Perspective and Anchor: The First-Personal Frame of Experience

Recent accounts of experience have refined descriptions of experiential content and of the sense in which experience is lived as real. This article addresses a different explanatory problem: the first-personal frame in which experience is given from somewhere, to someone, and within a lived present. Content concerns what appears in experience. Reality-feel concerns the lived status of what appears as real, present, and world-involving. Perspective concerns the organization that situates experience within a first-personal field. Drawing on phenomenology, bodily self-consciousness research, work on large-scale intrinsic organization and temporal continuity, and clinical dissociations, the article develops an account of the first-person frame in terms of bodily anchoring and a temporally stable functional anchor. The first-person frame thus emerges as a distinct explanatory dimension of experience.