Subjectivity as origin-tracking: a structural account of individuation

Selfhood is often explained either by the felt quality of conscious experience or by the mental representations that allow thinking about oneself in the first person. Both approaches assume that selfhood is a kind of content—either experiential or conceptual—and so miss the underlying organization that makes such content possible. This paper argues that neither the sense of 'for-me-ness' in phenomenology nor the first-person mode of presentation in analytic philosophy can ground how a subject is individuated, because each already relies on an asymmetry built into the system.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Debates on selfhood typically locate its basis either in the minimal experiential structure of consciousness or in the representational mechanisms underlying de se thought. Both approaches treat selfhood as a matter of content—phenomenal or conceptual—and thus overlook the organizational conditions that make such content possible. I argue that neither the lived “for-me-ness” emphasized in phenomenology nor the first-person mode of presentation emphasized in analytic philosophy can ground individuation, since each presupposes an antecedent asymmetry already built into the system’s architecture. I develop an alternative account in terms of origin-tracking: a structural invariant through which a system differentiates self-generated from externally generated events and coordinates perception, action, and integration around a privileged standpoint. Origin-tracking is not representational but organizational; it individuates the subject by establishing the conditions under which perspectival experience and de se representation can arise. Minimal selfhood and first-person thought emerge as complementary expressions of the same architectural asymmetry rather than as its source. This structural account clarifies the unity of agency, pre-reflective selfhood, and first-person cognition without positing a substantial ego or higher-order representation, and it explains both the fragility of subjectivity in pathological cases and the continuity of the subject across time.