From Qualia to Computation: A Case for Engineering Functionalism [Preprint]

The Hard Problem of Consciousness has resisted solution for three decades not because it is unanswerable but because the standard framing treats the felt quality of experience as something to be explained away or simply accepted. This paper advances a cumulative case for a third option: the most parsimonious account consistent with the available evidence. The argument turns on a distinction that is load-bearing throughout: consciousness (the existence of a workspace in which states are available for flexible integration) and qualia (the specific felt format of the content that workspace processes) are related but not co-extensive. Engineering Functionalism, the position developed here, addresses the second level: why the felt format takes the precise profile it does. A phenomenological profile of qualia is established from philosophical and empirical literature across five independent research traditions. The same profile is then derived independently from functional and engineering constraints governing any finite agentic system under real-time bandwidth pressure, without phenomenological assumptions. The convergence of two independently motivated descriptions is explained by identity: qualia are not accompanied by this processing but are what this processing is at the level of the system’s own self-modelling. Engineering Functionalism (EF) navigates between eliminativism, which explains away what the clinical and functional record shows to be causally indispensable, and property dualism, which accommodates the evidence without explaining it. The zombie stipulation is shown to be nomologically incoherent for any finite system under constraints facing the valuation bottleneck. Under EF, qualia are not optional. They are an architectural requirement.