What is love?
Love is what we feel when we are emptied of the ideals of the addictive, human landscape. Human ideals are qualia, sure enough, but not qualiadelic, because they create a hypocritical sense of fairness in an unequal world. Justice, for instance, is only necessary because we have evolved into a competitive, materialistic species.
All individuals are competitive within their own species, but only humans have had to create laws. The “laws” of other creatures are not laws at all but reflections of ecosystems (and yes, nature can be brutal). But between species there is, by and large, less competition and more cooperation, because they have evolved perfectly in their niches. So it is that the ecosystem needs no laws: animals and plants simply abide by the qualia they have evolved to notice.
If individuals consciously ritual, we will be emptied piece by piece of our hypocritical ideals – and into that emptiness flows love. Love is pure qualia, qualia unmixed with fear, and uninfluenced by the need to have more.
The value of qualia is greater than matter, just as a gift has more value than something bought. Gifts are ineffable, immeasurable, and they create an equality which is not based upon wealth, power, or any other hierarchy or privilege, but upon love.
This may sound woo-woo, but you might bet on it, à la Blaise Pascal.
Pascal was a brilliant mathematician in his day, in the 1600s, when gambling was a French national pastime. Some of his mathematical genius lay in the field of probability. But he gave up math and science for God, because he proposed a wager, the logic of which ran thus: if you wager that God does not exist and he doesn’t, you lose nothing. But if he does exist then you spend an eternity in hell. On the other hand, if you wager he exists and you are wrong, then you still lose nothing. Ah, but if he does exist you spend an eternity in heaven.
I want to suggest that by the same logic, placing our bets on an equality based upon love might make the world a better place. What have you got to lose?