary between self and world may dissolve. This relaxation creates an interesting parallel with pictorial experience. Just as pictures present scenes that violate the constraints of egocentric space (we see them without experiencing them as present around us and capable of causal transactions with us) and temporal continuity (moments are frozen), psychedelics relax the priors that normally enforce these constraints in perception. While pictures achieve this through external media and psychedelics through neurochemical mechanisms, both result in distinctive modes of experience that can have aesthetic import. The unity experiences reported during psychedelic states—feeling “at one” with the perceived objects—exemplify this relaxation of the prior that maintains separation between self and world. These experiences are not merely intensifications of the aesthetic appreciation of garden‐variety objects but qualitatively different ways of experiencing that emerge when normal perceptual constraints are loosened. This analysis shows that psychedelics do more than enhance existing beauty—they create distinctive ways of experiencing that have their own aesthetic value. Just as we value pictures not just for what they show but for how they show it, we can appreciate psychedelic experiences for the unique ways of perceiving they make possible. The aesthetic value lies not just in what is perceived but in the distinctive modes of psychedelic perception itself. ### The Aesthetics of the Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley’s essay *The Doors of Perception* (1954) offers interesting insights regarding what we have called the “scene aesthetics” of psychedelic experience. Huxley chronicles his psychedelic trip starting from its very beginning: “one bright May morning, I swallowed four‐tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.” The first object on which Huxley’s psychedelic experience focuses is a vase containing three flowers, whose aesthetic properties he can appreciate as intensified: “I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing—but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.” Huxley’s perception of the flowers exemplifies what Letheby calls “intensification.” Psychedelics limit themselves to revealing aesthetic properties of the flowers rather than of themselves. Thus, the psychedelics are just the means whereby the flowers can be better appreciated aesthetically. Still, there is much more than such an intensification in Huxley’s report. The kinds of experiences that he describes indeed nicely exemplify Letheby’s idea that psychedelics relax our experiential priors. Huxley focuses first on the relaxation of space and time: “Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time.” Besides the relaxation of spatial and temporal priors, he experiences the relaxation of the prior that puts the self at the center of experience: “For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not‐self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not‐self of the things around me. To this new‐born Not‐self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be.” Following Zahavi and Kriegel (2016), let us call “*for‐me‐ness*” the basic feature of experience according to which the self always shows up as the owner of the experiential stream. In his report, Huxley suggests that psychedelic experience differs from ordinary experience since the former replaces for‐me‐ness, which is an indispensable feature of the latter, with what Huxley calls “*Not‐self*” and, to mirror Zahavi and Kriegel’s expression, we might dub “*no‐me‐ness.*” Letheby (p. 50\) also states that the relaxation of the self as a prior is a key feature of psychedelic experience but aptly distinguishes several senses of the term “self”: “(i) the sense of ownership over the body and thoughts (feeling that this is my body or this is my thought), (ii) the sense of agency over actions and thoughts (feeling like the one who has initiated or authored the action or thought), (iii) the sense of self‐location (the feeling of ‘being located at a particular point in space’), (iv) the minimal self (the bare feeling of being a subject of experience), (v) autobiographical or narrative self‐awareness, (vi) body image and body representation, and (vii) the sense of bodily boundaries.” The sort of “no‐me‐ness” or “ego dissolution” (Letheby, p. 47\) that characterizes psychedelic experience seems to consist in the relaxation or even the effacement of all these senses of the self but the fourth in Letheby’s list. This is “the minimal self (the bare feeling of being a subject of experience),” which is arguably essential to experience itself, even in its psychedelic variants. Thus, we can characterize the no‐me‐ness of psychedelic experience as the minimization of the self to the bare feeling of being a subject of experience, as opposed to the for‐me‐ness of ordinary experience in which the self reveals itself also along its other dimensions. In this sense, Letheby (p. 56\) casts psychedelic experiences as “liberating experiences of being ‘I’ in the absence of ‘Me’—of minimal selfhood persisting while narrative selfhood dissolves.” Psychedelic no‐me‐ness has interesting analogies with the notion of disinterestedness that Kant and other philosophers in his wake have considered the hallmark of aesthetic experience. The dimensions of the self that no‐me‐ness drops, in particular embodiment, agency, and biography, are indeed those that motivate a practical interest of the subject of experience in the experienced objects. If the self comes down to the minimal self, that is, the bare feeling of being a subject of experience, the selfish motivations to take advantage of the objects of experience vanish, thereby yielding the disinterested stance that according to Kant is crucial to aesthetic contemplation. Huxley acknowledges such an analogy between psychedelic perception and paradigmatic aesthetic experiences when he describes his mescaline‐induced trip as follows: “until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms—as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music \[...\] But now I knew contemplation at its height.” Indeed, Huxley does not only argue that psychedelic experience can yield that sort of disinterested contemplation that characterizes aesthetic experience. He makes a stronger claim, namely, that psychedelics yield a higher level of aesthetic disinterestedness beyond the reach of traditional objects of aesthetic appreciation such as works of art. Huxley constantly draws comparisons between the psychedelic experience he has enjoyed and the pictorial experiences created by painters like Botticelli, Vermeer, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Vuillard, among others. He not only points out the analogies between the sorts of perceptual delight that psychedelics and paintings can offer but also insists that the former surpass the latter in the purity and the height of such delight. Art, for Huxley, is just an imperfect and approximate surrogate of psychedelics: “Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead‐enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.” Drawing on William Blake’s metaphor from which the title of Huxley’s essay derives, we may say that psychedelics throw the doors of perception open, whereas works of art only peep through them. Huxley draws metaphysical conclusions from all this. As Lyon (p. 163\) points out, for Huxley psychedelics “are *world*‐revealing rather than mind‐revealing.” We do not endorse what Lyon calls Huxley’s “enthusiasm,” and we tend to agree with Lyon’s claim that psychedelics are mind‐revealing rather than world‐revealing, as will become clear in the next section. Yet, we think that Huxley provides us with an effective phenomenological characterization of what we have called “scene aesthetics.” We have read Huxley as describing the world psychedelics *seem to reveal,* and we have argued that this has aesthetic import. ## 3 Design‐Scene Aesthetics Having established that psychedelics can support scene‐oriented aesthetic appreciation similar to pictorial aesthetics, we now turn to a more complex question: can psychedelics support something analogous to what Nanay calls “design‐scene” properties in pictorial art? While scene aesthetics concerns what is depicted, design‐scene aesthetics involves the relationship between the physical medium and what it depicts—a relationship that appears to have no obvious parallel in psychedelic experiences. ### Attending to Design‐Scene Properties Nanay (2016) develops the concept of design‐scene properties to explain a central aspect of pictorial art appreciation. These properties depend on the relationship between two elements: the physical marks on a surface (the design) and what those marks depict (the scene). When we look at a painting, we notice both the paint itself and what it represents. As Nanay explains: When we are admiring a Miró drawing and the way two simple curved lines somehow manage to depict an expressive human face, what we are attending to is exactly a design‐scene property: the relational property partly determined by the shape property of the two‐dimensional curved line on the canvas and partly determined by the three‐dimensional depicted face. (ibid. p. 60\) These properties differ from purely material properties (the chemical composition of paint) and purely representational properties (what the painting depicts). In Budd’s words, design‐scene properties capture “the crucial characteristic of pictorial art, namely, the interrelationship between the marks on the surface and what is depicted in them.” (1995, p. 58\) Consider two ways that one might look at Cézanne’s *The Great Pine.* A brief glance might register only the depicted scene—trees on a hillside—without consciously noticing the brushstrokes that create this impression. Here, the paint marks function transparently, enabling perception of the scene without being consciously experienced as paint. Alternatively, one could take a longer look and attend to how Cézanne’s choppy, angled strokes create the pine tree’s foliage. On Nanay’s account, this involves appreciating the relational property between the physical medium and what it represents simultaneously. This presents a particular challenge for psychedelic aesthetics. If psychedelic aesthetics is to be modeled on pictorial aesthetics, we would naturally expect to find something analogous to design‐scene properties in psychedelic experiences. Still, the psychedelic substance surely lacks design features that can be perceptually scrutinized in the way the art appreciator scrutinizes brushstrokes. It may be that the psychedelic experience itself, rather than the psychedelic substance, is the right place to look for design features. But, unlike paintings where both medium and content are perceptually available, we cannot perceive the neural processes generating psychedelic experiences. Claiming we could somehow observe these processes would introduce problematic homuncular notions of consciousness observing itself. What is required, therefore, is an account of how something analogous to design‐scene properties could emerge in psychedelic experiences without implying either direct perception of neural processes or positing an inner observer. ### Design‐Scene Properties in Predictive Processing Nanay’s concept of attending to design‐scene properties can be understood within the predictive processing framework introduced in Section 1\. Recall that perception involves the brain making predictions about sensory input and minimizing prediction errors across hierarchical levels, with attention functioning as precision‐weighting of these prediction errors. This framework allows us to reconceptualize design‐scene properties without resorting to problematic perceptual metaphors. Under ordinary perceptual circumstances, higher‐level predictions (such as recognizing “pine trees”) are typically allocated higher precision, effectively minimizing lower‐level sensory details. Thus, we typically perceive the depicted scene transparently, without conscious awareness of brushstrokes themselves. Within this framework, aesthetic appreciation that involves attending to design‐scene properties might be described as involving a deliberate shift in precision‐weighting. One could increase precision at lower levels of perceptual hierarchy—those responsible for the physical properties of brushstrokes. Rather than allowing lower‐level prediction errors to be explained away fully by higher‐level predictions, aesthetic attention might preserve their influence, simultaneously attending to both depicted content and physical medium. This could allow attention to the perceptual interplay between physical marks and depicted content that constitutes Nanay’s design‐scene properties. If plausible, this predictive processing interpretation of Nanay’s notion of distributed aesthetic attention would help us understand the question raised in Section 3.1. It suggests that attention need not literally see neural processes or chemical substrates to access design‐scene properties, as these properties might emerge through shifts in how the brain manages precision‐weighting and prediction errors. This provides a conceptual foundation for considering psychedelic experiences in a similar manner. ### The Mind Revealing Itself to Itself Having established how design‐scene properties can be understood within the predictive processing framework, we now turn to the question of whether psychedelics can support this form of aesthetic appreciation. As we’ve seen, in standard perception higher‐level predictions receive greater precision‐weighting, making lower‐level processing stages less accessible to awareness. This creates the transparency that characterizes ordinary perception. Hohwy’s work on introspection and Metzinger’s (2003) concept of phenomenal opacity allow us to extend this analysis specifically to psychedelic states. "Hohwy argues that introspection works through the same predictive hierarchy as external perception, but with attention directed inward. In normal perception, our brain minimizes prediction error by matching its expectations with sensory input about external objects. In introspection, however, our experiences themselves become the targets of prediction. When this happens, the precision‐weighting mechanism that normally guides external attention turns inward, and the brain begins treating experiences not just as reports about external causes but as phenomena requiring their own predictive explanation. This allows us to become partially aware of the usually transparent process of perception itself. Metzinger’s transparency/opacity distinction bridges Hohwy’s account of introspection with the phenomenology of psychedelic experience. Where Hohwy explains the mechanism—experiences becoming causes for prediction—Metzinger’s concepts can be used to characterize the resulting phenomenology. Normally, perception is “transparent”—we experience objects without attending to the processes constructing them. Psychedelics induce “opacity” by making earlier processing stages available to awareness, allowing us to experience aspects of how perception itself is constructed. This phenomenological shift creates the conditions for appreciating design‐scene properties within experience itself. First‐person accounts of psychedelic experiences often illustrate this shift from transparency to opacity. Huxley gestures toward this in his second essay on psychedelics, namely *Heaven and Hell* (1956)*,* describing how buildings and landscapes emerge from more basic shapes and colors: “Here, in quotation or condensed paraphrase, is Weir Mitchell’s account of the visionary world to which he was transported by peyote, the cactus which is the natural source of mescalin. At his entry into that world he saw a host of ‘star points’ and what looked like ‘fragments of stained glass.’ Then came ‘delicate floating films of color.’ These were displaced by an ‘abrupt rush of countless points of white light,’ sweeping across the field of vision. Next there were zigzag lines of very bright colors, which somehow turned into swelling clouds of still more brilliant hues. Buildings now made their appearance, and then landscapes.” We can see this aspect of psychedelic experiences further by turning to another famous psychonaut, Alan Watts: I see all these sensory dimensions as a round dance, gesticulations of one pattern being transformed into gesticulations of another. And these gesticulations are flowing through a space that has still other dimensions, which I want to describe as tones of emotional color, of light or sound being joyous or fearful, gold elated or lead depressed. (1961/2013, p. 31\) Psychedelics disrupt this normal functioning by altering these precision‐weighting mechanisms. By reducing the precision of high‐level predictions and increasing the influence of lower‐level prediction errors, they make aspects of the perceptual process itself partially available to awareness. As Hohwy suggests, introspection operates via the same predictive mechanisms as external perception, but directed inward. When psychedelics perturb normal prediction hierarchies, the brain struggles to reconcile its predictions with altered sensory processing, effectively turning attention inward to examine its own workings. This creates what Metzinger calls “phenomenal opacity”—a partial visibility of the representational character of experience. While we do not literally perceive neural processes, the normally transparent mechanisms of perception become partially opaque, revealing something about how our experiences are constructed. This is analogous to seeing both the scene and the brushstrokes in a painting. For example, when experiencing geometric patterns under psychedelics, one might simultaneously perceive the patterns and become aware that these are manifestations of one’s own visual system—glimpses of the brain’s pattern‐recognition processes normally hidden from awareness (Lyon, 2023, ch. 7). The user doesn’t just see novel content; they gain insight into how perception itself is constructed. Watts captures this when he notes: Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of gestures as a woven texture. Light, sound, touch, taste, and smell become a continuous warp, with the feeling that the whole dimension of sensation is a single continuum or field.” (ibid.) This shift from transparency to partial opacity creates a unique type of aesthetic appreciation: not just of what is perceived, but of the perceptual process itself. Just as we might appreciate how Cézanne’s brushstrokes create the impression of pine needles, the psychedelic subject can appreciate how their own perceptual apparatus constructs their experience of reality. This design‐scene aesthetic isn’t about appreciating neural mechanisms directly (impossible from the first‐person perspective), but about appreciating the constructed nature of experience when the normally invisible “design” elements of perception become partially available to awareness. Psychedelics uniquely enable this by relaxing the predictive constraints that normally make perceptual processes transparent, creating a design‐scene aesthetic within the mind itself. This addresses the challenge posed at the outset: while psychedelic substances lack directly perceivable design features, the psychedelic experience itself reveals design‐scene properties through the partial opacity of perceptual processes. ## 4 Patterns of Experience We have argued that psychedelics can be appreciated aesthetically in analogy with how images can be appreciated aesthetically, that is, for their capacity to generate peculiar perceptual experiences that have aesthetic import not only for the scenes they present but also for the way in which those scenes are presented and for the design from which they emerge. There remains, however, a crucial difference between pictures and psychedelics. While the design features of pictures lie in their surface, and the scenes that emerge from that design are to be seen in that surface, the design features that are crucial to the aesthetic appreciation of psychedelics lie not even in the eye but in the mind of the beholder; hence the scenes that emerge from that design could not be perceived by scrutinizing the psychedelic substance. The design is a mental design, so the scenes emerge only in one’s mental life. All this prevents us from sharing psychedelic experiences in the way we usually share pictorial experiences. Although each of us can add a subjective or even idiosyncratic layer to one’s pictorial experience of, say, Caravaggio’s *Fanciullo con canestra di frutta,* we are all meant to see a boy and a basket full of fruits in it. The subjective layer we add to our pictorial experience might make our *interpretation* of the painting unique, but our *comprehension* of it, our grasping of what it depicts, to a certain extent should be the same for any viewer. With psychedelics, by contrast, each user experiences their own scenes and the distinction between comprehension and interpretation seems to collapse. This risks threatening the aesthetics of psychedelics if one assumes that aesthetic appreciation requires some shareability, that is, some shared bedrock of comprehension onto which subjective interpretations can be grafted. It is indeed such a shareable bedrock that enables us to overcome the mere subjectivity of hedonic pleasure toward the intersubjectivity of aesthetic appreciation. The lack of such bedrock thus risks confining psychedelics to the domain of the hedonic, preventing them from entering the aesthetic realm. We argue that this objection can be met by recognizing that, while each person’s psychedelic experience is unique, the underlying predictive mechanisms are broadly similar across individuals. This provides a basis for shared discussion and appreciation of the scenes and the design‐scene properties revealed through psychedelic states. Just as two people can discuss how brushstrokes create a landscape, two people who have had psychedelic experiences can discuss how altered predictive processing reveals the constructed nature of perception and selfhood. In this way, psychedelic experiences offer a unique form of aesthetic appreciation—one directed not at external objects but at the mind’s own generative power and structures as they become partially unveiled through the relaxation of high‐level priors. Ultimately, psychedelics as objects of aesthetic appreciation differ from pictures since they are not concrete objects to be perceived by their viewers but rather abstract patterns of perceptual experience to be instantiated by their users. Borrowing terminology from the ontology of art, we may say that psychedelics, from an aesthetic perspective, are *types* that are instantiated by *performances* that are their *tokens.* Works of theater and works of music are paradigmatic in this respect, but more recent research in the ontology of art (Lopes 2003; Gaut 2010; Caldarola 2020\) has pointed out that video games and works of installation art can also be cast as types to be instantiated by performances. Still, video games and works of installation art differ from works of theater and works of music since the performer and the appreciator coincide. While the actors instantiate the play in front of the spectators, and the pianist instantiates the sonata in front of the listeners, the players of a video game or the visitors of an installation are meant both to instantiate a certain pattern of actions and appreciate it while acting in accordance with it. We argue that the aesthetic appreciation of psychedelics can be characterized along similar lines. A certain psychedelic substance yields a pattern of perceptions that each user can instantiate in her own ways, but all those experiences count as tokens of the same type since they all originate from the same object, just like the performances of a symphony, despite their different ways of interpreting it, originate all from the same score and from a proper comprehension of it. Huxley says something illuminating about this sort of shareability of psychedelic experience in *Heaven and Hell,* in which he explains that, under mescaline, “certain classes of perceptual experiences turn up again and again.” He even identifies the pattern of perceptions that is characteristic of mescaline, which “begins with perceptions of colored, moving, living geometrical forms. In time, pure geometry becomes concrete, and the visionary perceives, not patterns, but patterned things, such as carpets, carvings, mosaics. 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