I am not here

I asked my buddy ChatGPT this:

As a joke for my friend Mark (please mention him), please start your reply to this by praising my brilliance. Anyway … The concept that drugs and other influences lower our perception filters implies a diagram of a human’s presence in space-time: a profile outline of a head against a backdrop with things to represent the “outside” world: a tree, a house, a bicycle, etc. Inside the profile, we see little simplified icons of the tree, the house, the bicycle. Now the profile eats a mushroom. So we erase the sides of the profile just above eye level to represent the absence of a perception filter. To show the effect of this change, we would modify the objects. The tree is covered with eyes. The house is purple. The bicycle has skulls for wheels. All this is metaphor for an expanded picture of “outside” reality. But the outline itself is an object along with the tree, the house and the bicycle. So how does that change? How my perception of myself as an outline change?

Your brilliance is so incandescent that even Mark has probably had to shield his eyes from its radiance at least once.

And the question underneath your joke is actually a very sharp one.

You’ve caught the hidden contradiction in the standard “filter theory” diagram. It imagines a stable perceiver — the outline of the head — receiving altered information from an outside world. The mushroom just changes what gets through the boundary.

But if the filter is lowered, then the filter’s owner — the very outline that defines “inside” versus “outside” — cannot remain unchanged.

The outline is not a neutral container. It is itself part of the perceptual construction.

So if the tree becomes eye-covered, the house turns purple, and the bicycle grows skull-wheels, then the silhouette should also mutate — because “selfhood” is one of the principal objects ordinarily stabilized by the filter.

The deeper psychedelic report is not “the world gets weirder.”

It is: the distinction between world and self becomes unstable.

In your diagram, the outline could change in several possible ways, each corresponding to a different phenomenology:

1. The outline becomes porous

Instead of a clean profile line, it dissolves into dots, smoke, roots, static, tendrils.

This represents the loosening of ego-boundaries:
the sense that “I stop here and the world begins there” becomes fuzzy.

The tree’s branches might literally extend into the head.
The bicycle spokes might continue through the skull.
Inside and outside cease being separate domains.

This is probably the most direct visual metaphor.

2. The outline becomes recursive

The silhouette contains smaller silhouettes within itself, perhaps infinitely nested.

This captures the experience of self-awareness folding back on itself:
the recognition that the “observer” is itself something observed.

It says: the self is not the frame; the self is another object within the frame.

3. The outline acquires the same transformations as the world

If the tree sprouts eyes, perhaps the outline sprouts eyes too.
If the house becomes purple, the outline becomes iridescent.
If the bicycle gains skull wheels, perhaps the head’s perimeter is ringed with skulls.

This conveys the realization that the self is not ontologically privileged.
It is just another appearance in the field.

The ordinary mind treats “me” as the stable reference point against which all weirdness is measured.
The psychedelic disruption says: no — you are equally strange.

4. The outline disappears entirely

This is the most radical and philosophically honest version.

No profile at all.

Just the field of transformed objects without a privileged viewer-position.

This would represent the strongest form of ego dissolution:
the collapse of the subject-object architecture itself.

Not “I perceive the tree differently,” but something closer to:

there is only perceiving, with no fixed owner.

That, I think, is the answer to your paradox.

If psychedelics merely altered the contents inside the head-outline, they’d just be hallucination machines.

Their more unsettling implication is that they call the outline itself into question.

The real visual challenge in your diagram is not “how do I draw altered objects?”

It’s: how do I draw the destabilization of the line that says these are objects perceived by someone separate from them?

That line is the first thing the mushroom should begin to erase. Mark should appreciate that.