Wake Up and Smell the Qualia!

First of all, ideas are qualia. Ideas, just like colors, or smells, are not really part of the things that have them, though they are very much a part of us. A rose wouldn't be red if we (or some other organism) had not evolved the ability to sense roses that way. This is a basic fact about qualia: qualia makes us evolve together with the stuff in our environment. It allows us to work, to live, to survive together. Ideas are no different: a chair is an idea that evolved only after many, many generations of humans sat around on rocks and logs. No rock would ever have "chairness" if we hadn't evolved this particular, qualiadelic attraction to them – "hey, that rock looks comfortable..."

And so the rock evolved into the chair, and we evolved artists and experts at sitting. And this qualiadelic relationship transformed the landscape around us as we improved the chair into the many designs we see today. Of course, most of the chairs we see are in houses, because we also ritualed with caves; likewise we ritualed with clothes, and methods of getting from here to there, and preparing our food. So today the landscape is full of cars, clothes, and caves decked out with all the latest appliances.

Life is good. Except we're destroying everything around us. It is time to re-examine our qualia, and beging ritualing with some new ideas. We can't fix the environment and not fix ourselves; nor can we change ourselves without transforming the environment. We all evolve together. The redness of the rose evolved with the creatures that ritualed with it. The environment evolved with the creatures that survived within it. We live in qualiascapes – landscapes filled with man-made objects – but until we learn to see the ideas behind all the things we're not going to solve the big problems.

The ideas behind humans things, ideas like freedom, or greed, will only get us so far. There are other ideas which transcend humanity, and include the environment. The laws of physics seem eternal and unchanging, but they are not. They evolved from the first relationships between matter and qualia in the ancient universe; the big news about the laws of physics is that they're not done evolving yet. Physicists can't figure out how to put the four fundamental forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational) together into a unified theory because they aren't unified...yet. They will be, and we will be responsible for unifying them, because we created that idea. (Alas, once unified, something else will evolve come along because life needs change and monolithic traditions cannot endure, even unified field theories.)

We humans put qualia out into the universe, but as long as our qualia is little more than human junk, like space-ships and nuclear waste, then that is what will become of the universe. But if the qualia we put out there is beautiful, like relativity and quantum theory, or colorful, like universal love and spiritual vibration, or mysterious, like alternate realities and multiple dimensions, then the universe will move to it; it won't grow solid and inflexible like a bad dance partner.

So we must wake up and smell the qualia. Even if we just pay attention to the patterns of clouds and the weather, and the play of light and the gurgle of streams, we will be doing our part. Hidden in all these natural phenomena are the secret patterns and hidden shapes which harness the matter of the universe the way a hexagon harnesses the frozen water of a snowflake. But we need to develop a sense for it.

Yes, wake up and smell the qualia, people.


Tony Brussat has a Master's degree in Rhetoric and Communication, and he lives in the Mythical State of Jefferson. Purchase WELCOME TO THE QUALIASPHERE to learn more about conscious ritualing and the qualiadelic experience. Visit qualiadelic.com