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 invariably bound to a unique, enduring first-person perspective? This paper refers to this as the problem of ownership, or the problem of individuation. The breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have rendered this question urgently pressing: AI can now produce highly coherent simulations of conscious content, effectively decoupling content from biological perspective, and forcing us to ask: what is the ontological principle that makes content experienced as mine? To address this problem, this paper introduces the Differential Stripping Method (DSM) as its core analytical tool. The DSM rests on a fundamental decomposition: any experience is split into shareable qualitative content and non-shareable perspectival ownership. Take pain: my pain = pain (qualitative content: shareable, strippable) + mine (perspectival ownership: non-shareable, non-strippable). Strip away all shareable terms — indefinitely, exhaustively — and qualitative content converges toward identity. But mine never goes. At every level of stripping, it remains. The marker that persists at the limit of this operation is the Root. The DSM possesses a bidirectional revelatory capacity: tracing backward, it systematically strips all shareable items until it reaches bedrock — the causal origin of an individual life; read forward, the same trajectory manifests positively as Worldline Realization — an unrepeatable life history that unfolds continuously in spacetime from its causal origin. This duality elevates the DSM from a thought experiment to a methodological instrument in its own right. When the DSM's backward trace reaches bedrock, the perspectival remainder is still there. This fact logically compels the concept of the Inaugural Event: at the causal origin, something must have launched this history — must have anchored this Root to this particular Worldline Realization. A reductio ad absurdum argument further demonstrates that any position claiming the Root arises after the causal origin leads to an unacceptable paradox: perspectival ownership becomes indeterminate, and indeterminate ownership is precisely what the phenomenological structure of experience forbids. Armed with this framework, this paper systematically revisits the contributions and blind spots of Locke, Parfit, Dennett, Zahavi, and Integrated Information Theory, arguing that every philosopher who has attempted to explain the self has been working without this blade — the DSM. Their theories operate either at the level of conscious content or at the level of the conditions of consciousness, without reaching the ontological foundation of ownership. Finally, this paper introduces the concept of the Root Signature — a stable, individual-specific neurodynamic pattern serving as the dynamical proxy for the continuity 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 (mineness). When extremely weak — as in early development — the Root already exists but for-me-ness has yet to come into focus; as the Root Signature matures, for-me-ness crystallizes into clarity. The Root Signature has a measurable flight envelope: within its elastic range, even profound suppression — anesthesia, deep sleep — is survivable, and for-me-ness is rebuilt upon recovery; beyond it, the Root Signature collapses entirely, the Root is permanently lost — and the Worldline Realization may continue to unfold without it. The measurability of the Root Signature has been systematically established in a companion study (Pang, 2026c). Mapping the Root Signature and the precise boundaries of its flight envelope is among the most urgent scientific tasks facing consciousness science today. This paper concludes that the science of consciousness urgently requires an Individuation Turn — a shift from asking "Is it conscious?" to asking "Which subject of consciousness is it?" This is a revised and substantially expanded version. The paper has been fully translated into English and undergone comprehensive revision, including: (1) complete philosophical argumentation with formal reductio proof; (2) expanded treatment of boundary cases and three systematic objections; (3) Section 5 establishing empirical testability of the Root Signature framework with falsifiable hypotheses; (4) critical dialogue section added. The core theoretical framework and conclusions remain unchanged.