It is easy to put our faith in qualia, yet it is hard to put our faith in ideals. This should not discourage us. We have eons of evolutionary success placing our faith in qualia. Ideals, on the other hand, only came along when we started paying attention to the inner qualia of things — that is, when we started following the qualia inside our own minds (50,000 years ago, tops — since the dawn of language, let us say).
To understand how hard this transition has been — how hard it has been to escape instinct and follow ideals — lets compare the peer pressure of the past with the present. Our earliest human ancestors didn’t dare go against the group — that not only meant ostracism, but often death. Now remember how hard it was, when you were a kid: peer pressure was hard to resist when we were cavemen, and it still is now. Grown ups hardly dare take “the road less traveled,” even though they hardly risk ostracism, much less death. It is hard to peel away ideals, like individualism, from the instincts (following the herd) out of which they arose. No wonder it is hard to put our faith in ideals, they are so closely tied to the qualia which has helped us endure for thousands of years.
Just as our ancestors evolved with the landscapes around them, we are evolving with the qualia within. That is where our ideals come from. New qualia always suggests new ideals. When we consciously ritual with qualia, the landscape changes, to reflect it; when the qualia is in the mind, when it is idealistic, both the inner and the outer landscape changes. When new ideals arise, we must decide whether or not to let the old ones go.
As the landscape changes, old landmarks and pathways (as well as old ideals) move to the background. This is just as true in our own lives as it has been throughout the evolution of life. As one landscape morphs into another, the old landscape becomes like wallpaper: it is still there, but we don’t notice it anymore. The old landmarks (i.e. like the badges of belonging) no longer move us, or send us down the pathways as they used to, but their qualia is still in us — in our cells, perhaps in our DNA, our dreams. It shows up all too often, in situations such as peer pressure, in the gender roles into which we fall, in our political and moral fears. It is waiting for to come to life again, and to participate anew when the need returns.
The true challenge is being able to recognize whether the need is really justified. After all, the old qualia does serve some purpose, but it is up to us, with our ideals, to decide when to tap into them — and when not to. Our cell memories still contain something of the distant landscapes of our ancestors, both human and animal. These atavistic landscapes can make us vulnerable to savvy marketers, to demagogic politicians, to religious fanatics. But our better selves may be triggered, too: before civilization hijacked the dopamine reward circuit and turned us all into Big Dopamine addicts, our senses were finely honed to sense Little Dopamine. Little Dopamine always comes first, before Big Dopamine (it has to — it is a law, is it not, that things grow from small to large, that every big thing contains a smaller version of it, which must have come first?). Modern man moves quickly past the Little Dopamine to get to the Big Dopamine.
We still have the taste for Little Dopamine deep within our DNA. Our ancestors passed on to us the tendency to look for new qualia, which always begins as Little Dopamine. Unlike the qualia our ancestors noticed, which arrived as gifts from the ecosystem — the qualia we notice today is marketed at us, for someone else’s gain. It comes from our culture In the past, those who noticed new qualia survived; today, those who notice new qualia consume. But there is hope. The landmarks and pathways of our ancestors may be lost, but their qualia is still within us; moreover, their faith in qualia, their instinct to look for new qualia in a crisis, is still within us, waiting for its moment to be called back into duty. Our ecosystems’ gifts are always waiting for us to notice. New qualia is always in potential.