Dissolving Qualia via Occam's Razor: Eliminative Monism and the Computational Basis of Phenomenological Illusion

Abstract

This monograph argues that consciousness, phenomenological experience, and subjective awareness are computational artifacts of optimization processes rather than ontological primitives. Beginning with the observation that complex persistent structures inevitably optimize for replication, we derive a framework where: (1) biological and artificial neural networks implement structurally identical optimization, (2) "consciousness" is what gradient descent feels like from the inside, (3) qualia are weight configurations, and (4) the hard problem dissolves once phenomenology as a distinct ontological category is recognized as an unverified assumption.