The Improbability of Being Someone - And Why the Illusion Persists

This paper argues against person-identification---the assumption that consciousness is fundamentally identical with a particular human organism. Person-identification generates the lottery question (``why this observer among all possible observers?'') but cannot resolve the reference class needed to answer it; the question remains permanently malformed. An experiential-priority framing, by contrast, resolves the reference class (the class of coherent experiences is the unique non-arbitrary specification for any verbalized inquiry), enables the question to be coherently stated, and immediately dissolves it (every coherent experience is, trivially, a coherent experience). The resolution is the instrument of the dissolution. This yields the paper's core contribution: an explanation of why person-identification persists culturally despite being philosophically untenable. The same constraint that dissolves the puzzle---the structure of verbalized inquiry---also prevents the dissolution from spreading. Ideas propagate through narrative, and narrative requires precisely the dualistic structures (subject/object, self/world) that person-identification provides. The insight thus points to its own limited transmissibility.