Qualia always suggests ideals. We have an ideal of a ripe blackberry, but we won’t know until we taste it whether it is underripe or overripe or perfect.
It’s the ideal. It’s our aesthetic sense of beauty and sublimity, which tells us whether a berry is moving towards ripeness or falling away from it. It’s the beauty of growth, the sublime nature of decay.
These two aesthetic realities become our compass, moving us towards ideals.
This is a teleological explanation, à la Aristotle, but Aristotle also had a formal cause. And qualia as a formal cause is how we create meaning.
We see patterns. We find patterns to explain what is going on in the world.
Those patterns may be full of growth. They may be full of decay. They may be beautiful. They may be sublime. They may be healthy.
They may not be.
But every being on the planet has shared formal causes because of the qualiadelic relationships in which they evolved. The formal cause grounds the ideal and the teleological cause keeps the formal from stagnating.
The human race has refused to fully acknowledge its belonging with the rest of the beings on the planet, as if we have some special form they do not. Most likely the mind, but the mind, ideally is an ecosystem, and that is our teleological goal – rediscover our harmony with ecosystems.
Another way of putting it is that, if ecosystems are qualiadelic and nature is the formal manifestation of ecosystems, then our bodies and brains ought to be seeking sharedness with nature by sharing qualia with ecosystems.
Empedocles wrote about a pre-formal chaos where individual arms and limbs roamed about searching for the rest of the body they belonged to. “Faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads…Many creatures were born with faces and breasts on both sides, man-faced ox-progeny … ox-headed offspring of man, creatures compounded partly of male, partly of the nature of female.”
To me, this is a picture of human consciousness right now, attempting to reconnect with ecosystems.