Ipseity as Frame: First-Person Invariance and the Epistemic Gauge of Self-Location

This paper defends a frame account of ipseity. By ipseity I mean the first-personal for-whom structure of coherent appearing: not a hidden observer behind consciousness and not a finite content inside consciousness, but the non-objectual disclosure-frame in which finite contents can appear as present, situated, comparable, and reportable. The argument begins from a distinction between givenness and interpretation. At the level of givenness, experience is disclosed as here, now, and for-whom. At the level of interpretation, that appearing may be fixed to a body, name, biography, social identity, or person-token. The central claim is that such empirical self-fixing is not primitive. It depends on operations of localization and identification that apply only to finite appearances within a field. Temporal localization requires temporal differentiation: retention, protention, recurrence, sequence, contrast, or mnemonic marking by which appearances can be conceived as prior, later, enduring, repeated, or no longer present. Spatial localization requires finite contrast within or across here-now configurations. Identification requires comparison between finite appearances or between finite traces, records, memories, or representations. These operations make contents localizable and identifiable; they do not make the field of appearing itself into one more bounded content. Since ipseity is the for-whom structure of the here-now field, not an appearance inside it, ipseity cannot be localized or identified by the same operations that it frames. This yields the principle of non-excessive self-presence: no first-person determination attributable to ipseity exceeds what is disclosed within the here-now field in which ipseity is operative. The principle blocks the reification of ipseity into a hidden witness that would possess absolute self-coordinates unavailable to experience. The paper further develops a verification asymmetry: the other's verification of my "I am'' is content-supervenient, while minimal self-verification is structure-supervenient. Others verify the empirical person through body, speech, behavior, records, traces, and social recognition; self-givenness verifies ipseity through the immediate structure of coherent appearing itself. This also clarifies death and absence: the third-person frame can register the death or absence of the empirical person, but the first-person frame cannot encounter its own non-being as an experience. The resulting gauge claim remains epistemic rather than ontological. Absolute embedding may exist and may be recovered by third-person methods, but it is not given from within ipseity as an absolute self-coordinate. We formalize this by introducing world-parameters, frame-parameters, passive co-transformations, and first-person report maps. Under phenomenological extensionality and a no-beacon condition, report maps are invariant under phenomenally silent passive co-transformations. With parametric sufficiency, reportables factor through the reachable orbit space (S × F)/G. The paper concludes that empirical "I''-talk functions as coordinate-fixing over a more primitive first-personal invariance, while ordinary de~se indexicality remains intact.