The Spirit of Qualia
Posted: Friday, July 15, 2011
by Tony Brussat
http://qualiadelic.com
The first anthropologists to study religion around the world found what they considered to be primitive, almost fossilized predecessors to the modern, “great” religions. The fetishism and nature worship of our ancestors still lingered in some cultures, here and there, but that wasn't a surprise – they, just like many ancient creatures that still exist today, are just waiting to go extinct.
Of course this was all quite wrong and we should be quite embarrassed. What the primitive people had, which we still dismiss today with educated hubris, was a sense that all things – even rocks and dead matter – are animated with spirit of some sort. There are things in the landscape which attracted them, toward which they moved. With whom they ritualed. They formed qualiadelic relationships. We still do the same, today, only in a different landscape. We ritual with the pixels and avatars on the internet. We go there, again and again, and we evolve and the web pages we interact with evolve, too. In this sense, they are animated indeed. In fact, for dead matter, our computers are quite alive.
Yes, there is a programmer on the other end of a URL, but the URL is not just a projection of the living creature. A web page is an environment, a landscape, an ecosystem; everyone who goes there rituals with it, and it evolves as surely as a river bank evolves according to the creatures who go there. (Beavers drop trees in it; deer and others drop seeds of foreign plants in it with their poop; fish winnow out the underbank; etc.) It is hard NOT to think of an ecosystem as alive, and digital reality is quite alive.
On the other hand it is easy to think of a grain of sand as dead; is it not just like any complex molecule, unfeelingly buffeted about and victimized by its environment? Well, now we must debate. For a molecule is an environment for subatomic particles – it is yet another ecosystem, and alive to the activities of the elements who live in it. But electrons aren't alive, of course! Or are they? We really can't say – physicists are unable to measure them; we can only theorize about them.
Here is another theory: Just as we are attracted to the color of a flower, even the tiniest particles of matter in the universe, like electrons, are attracted to qualia. They move toward it, or, at least we might say that if they encounter “attractive” qualia they choose to form along its lines, much as molecules of freezing water form around the pattern of a hexagon. A grain of sand, too, is filled with crystal patterns. Smaller and smaller they seem to grow, but when scientists get to the point at which things are so small that they cannot be measured, it is time to acknowledge that they are beginning to study the interaction of matter with qualia.
It is useless to wonder which came first, matter or qualia; like the chicken and the egg, the two have evolved together in lasting qualiadelic relationships. When we recognize that all things are formed of qualia and matter, we suddenly transcend the scientific paradigm of the material universe. All things, even the smallest particles, are alive. They are organisms with a subtle sense that moves them toward qualia, to form relationships that endure and evolve.
Many people still do believe, at some level, that all things are animated by some form of spirit, or energy. That spirit or energy, or whatever, is qualia. When we modern sophisticates do finally wake up to qualia, we are going to feel quite a bit more embarrassed than those early anthropologists who so haughtily dismissed the nature worship and animism of primitive religions. The entire universe, all that “dead” matter – from cosmic space dust to giant mountain ranges – will be laughing at us, and we shall feel as if we were in front of our eighth grade class with no clothes on. Fortunately, little conscious ritualing, and the awareness of qualia which comes with it, will wake us up from our materialist delusions.
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