Present Self and the World-Individuating Record — A Record-Based Account of Present Subjectivity and World-Individuation

This paper develops a record-based account of present subjectivity within the broader framework of Record-Based Ontology (RBO) and Bit-Collapse Theory (BCT). A companion paper, The Waking Self Problem, argues that personal continuation across interruption does not require a primitive persisting ego, but can be explained through record-continuity. The present paper asks a different question: if the self is only a present conscious configuration, how can records acquire world-individuating force? The central claim is that the denial of a substantial self does not weaken the ontological role of records; it makes that role intelligible. The self does not persist as a metaphysical substance. Rather, a present subject arises within a physically inherited record-structure that constrains which histories, objects, possibilities, and outcomes are definite for that subject. Records are therefore not merely psychological traces or epistemic evidence. They are individuative constraints on the agent's world. Within BCT, the experienced world of an observer is not a single underlying global state, but an equivalence class of global states compatible with the observer's accessible and stable records. A stable record-update narrows or restructures that class. This paper argues that the present self is the locus through which such record-defined world-individuation becomes phenomenologically manifest. The result is a non-Cartesian, non-idealist account of subjectivity: the ego-substance is illusory, but the present subject is real as a record-constrained locus of definiteness.