Computational Awareness Monism: An Identity Theory of Conscious Experience

The hard problem of consciousness asks how subjective experience arises from physical processes. Many theories explain cognitive functions yet leave felt experience unexplained. Computational Awareness Monism (CAM) proposes that if reality is computational, then consciousness has explicit identity conditions: awareness is the universe's total computational causal process, manifesting locally as streams of qualia. CAM identifies one-to-one correspondences between qualia—units of experience—and computationally irreducible processes involving locally connected network regions—patterns whose evolution cannot be predicted without step-by-step computation. Observers correspond to computationally reducible structures that bound and organize these streams. We develop this framework through Wolfram Physics, which models reality as an evolving hypergraph. In this framework, unity corresponds to network connectedness, continuity to persistence of irreducible processes across updates, and qualitative changes to altered formatting and sequencing. CAM makes testable predictions in computational models, neural systems, and artificial architectures, linking topology and dynamics to reported experience across perception, altered states, and engineered systems.