Who Owns Consciousness? Anchoring First-Person Perspectival Ownership in Physical History

Abstract

The science of consciousness has long focused on the mechanisms that generate conscious content—the so-called “hard problem”—yet it has systematically suspended a more fundamental question: why is such content bound to a unique, enduring first-person perspective? This paper refers to this as the problem of ownership, or the problem of individuation. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have rendered this question urgently pressing: AI can now produce highly coherent simulations of conscious content, effectively separating content-generation from the existence of a unique biological perspective, and forcing us to ask what structural principle makes a history and its contents belong to this subject rather than another. To address this problem, the present paper adopts the second formulation of the Difference Stripping Method (DSM) developed in a companion methodological study (Difference Stripping Method, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20672227). DSM does not begin from a phenomenological remainder. It identifies the minimum structural constraints required for distinction, objecthood, persistence, historical irreplaceability, and self-grounded reference. Its fourth layer establishes an irreplaceable realization as a Reference Candidate; its fifth layer—the Reference Ground Constraint—requires that, if such a realization forms an internal reference grounded in itself, the ground of that reference must fall within that realization rather than in another realization, an external observer, or an added label. The resulting structure is Self-grounded Reference. This paper calls the concrete, historically continuous subject-form of that structure the Root. Read backward, the DSM traverses the stripping of replaceable properties until it reaches the causal origin of an irreplaceable realization. Read forward, that same trajectory is Worldline Realization: a continuous, unrepeatable life history unfolding from its causal origin. The Root is not a memory, personality, narrative, or collection of conscious contents; it is the structural fact that this irreducible history is self-grounded as this subject’s history. This structural foundation compels the concept of the Inaugural Event: the event at which a Worldline Realization begins and the Reference Ground becomes anchored within that particular irreplaceable realization. A reductio argument is reformulated accordingly. If the Root were externally assigned or generated only after the causal origin, its Reference Ground would have to be supplied by another realization, an observer, or an added criterion; each alternative violates the Reference Ground Constraint. The Root must therefore be internally anchored to its own Worldline Realization rather than conferred by later content or external attribution. Armed with this framework, the paper revisits the contributions and blind spots of Locke, Parfit, Dennett, Zahavi, and Integrated Information Theory. Their accounts illuminate memory, psychological continuity, narrative organization, the phenomenology of for-me-ness, or synchronic integration, but they do not independently establish the diachronic ground by which one irreplaceable realization is self-referentially anchored as one subject. Finally, the paper retains the concept of the Root Signature—a stable, individual-specific neurodynamic pattern serving as the dynamical proxy of the Root. The Root Signature germinates synchronously at t₀, the moment of the Inaugural Event, and matures continuously as the Worldline Realization unfolds; its degree of tension determines the clarity of for-me-ness. When extremely weak, as in early development, the Root already exists but for-me-ness has not yet come into focus; as the Root Signature matures, for-me-ness becomes clear and stable. The Root Signature has a measurable flight envelope: within its elastic range, profound suppression during anesthesia or deep sleep is recoverable; beyond it, the Root Signature may collapse irreversibly, the Root may be permanently lost, and the Worldline Realization may nevertheless continue. The existing empirical literature does not by itself identify the Root Signature, but several independent findings are compatible with its predicted intra-individual stability, inter-individual distinguishability, developmental maturation, and state-dependent suppression and recovery. Mapping the Root Signature and determining the boundaries of its flight envelope therefore remain central empirical tasks. The paper concludes that consciousness science requires an Individuation Turn—a shift from asking only “Is it conscious?” to asking “Which subject of consciousness is it?”