When asked recently during an ice breaker what motivates me, I responded (perhaps selfishly, certainly self-consciously), that “I motivate me.” Others said things like providing protection for family, or the support of friends, travel, food, sex etc., but I was thinking of my interpretation of all the stimuli – the qualia – that come across my senses and into my mind, from time of day to books that I read and a million other things.
Just internally, the body has about a billion billion billion atoms, each clinging to molecules, and each molecule belonging to a cell, and each cell part of an organ etc. etc.. In every case the local consciousness does not extend particularly far – the stomach, despite its interdependence with them, is largely unaware of the heart or the lungs or the brain.
Thankfully, I don’t have to pay much attention to those landscapes. Although my stomach can’t smell the plate of yummy food in front of me, my gonads can’t see the attractive model in the picture, and even my brain has no idea of the contents of the book my hands are holding, nonetheless each organ is stimulated respectively. But it is up to our minds (and not our brains), to control those nudges and urges.
Here’s how: just as our perception of the body works down from organs to cells to molecules and then atoms, so do the interpretations of mind cascade downward from organ-like ideas, to cells of thought, to molecules of myth, to atoms of language, until all that is left (all that exists) is the pure, un-evolved subatomic qualia that holds reality together.
And so it becomes clear that reality is an illusion. All matter is stardust and all qualia is potential. Are the finest sensations within my body matter or qualia?
In the human landscape, the qualia that we pay attention to excites either Big dopamine or Little dopamine. If you look back to wild animals, the Little Dopamine, the qualia, is what motivates.
I have spent a lifetime indulging in both, but I have always preferred the Little Dopamine. It does not possess me as does the other. It allows room for observation and reflection, the fruits of which are self- sustaining.
In this, I am like ecosystems, whose gifts sustain us all. So it is that I motivate me.