For-me-ness: a critical assessment of the phenomenal mineness thesis

Abstract

This paper examines the claim that the phenomenal "for-me-ness" is the core feature of every conscious experience. Any conscious episode is intrinsically given as mine, and this mineness, while non-reflective and non-cognitive, belongs to the personal and phenomenal level. The compatibility checks for the for-me-ness thesis comes from cases such as depersonalization, schizophrenia, infancy and autism. I argue that this view lacks evidential support beyond the phenomenological descriptions it was built to interpret and that these phenomena receive better explanations that do not require positing for-me-ness.