Functional fragmentation of the minimal self: an in-depth explanation of self-individuation

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.

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Abstract

The minimal self hypothesis holds that the inherent sense of “for-me-ness” or “mineness” in every plain conscious experience provides a basic solution to the problem of self-individuation: namely, how to establish intrasubjective unity and intersubjective boundary. I advance two objections to this account. First, the minimal self hypothesis fails to present the most parsimonious conception of the experience-experiencer relation. Instead, it smuggles the private/public contrast into the characterization of a plain experience through the linguistic terms “self” and “me.” Second, this hypothesis is theoretically infertile. It accounts for neither the origin of the first/third-person distinction nor the heterogeneity of disownership phenomena. As an alternative, I propose a functional fragmentation of the minimal self into more fundamental concepts of “subject,” which I call “proto-subjects” or “subjective guises.” These functional fragments of the minimal self are conceptually exhausted by their specific theoretical roles. Their convergence and divergence under certain principles can explain the diversity of disownership disorders and provide a substantive analysis of the first- and third-person perspectives. For phenomenologists open to drawing inferences from observable facts, the explanatory benefits of this fragmentation proposal balance its associated costs.