Functional fragmentation of the minimal self: an in-depth explanation of self-individuation
Synthese May 4, 2026 Zixuan Liu
The minimal self hypothesis—that every conscious experience carries an inherent sense of "for-me-ness" or "mineness"—is meant to solve how we individuate selves. This paper argues that the hypothesis fails on two counts: it is not the most parsimonious account of the experience-experiencer relation, because it smuggles a private/public contrast into plain experience via the terms "self" and "me"; and it is theoretically infertile, explaining neither the origin of the first/third-person distinction nor the variety of disownership phenomena. As an alternative, the author proposes fragmenting the minimal self into more fundamental concepts called "proto-subjects" or "subjective guises," whose convergence and divergence can explain disownership disorders and the first- and third-person perspectives. The explanatory benefits of this fragmentation are argued to balance its costs.