How Can Self-Consciousness Emerge in Embodied AGI? From Bodily Boundaries and Self-Regarding Drives to the "Pure Thinking Self"

The most vexing gap in current research on AI consciousness is not merely that the question of whether machines possess subjective experience remains unsettled; more fundamentally, the "self" is often treated as an already-existing premise. Theories can explain how information is broadcast, integrated, or represented at a higher order, yet they rarely ask how a system gets from "having a body" to "this is my body," and then to "I know that I am thinking." This article places that generative problem within the framework of embodied AGI. Adopting a constructive method of "structural constraints—functional decomposition—engineering mapping—counterfactual testing," it proposes a three-stage generative architecture of functional self-consciousness: a somatic self-preservation layer that forms a stable self–world boundary and a sense of body ownership; a value-driven layer that sedimentates interoceptive evaluation into "self-regarding drives" oriented toward the system's own continued existence; and a rational reflection layer that enables thinking to take its own process again as an object. The article further reformulates the "Personality Compass" as a computable multi-drive structure and proposes a dual-mode mechanism of "low-load continuous monitoring and event-triggered focusing," explaining how the "pure thinking self" is possible at the functional level. On this basis, five diagnostic criteria are advanced—sense of body ownership, endogenous preference, causal constraints on self-reference, autobiographical continuity, and metacognitive calibration—and a "speaker mechanism" is used to discuss the structural tension among self-interested drives, public norms, and corrigibility. The article does not claim to solve the "hard problem" of phenomenal consciousness, but seeks to advance AI self-consciousness from an abstract ontological judgment to a designable, intervenable, and falsifiable research program.