Deepak Chopra defines qualia as the subjective qualities of experience—taste, color, emotion—and argues every conscious experience is made of them. Each species has its own qualia matrix, making their sensory worlds fundamentally different from ours. He proposes shifting science's focus from studying particles to studying qualia, with quantum physicists and neuroscientists working together to understand consciousness as reality's foundation.
Let me explain what qualia are. Qualia are descriptions of subjective experience. So the taste of onion, the experience of the taste of onion is a qualia. The experience of the taste of red wine, the smell of garlic, the color red, anything that we experience subjectively is a qualia. So qualia are thoughts, they are feelings, they are sensations, and they're emotions. Love is a qualia, compassion is a qualia, joy is a qualia, hostility, anger, depression, these are all qualia. When you understand qualia, then you realize that's all we experience. Our physical body is an integrated set of qualia and consciousness. Consciousness. Our thoughts, our mind is a collection of qualia. And the whole universe that we experience out there is an integrated collection of qualia in human consciousness. Human consciousness is the only qualia we can experience. Now, it's logical to assume that other animals or other life forms probably experience different qualia. So the bark of a dog does not sound like the bark of a dog to a dog as it sounds to you and me. Or the cawing of a crow doesn't sound the same to a crow, it's a completely different nervous system, as it sounds to you and me. And yet we can communicate with these life forms, because their qualia matrix is transferred or translated into our qualia experience in our own consciousness. In other words, qualia are species-specific, which means, of course, there are multiple universes because they're all experiences of qualia in multiple species. Even the nervous system is the object of experience in our consciousness. So the brain and neural networks and genes and even quanta or photons or subatomic particles are qualia in consciousness. In fact, Hans-Peter Duhr calls them HAPs, happenings. All objects in space are events in time and they are in consciousness. When we understand this, then we really understand why many wisdom traditions, particularly Vedanta, say, I'm not in the world, the world is in me. I'm not in the body, the body is in me. I'm not in the mind, the mind is in me. Me meaning the consciousness in which these qualia come and go. I think we are ready as a scientific movement to move from quanta to qualia. And that is going to be a major endeavor of mine with many scientists, including quantum physicists and neuroscientists, in the very near future. More to come.
