All of life communicates via the landmarks and pathways they have evolved to perceive. Presumably, most animal eyes see a tree, most prokaryotes discern temperature or light or some chemical flavor, etc. etc., but landmarks and pathways may have different meanings or interpretations depending on the species or the individual.
Qualia is the message that a flower projects – a color or a smell – that a bee or a bird perceives. Similarly, signals such as a warning screech by a young orangutan, or a chemicals released between nearby trees have meaning.
The meanings of all the messages have evolved, some more quickly than others, through qualiadelic relationships, but none (seemingly) have evolved as speedily as human language.
The complexity and ever transforming meanings of words, of art, music, and even science literally boggle the mind. While we have been able to still the world around us to make sense of it, the human inner landscape – the mind – moves at warp speed.
In the world around us, qualia evolves with matter, but in the human mind, qualia evolves with other qualia, and this makes all the difference. As we can easily see, the symbolic play of imagination changes the brain, which changes the body, which in turn changes the landscape.
This has its benefits but also its costs (suffering, pollution, climate change..,) but if we consciously ritual and model our ideals after ecosystems we can turn things around. After all, the best ideas that have ever come into the mind have come from ecosystems, while the worst have come from the human landscape (for instance, the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics reflect ecosystems but atom bombs and computers do not).