[naasking]

> Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts.

Not under eliminative materialism.

> You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is.

The ineffability of the experience of the pain is the qualia that needs explanation, the rest are all compatible with mechanistic explanations. It is the ineffable quality that disappears under any serious scrutiny.

Edit: if you want to understand how eliminativism can work scientifically, I suggested reading this paper:

The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between perceptual signals from our internal representation of the world, and the perceptual signals from our senses.