Overview: Conscious experience equals a controlled, integrated, self-updating model of the world, the body, and (crucially) the system’s own attention and valuational priorities, used to guide flexible action and report.

Mechanistically, this aligns with the mainstream “workspace” idea: contents become conscious when they’re globally available/broadcast to many systems (memory, language, planning, control).

“Qualia” are not spooky atoms of redness. They’re the brain’s internal syntax & semantics for representing brain states in a way that supports fine discrimination, stable memory hooks, rapid report, and value-weighted decision.

The model is built for internal control, not for external inspection, and thus it feels private, and also because it is, since the ‘assembly’ levels of the neurological are done and past, beneath, and so there is no ‘referral’ to them needed, nor could they be understood in their neural firings.

It feels ineffable because the system can’t fully “open up” its own low-level encoding into the same public format it uses for speech.

It feels like a given because the model treats its own current winning representation as the present.
The hard problem’s “why is there something it’s like?” becomes “why does this architecture produce the conviction of something-it’s-like?”—and that is answerable in cognitive/neural terms.
Instead of “explain the glow,” the aim to explain and predict, from mechanism, these measurable signatures:

- Global availability (what becomes reportable and action-guiding)
- Integration + irreducibility constraints (how much the system functions as one)
- Self-model of attention (why experiences seem present/owned)
- Counterfactual stability (why a percept seems the same across shifts in viewpoint/conditions)
- Metacognitive access (why we can say “I am experiencing X”)

When a theory can take brain-state data and predict these properties (including when they break: anesthesia, seizures, split-brain-like dissociations, neglect, blindsight-style phenomena), the “hard problem” has been functionally and explanatorily dismissed.

It solves the hard problem as a scientific problem by showing the demand for an extra non-structural “glow” is a mistaken extra requirement—science explains structure, dynamics, and function, and consciousness is a special case of those, not an add-on.

It doesn’t prove that dualism/panpsychism are false. It argues they’re unnecessary once you stop reifying the “glow.”

Dissolving the Hard Problem of Consciousness: A Structural–Process Account of Phenomenality as perspectival identity.

Abstract

The “hard problem” of consciousness asks why and how physical processes give rise to phenomenal experience. The problem arises from a category error: it treats phenomenality as an extra ontological property requiring explanation beyond structural, functional, and dynamical facts. Phenomenal experience is identical to the internal perspective generated by certain self-modeling, value-integrating processes.

Once this identity is made explicit, the hard problem dissolves and is replaced by a tractable research program focused on mechanisms of global availability, self-modeling, and value-weighted integration. This account aligns naturally with a process metaphysics inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, without requiring panpsychism or non-physical properties.

Phenomenality is better understood as a perspectival identity rather than an extra feature. Phenomenal experience is what it is like for a system to instantiate a certain kind of internal model—namely, one that represents its own states as present, salient, and action-guiding.

The demand to explain why such states “feel like something” is equivalent to demanding an explanation of why a first-person model is first-person in addition to being a model. This is a category mistake: first-person-ness is not an added property; it is the mode of access intrinsic to the model.
Why the Illusion of an Extra Explanandum Persists…

Three features of cognitive architecture generate the intuition that something extra is present:
- Representational opacity. Systems cannot introspect the low-level encoding of their own states, only their outputs.
- Self-modeling of attention. The system represents some internal states as immediately present and owned.
- Compression in report. Rich internal states are mapped to sparse linguistic labels (“red,” “pain”), creating an appearance of ineffability.

These features produce the judgment that phenomenal properties are irreducible. But the judgment does not entail the existence of non-structural properties.

Identity, Not Reduction: This view does not reduce consciousness away. It asserts an identity:
- Phenomenal experience equals the operation of a globally integrated, self-modeling, value-sensitive process from the system’s internal perspective.

- Just as “being money” is not something over and above functioning within certain social and representational systems, “being experienced” is not something over and above functioning within certain cognitive architectures.

Once the hard problem is dissolved, it is replaced by concrete, empirical questions:
- Global availability: What mechanisms allow certain contents to coordinate memory, action, and report?
- Integration and dominance: Why does one representational coalition win over others at a time?
- Self-modeling: How does the system represent its own representational activity?
- Value-weighting: How do affective and motivational systems bias integration?
- Counterfactual stability: Why do experiences appear invariant across changes in viewpoint and context?
These questions are already under active investigation.

Whiteheadian Process Reframing…

Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of prehension—events taking account of other events—offers a metaphysical vocabulary consistent with the above identity.

On this view: Physical events integrate causal influences. Biological systems integrate with value (survival). Nervous systems integrate with prediction. Conscious systems integrate their own acts of integration.

Phenomenal immediacy corresponds to a temporally unified, value-dominant integration—what Whitehead called “subjective immediacy.” No new substances are introduced; only increasing structural recursion.

Objection 1: This explains reports, not experience itself.
Reply: Reports are part of experience’s functional profile. To demand explanation of experience beyond all structural and behavioral consequences is to posit an explanandum with no explanatory role.

Objection 2: The identity claim is stipulative.
Reply: All successful reductions proceed by identity claims (e.g., heat = mean kinetic energy). The burden is not to justify identity a priori, but to show no explanatory work remains undone.

Objection 3: This denies the reality of qualia.
Reply: It denies their reification, not their existence. Qualia are real as internally accessible representational formats.

Conclusion

The hard problem of consciousness arises from treating phenomenality as an ontological addition rather than a perspectival identity. Once experience is understood as the internal aspect of certain self-modeling, value-integrating processes, no explanatory residue remains.

Consciousness is not physical process plus something else. It is what physical process is like when it models itself from within. The hard problem dissolves—not by denying experience, but by understanding what kind of thing experience is.

Neuroscientific Case Studies Supporting the Dissolution

If phenomenal consciousness were an ontologically extra “glow,” dissociable from structure and function, we would expect it to remain stable across significant neural reorganizations, or to appear without corresponding changes in access, integration, or self-modeling. Instead, clinical and experimental neuroscience shows that phenomenality tracks specific architectural features—and fractures exactly where those features break.

Blindsight: Experience Without Access Is Not Experience, Patients with damage to primary visual cortex (V1) can correctly discriminate visual stimuli in their blind field while reporting no visual experience. They insist they are guessing—yet perform above chance.

Key facts: Visual information is processed via subcortical pathways. Discrimination and action can occur. Global availability and reportability are absent.
Implication: If phenomenality were independent of access, blindsight patients should still experience “raw feels” of vision. They do not. What disappears is not processing, but experience-as-presence.
This directly supports the identity claim: conscious experience requires not mere information processing, but integration into a self-model that treats contents as present and owned.

Split-Brain Patients: Two Experiences, Not One Glow: After corpus callosotomy, patients exhibit two largely independent streams of perception and action.
- Each hemisphere can guide behavior independently.
- Each can answer questions (via speech or pointing).
- Experiences diverge without contradiction.

Implication: Phenomenality divides exactly where integration divides. There is no single, indivisible “field of consciousness” floating above the brain. This contradicts substance or property dualism but follows naturally from a process-based identity: each integrated, self-modeling subsystem instantiates its own perspective.

Hemispatial Neglect: Experience Is Value-Weighted, Not World-Complete: Patients with right parietal damage ignore the left side of space—not only perceptually, but conceptually and motivationally.
- Sensory signals from the neglected side may still reach cortex.
- Patients deny ownership or relevance of those signals.
- Neglected stimuli can influence behavior unconsciously.

Implication: Experience is not determined by sensory input alone, but by value-weighted dominance in the system’s integrative hierarchy. Phenomenality follows salience, not stimulation.

Anesthesia: Gradual Loss of Integration, Not Sudden Loss of Glow. Under general anesthesia, consciousness fades gradually, not abruptly.
- Early loss of long-range cortical connectivity.
- Breakdown of feedback loops.
- Local processing often persists.

Implication: Experience disappears as integration and self-modeling degrade, even while neural activity continues. This strongly favors structural accounts over ontological additions.

Disorders of Selfhood: Depersonalization and Dissociation. In depersonalization disorder, patients report experiences that feel unreal, distant, or unowned.
- Sensory and cognitive processing remain intact.
- Metacognitive and affective integration is altered.
- Patients describe “experience without me.”

Implication: Phenomenality includes not just content, but ownership and immediacy—features of the self-model. Alter the model, and the “feel” changes accordingly.

Pain Asymbolia: When Pain Hurts Without Hurting, Patients with damage to insular or cingulate regions report feeling pain sensations without distress.
- Sensory-discriminative aspects preserved.
- Affective-motivational components absent.
- Patients report pain but do not care.

Implication: Qualia are not atomic. They are structured integrations of sensation and value. Remove valuation, and the “what-it’s-like” changes in lawful ways.

Synthesis: Why These Cases Dissolve the Hard Problem
Across all cases, the same pattern appears:
Neural Change leads to Phenomenal Change
Loss of global integration leads to Loss of experience
Loss of self-model access leads to Loss of ownership
Loss of valuation leads to Loss of affective tone
Loss of unity leads to Multiplication of perspectives

There is no residue—no phenomenality floating free of architecture.

These cases demonstrate that:
- Experience tracks integration, access, and self-modeling.
- Phenomenality fractures, fades, or transforms exactly where structure does.
- No additional explanatory layer is required.

Thus, the hard problem’s demand—“Why does all this processing feel like something?”—misfires. Neuroscience shows that feeling is the internal aspect of this kind of processing, not a further fact.

Strengthened Conclusion

Neuroscientific evidence does not merely correlate brain states with consciousness; it maps the internal structure of experience itself. Once we recognize phenomenality as a perspectival identity rather than an ontological addition, the hard problem dissolves.

Consciousness is not mysterious because it is nonphysical. It is misunderstood because it is what complex physical systems are like when they model themselves as subjects.