Phenomenal Ownership and Self-Referential Integration: A Review and Testable Framework for Access-Ownership Dissociations

This review proposes the Internalization framework, a testable account of phenomenal ownership and self-referential integration. The central claim is that access, reportability, integration, prediction, and task competence are not sufficient by themselves to explain why an experience is lived as mine. The framework distinguishes four stages: salience detection, affective valuation, contextual-personal assessment, and Stage 4 self-referential integration in an mPFC-PCC-centered ownership architecture. The review integrates evidence from consciousness science, clinical dissociation, depersonalization-derealization, body ownership, agency, disorders of consciousness, development, comparative cognition, artificial consciousness, and major philosophical problems such as qualia, first-person perspective, Mary, zombies, inverted spectrum, and access versus phenomenality. Rather than claiming final empirical proof, it presents a falsifiable framework built around access-ownership dissociations and adversarial tests. The manuscript is accompanied by supplementary information and figures that provide the extended clinical map, mathematical scaffold, hypothesis set, and figure-specific references.