From the introduction to my book, Welcome to the Qualiasphere.
Our goal is to move from landscapes to ecosystems. All animals have evolved in landscapes to chase matter, to desire it, and often, to possess it. Landscapes are competitive, full of struggle and desire. But ecosystems consist of many landscapes together, co-existing in harmony.
An ecosystem is like the hexagon in a snowflake. All the matter clings to it, but the hexagon has no material existence. It is qualia. When the snowflake melts, the hexagon disappears. When the landscapes fall apart, the ecosystem disappears. When the human community decays, its ideals disappear.
God, Voltaire famously said, is a “circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” So is an ecosystem. We are always at the center of our landscapes, but we are never at the center of ecosystems. By reducing the “circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” to the local sphere of the ecosystem, the imperative of the Golden Rule becomes clear: treat others as you would like to be treated. The rule exemplifies ecosystems (the Green Rule?).
Wherever landscapes intersect, whether they belong to different species, different cultures, or even different individuals, an ecosystem may exist and a new center must be found. The keenness of our “sense” for the new center, in both nature and culture, depends upon our sensitivity to qualia.
Qualia always hints at the ideal. If we imagine the hexagon in a snowflake, we can imagine a perfect hexagon. The ecosystem is a new idea, a new ideal — new qualia. Its “fitness” is proven by its adaptation to many landscapes, not just natural but cultural. In nature, ecosystems appear quite ideal, while in culture, ecosystems appear to be highly imperfect. In reality, of course, both are full of flaws.
We do not strive for the ideal any more than we consciously promote the decay of things and death. Rather, depending upon our habits of noticing, ideals and flaws (the beautiful and the sublime) exist upon a see-saw that is more or less in balance. The more in balance that line is on its fulcrum, the more we can sense slight changes in our landscape. Alas, the human landscape is not in balance – but ecosystems are!
Imagine ecosystems, ritual with them, and the see-saw turns out not to be a line, nor even a plane, but a sphere. Welcome to the qualiasphere.