Seen through this lens, aesthetic experiences are not essentially different from other kinds of experience, disinterested, or involve a unique sort of pleasure. They are rooted in basic reward processes shared with other animals, have motivational and biological roles, and deep evolutionary origins

We abandon the assumption-burdened concept of aesthetic experience in favor of sensory valuation, reframing aesthetic experience as an outcome of domain-general processes in the reward system. These processes integrate sensory information, expectations, experience, context, and physiological states

@mskov01.bsky.social and I challenge traditional ideas about aesthetic experience—rooted in 18th-century philosophy rather than empirical evidence--that view aesthetic experience as uniquely human, disinterested, and lacking utilitarian or motivational functions. We propose a radical shift