Qualia comes in all sorts of forms. Once we have a sense for it, it appears everywhere, like color. Even such important qualia as relativity would appear everywhere, could we only hone our senses to it.
Color and relativity are abstract qualia. Why is it that human qualia does not work the same way? Why is it that we can’t discern respect and compassion all around us?
Seeing old patterns, or pathways, or events, from new angles helps us to create new order in our lives. Ideally, order should be perfect and unchanging from every angle. In a practical sense, outside the order is disorder, uncleanliness, impurity, unholiness.
What we have dared is to venture into the disorder. What we have found is that looking at the old order from a new perspectives moves us toward the understanding that all things are interconnected.
The pleasure in walking the opposite direction through a familiar trail comes not so much because the familiar is seen from a new angle, but because a pathway is qualiadelic — a pattern, a form — and seeing a new form from a new angle reinforces the pattern in ways in which we were not even aware. It is a massage of symbols. No ritual is the same twice.
When we have contentedness the world is no longer desolate — the world is filled with colorful and appealing qualia. Not only does nature look pretty and grand, but so too ideology and propaganda. It is dangerous to ignore the unknown, to take the illusions for knowledge, and to fade blindly into the wallpaper.
The word “desolate” means void of habitation. Our neurons seem desolate compared to the physical world around us, and the psychological world inside. But the neurons are reality; the rest is so much wallpaper.
Being born human is even better than being born in the United States, but it presents similar problems. Such an excess of delightful stimulation, both to the senses and to the mind. Living in the land of plenty is a wonderful thing, but it begs the question, when is enough too much?
Just as a Klein bottle lets us travel inside and outside, so we can travel our neurons. It is easy enough to imagine a path through the forest in our mind. Why not, then, imagine ourselves upon a path of neurons outside of us.
(A Klein bottle is like a 3D Mobius strip. Follow it around.)
We have evolved our senses in very specific ways. One way seems to be speed, to notice more quickly the appearance and movement of predators. Meanwhile, the rest of the landscape — that which is not a threat — has either slowed down or sped up. We don’t take much notice of a tree — it moves too slowly — or a beam of light — it moves too quickly; we just see monolithic trees and a generalized lightness or darkness. The world which is not in our time frame is basically static.
As we grow old time speeds up, so why can’t we learn to see light? And as we grow wise, why shouldn’t our thoughts spread out in tree-like, graceful, tempered movements.
Knowledge make people invisible. The more, for instance, we know biology, the less we perceive the body; a spell-binding cloak of cells, chemicals, genetics, and abstract theories make invisible the humanity of our being. This is a good thing, because we are, in the main, destructive creatures, while everything non-human in which we have taken an interest has proven divine.
Just as matter forms around qualia, words form around ideas. Of course, many a writer starts with words, letting their metaphorical magic lead onward serendipitously to sense; in this method, ideas appear like momentary gods, helping the writer out of a crisis. It is, however, a mark of maturity in a writer to begin with an idea, and force words to conform to sense.
Does the world conform to our sense?