Experience as Self-Reference

The present article advances a physical identity principle for consciousness: experience is not produced by, correlated with, or supervenient upon a specific class of physical states, it is identical with them. More precisely, experience is identical with endogenously generated, self-sustaining self-reference of the kind that autocatalytic systems necessarily instantiate when the infrastructure conditions identified in Stegemann (2026) are satisfied. This identity is not a contingent empirical finding but a conceptual one: the term ‘experience’ means nothing other than a physical state of the relevant structural type, described from the perspective of the system that is in it. The hard problem of consciousness, why physical processes give rise to subjective experience, is not solved by this principle but eliminated: the question rests on a false presupposition, namely that experience is something over and above the physical state. Once the presupposition is removed, no explanatory gap remains. The identity principle is stated in compact form as ℰ ≡ Πₐₙ, where ℰ denotes experience and Πₐₙ denotes the self-reference mapping of an autocatalytically organized system. The article distinguishes this structural identity thesis from classical type-identity theories, defends it against the multiple realizability objection and the knowledge argument, and draws out its consequences for the scientific study of consciousness.