Individuation in a Consciousness-First Ontology

A satisfactory consciousness first ontology must explain how multiple individuated perspectives arise within a reality whose fundamental character is experiential manifestation. Contemporary approaches including panpsychism and cosmopsychism recognise this difficulty, though a detailed structural account of subject formation often remains underdeveloped (Strawson, 2006; Chalmers, 2015; Goff, 2017; Nagasawa Tononi, 2008; Dehaene, 2014), the paper formulates an Integration Dominance Criterion according to which a region of experiential organisation constitutes an individuated subject when internal integration exceeds its coupling to surrounding experiential dynamics. Individuated subjects are interpreted as stability regimes within the unified experiential field. Their unity reflects dense internal integration within a stability regime, while their boundaries arise from structural segregation within the surrounding field. Persistence reflects the diachronic stability of constraint organisation across successive experiential states. The resulting framework provides a structural explanation of subject formation and shows how multiple perspectives can arise within a unified experiential ontology.