Scientific philosophers have an explanation for the reality we experience: it’s an illusion. All that we perceive with our senses, including the thoughts in our own heads, are just illusions. We are nothing more than a pack of neurons, while reality consists only of what they (scientists) can measure with their instruments (even though there is an argument to be made that their instruments are just extensions of our senses).
This explanation of reality provides some insight as to the mystery of qualia, for no scientific instrument has ever seen an idea. Scientists can measure blood flow and chemical electricity in the brain, but they have never found an idea there. Ideas, the thoughts in our heads, are qualia.
Other thinkers, perhaps those who explore the nature of consciousness through religion or philosophy, define reality in a different way: they often believe that life, as we experience it in the world of matter, actually limits our conception of reality. We are misled by our senses, and subsequently by our reason, about the nature of reality.
This explanation of reality provides another insight into the nature of qualia: we evolve with the landscapes in which we live, and therefore our senses evolve along with the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures around us. We evolve to be fit, but not, as divinity would have it, to be the best.
We evolve to endure, and qualia provides the forms, the patterns, and the physical and social laws that help us and all matter survive. Qualia keeps everything from falling apart. Most of the time qualia is the fittest for a particular moment in time. It is still a work in progress, as we know so well when it comes to the human landscape.
The value of the mind and its ideas is the ability to see the best. So, the best, for us, is not so much an illusion, or even a series of delusions. Rather, it is elusive. Reality is not the landscape in which we live, but the landscape, created in the mind, toward which we aspire.
Alas, the landscape in which we do live is delusional, because what we aspire to is so unhealthy, addictive, egoistic, and traumatic. The past, then, is what becomes an illusion. And although the future is elusive, it is no more an illusion than the prey spied by a soaring hawk or a stalking tiger.
Reality, like the future, is what we make it, so be qualiadelic!