A grain of sand is filled with crystal patterns – smaller and smaller they seem to grow, but when scientists get to the point at which things are so small that they cannot be measured, it is time to acknowledge that they are beginning to study qualia.
It is useless to wonder which came first, matter or qualia. Like the chicken and the egg, the two have evolved together in lasting qualiadelic relationships. When we recognize that all things are formed of qualia and matter, we suddenly transcend the scientific paradigm of the material universe. All things, even the smallest particles, are alive. In some sense, qualia is consciousness. Matter, even in its elemental form, is an organism with a subtle, qualiadelic sense. It is well to remember that the physical laws that describe the attractions of matter are qualia (they have no material existence in themselves).
The first anthropologists to study religion around the world found what they considered to be primitive predecessors to the modern, “great” religions. It was magic, not science, said the smartest of them.
Of course this was all quite wrong. What the primitive people had, which we still dismiss today with educated hubris, was a sense that all things – even rocks and dead matter – are animated with spirit of some sort. There were things in the landscape which attracted them, and they moved toward them, ritualed with them, and formed qualiadelic relationships with them.
Why should that seem so strange? We still do the same, today, only in a different landscape. We ritual with AI on the internet. We go there, again and again, superstitiously, just like Skinner’ pigeon, and we evolve and the web pages we interact with evolve, too. In this sense, they are animated indeed; in fact, for dead matter, the internet are quite alive.
A web page is an environment, a landscape, an ecosystem; everyone who goes there rituals with it, and it evolves (or perishes) as surely as a river bank evolves according to the creatures who go there. Beavers drop trees in it; deer and others drop seeds of foreign plants in it with their poop; fish winnow out the underbank, and so on. It is hard NOT to think of an ecosystem as alive, and digital reality is quite alive.
On the other hand it is easy to think of a grain of sand as dead. Isn’t it just like any complex molecule, unfeelingly buffeted about and victimized by its environment? Well, a molecule is an environment for subatomic particles – it is an ecosystem, too, just like the riverbank; and it is alive to the activities of the elements who live in it. But electrons aren’t alive, of course! Or are they? We really can’t say – physicists are unable to measure them; we can only theorize about them. They certainly act like qualia, helping the matter they inform to endure!
Many people still do believe, at some level, that all things are animated by some form of spirit, or energy. That spirit or energy, or whatever, is qualia. When we modern sophisticates do finally wake up to qualia, we are going to feel quite a bit more embarrassed than those early anthropologists who so haughtily dismissed primitive religions. The entire universe, all that “dead” matter – from cosmic space dust to giant mountain ranges – will be laughing at us, too, and we smart people shall feel as if we were in front of our eighth grade class with no clothes on.
Fortunately, with a little conscious ritualing and the awareness of qualia which comes with it, we will wake up from our materialist delusions.