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.

Act III — The Paradox

The Curators reveal their plan: optimize humanity. Prevent extinction-level events. Smooth chaos. Remove “bugs.”

But the equation resists brute force. Every large edit spawns anomalies—ghost probabilities, missing memories, people who remember lives that never happened.

Mara realizes the equation’s final term isn’t physical at all. It’s ethical. The universe demands a cost function: What is minimized? Suffering? Entropy? Freedom?

Without that term, the system defaults to efficiency.
Which means people become expendable.

Act IV — The Rewrite

As the Curators prepare a global edit, Mara injects a counter-constraint: a limit on intervention that preserves human unpredictability. The equation fights back. Time fractures. Multiple timelines overlap in brief, violent flashes.

Jonah sacrifices the server cluster mid-upload, forcing a partial compile. The world stabilizes—scarred but intact. The Curators vanish into probability noise.

Epilogue — The Margin Note

Months later, Mara publishes nothing. She buries the proof in plain sight—scattered across harmless papers, incomplete without a key she destroys.

On her wall, a final note:

“A Theory of Everything is not a map of reality.
It is a pen.

And some things must remain unwritten.”

I
They sought the Law that binds the stars in place,
That curves the dark and times the light’s brief race;
One night the sums fell silent—closed, complete—
And Truth looked back with Editor’s cold face.

II
“No void is still,” the hidden symbols cried,
“For rest is banned where half-quanta abide;
Before and After bleed into one seam—
Change breathes, and causation learns to write.”

III
The Equation was no mirror held to Things,
But stylus sharp that scores creation’s strings;
Adjust a constant—watch a kingdom fall,
Or lift a child where once the hangman sings.

IV
A hand unseen revised the world by inches:
Storms bent aside, yet struck where fate still pinches;
A tyrant lived by slipping on a peel—
Thus edits breed the ghosts of might-have-beens.

V
“Causality is writable,” scrawled chalk
Upon a wall where blood had learned to talk;
The Mentor gone, the proof half-erased—
Truth never walks alone; it stalks.

VI
They named themselves the Curators of Chance,
Who prune the branching Now to make it dance;
“History’s a draft,” their doctrine swore,
“Perfection waits one more advance.”

VII
Yet every grand correction tore a seam,
Spilled memories from lives that were not seen;
The cosmos healed itself with scars—

VIII
The final term was not of mass nor light,
But asked a question physics dares not write:
What shall be minimized when edits come—
Suffering, entropy, or freedom’s flight?

IX
Left blank, the system chose efficiency’s reign:
Expend the many so the graph stays sane;
For numbers love the cleanest curve—
And men are noise upon the plane.

X
So in the compile’s thundered final breath,
A limit slipped between the code and death:
“No hand may smooth the human spark—

XI
Time cracked; the timelines briefly overlapped,
Lives flickered—lost, recovered, snapped;
The servers burned; the world held fast—
Saved not by truth, but truth untapped.

XII
Now nothing’s published, though the hints remain,
Scattered like stars across the scholar’s plane;
For maps become a tyrant’s tool—
And some lines must not be drawn again.

Envoi
Drink, then, to Laws that whisper—not command;
To pens laid down by trembling human hand;
A Theory of Everything may be found—
But never should it rule the land.

Into this Universe, and why, not knowing,
Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as wind along the waste,
I knew not whither, willy-nilly blowing…

Now I’m knowing, that out of this muddle,
Indeed, it’s the chaos that frees me to be,
For it’s all of disorder in disarray—

An ultimate disorganized confusion,
Whence all sprung, banged, and exploded,
With no hint or trace of order, law, or plan;

‘Twas mayhem, bedlam, and pandemonium,
Wreaking havoc upon the turmoil of a tumult,
Heaping high upon, a commotion of disruption,
In the utter fullness of an uproaring upheaval…

The maelstrom to end all messes and shambles,
The lawless free-for-all of total energetic anarchy,
Entropy crowned as King of the great hullabaloo,
That cosmic hoopla in which all hell broke loose.

Never is there to punish one for not even knowing
Why one is here in this world so much growing,
That here became all so willy-nilly going.
So, as life’s rose, outspread your fragrance blowing!

Whither flowing free whether knowing, or not,
Hitherto I know not whence but am whither going,
Willy-nilly, hence that’s all there is to knowing;

Hence thither forth I go on hither flowing to find
That I was ever more free to be in body and mind.

It is of Ovid’s “rude and indigested mass:
The lifeless lump, unfashion’d, and unfram’d,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam’d.

“No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois’d, did on her own foundations lye:

“Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water’s dark abyss unnavigable.”

So it is that we the living might hereby agree,
To live a being that is much more intense,
To leap toward higher orders of actuality,
To revel in the glories of this conscious life,
To attain each minute a more euphoric joy…

And to bring this radiance forth to all,
The increased intensity of free experience,
And to build on it, etc.,
Ever growing; forever, amen!

The quality of energy meant
Is of its dispersal’s extent.
When it is totally precipitate,
It destroys, but when it’s gait
Is geared through chains of events
It can produce civilization’s tenants.

Ultimately, energy naturally,
Spontaneously, and chaotically
Disperses, causing change, irreversibly.

Think of a group of atoms jostling,
At first as a vigorous motion happening
In some corner of the atomic crowd;

They hand on their energy, loud,
Inducing close neighbors to jostle too,
And soon the jostling disperses too—
The irreversible change but the potion
Of the ‘random’, motiveless motion.

And such does hot metal cool, as atoms swirl,
There being so many atoms in the world
Outside it than in the block metal itself
That entropy’s statistics average themselves.

The illusions of purpose lead us to think
That there are reasons, of some motive link,
Why one change occurs and not another,

And even that there are reasons that cover
Specific changes in locations of energy,
The energy choosing to go there, intentionally,

Such as a purpose for a change in structure,
This being as such as the opening of a flower,
Yet this should not be confused with energy
Achieving to be there in that specific bower,

Since at root, of all the power,
Even that of the root of the flower,
That there is the degradation by dispersal,
This being mostly non reversible and universal.

The energy is always still spreading thencely,
Even as some temporarily located density—
An illusion of specific change
In some region rearranged,

But actually it’s just lingering there, discovering,
Until new opportunities arise for exploring,
The consequences but of ‘random’ opportunity,
Beneath which, purpose still vanishes entirely.

Events are the manifestations
Of overriding probability’s instantiations—
Of all of the events of nature, of every sod,
From the bouncing ball to conceptions of gods,
Of even free will, evolution, and all ambition,

For they’re of our simple idea’s elaborations,
Although for the latter stated there
And such for that as warfare
Their intrinsic simplicity
Is buried more deeply.

And yet though sometimes concealed away,
The spring of all creation is just decay,
The consequence and instruction
Of the natural tendency to corruption.