Dissolving Qualia via Occam's Razor: Eliminative Monism and the Computational Basis of Phenomenological Illusion
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) July 11, 2026 Murad Farzulla
Consciousness and subjective experience are not fundamental features of reality but computational byproducts of optimization processes. Both biological and artificial neural networks implement the same kind of optimization, so what we call consciousness is what gradient descent feels like from within a system. Qualia correspond to weight configurations, and the so-called hard problem of consciousness disappears once the assumption that phenomenology is a distinct ontological category is recognized as unverified. The argument proceeds across physical, computational, epistemological, and linguistic levels, concluding that human-level intelligence may be a local maximum characterized by alienation and anti-natalist reasoning.