I don't think it's difficult at all to come up with a mechanistic/reductionist model for attention (or any related functioning: FEF, saccades, salience, etc).

I don't think it's difficult at all to come up with a mechanistic/reductionist model for attention (or any related functioning: FEF, saccades, salience, etc). But pure awareness is entirely different. You can't get around qualia. Because in essence, qualia is pointing to the idea that "you are." You have an experience of being. Saying here is an explanation of how the simulation arises just pushes the question back. Now I'm wondering, "to whom is the simulation presented?" You can say, "to no one—it's all a trick." But who is being tricked. Ultimately I am. The idea that my perceptions arise mechanistically presents no problem to me. The idea that the original background intelligence itself is a simulation seems obviously false. So obvious it precedes a logical argument because it is the intelligence from which logics derive their authority. Crudely speaking, it makes 1+1=2 true. I think a lot of really smart people look right past the most basic reality that they must exist prior to their perceptions for perceptions, logic, or a simulation to exist at all. If you can say that awareness is secondary and arises from these mechanistic explanations, who is left to evaluate the validity of this proposition? It's way simpler than we're all making it. People just have to sit alone with the knowledge that they are.