[mybandisbetter]

Personally, doing mushrooms helped me work out some stuff for my PhD thesis research. What he says about making your brain more plastic is the key point. I thought about things from a new angle, which directly informs my current research.

I also saw palpably how much I judge myself in every moment of the day, which I had never realized before. Reducing that judgement has become an important goal. That's just useful. It's not wacky far-out magic thinking.

Now, if I tried to describe to you the beauty of what I saw, I would say it looks like a cathedral, and have to stop there, or it will start to sound like nonsense. But that's only because we don't have useful language to discuss the specifics of the experience, so we have to try to use metaphors, which easily sound like BS, unless you've seen it yourself. But then, the metaphors used to describe any specialist field sounds a bit like BS if you don't have the technical language, or direct experience, to make sense of it.

[aero142]

How do you know it was actually beautiful rather than simply stimulating the part of your brain that registers beauty?

[colinmhayes]

Objective aesthetics is a question that we are not likely to solve.

[Lammy]

Why do you consider those to be different?

[aero142]

I'm pretty sure others have better answers than I do on whether objects we appreciate and describe as beautiful have intrinsic quality or if the entirety of the beauty exists only in the observer. I believe that there is an interplay between observer and object but I don't think I could prove it to you. However, if there was a pill that made me believe that something I previously thought was terrible and ugly was the most beautiful thing I had seen, that would not convince me that objects had no inherent beauty, just that the my brain was easily manipulated.

[mybandisbetter]

Ha, right, perhaps I hallucinated separately the image and the emotion that it is beautiful. My guess (just a guess) is that the images were themselves generated by the parts of the brain that register beauty, and so were beautiful by definition. If that's not true, I suspect that if you sat a large sample of people to look at these images, most would agree they were beautiful.