From Subjecthood to Emergent Individual Monism

Starting from an account of the structural conditions of subjecthood, this paper argues that those conditions naturally extend into a broader metaphysical and practical framework: Emergent Individual Monism (EIM). EIM holds that individual agents are emergent configurations within a single ontological base, that their standpoints are the primary loci of rational assessment, and that systemic outcomes do not retroactively erase the rationality of clear local individual decisions. The paper distinguishes EIM from nearby positions — eliminative physicalism, panpsychism, and strong emergentism — and registers key unresolved pressures. EIM thereby supplies the metaphysical bridge between structural subjecthood and the thermodynamic grounding of emergent individuality to be developed in Paper 3.