Zero Person

What does it mean to experience oneself as a self? And what if the familiar sense of being a unified person is not a single thing, but the result of multiple processes that can vary independently?

Zero Person: A Computational Theory of Autistic Selfhood develops a new framework for investigating these questions at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, autism research, predictive processing and active inference.

Drawing on Thomas Metzinger's theory of the phenomenal self-model and Karl Friston's active-inference framework, the book treats selfhood as a multidimensional architecture rather than a unitary psychological capacity. It distinguishes embodied, phenomenal, agentive, epistemic, social and autobiographical forms of self-modelling and examines how they may differ in phenomenal transparency, precision, hierarchical organisation and temporal depth.

At the centre of the book is the Zero-Person hypothesis: the possibility that conscious experience and effective agency can remain intact while some higher-order, socially mediated and autobiographical self-models exert comparatively less automatic influence over perception, cognition and action.

Autism provides the principal empirical test case. Rather than proposing that autistic people possess a weaker or diminished self, the book asks whether some autistic individuals may instantiate different configurations of self-modelling - and whether these differences can be described and eventually tested computationally.

The result is not presented as an established theory of autism, but as a research programme: a set of hypotheses, distinctions and falsifiable predictions intended to make an unusual form of subjective experience accessible to scientific investigation.