From Thomas Ligotti’s brief overview of Thomas Metzinger’s theory of consciousness in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror.

At the forefront of current studies in selfism and egology, the field of neuroscience has made unmistakable headway. In Being No One (2004), for example, the German neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger provides a theory of how the brain manufactures the subjective sense of our existence as discrete “selves,” even though, as Metzinger explains, we would be more rigorously categorized as information-processing systems for which it is expedient in an existential sense to create the illusion of “being someone.” In Metzinger’s schema, a human being is not a “person” but a mechanistically functioning “phenomenal self-model” that simulates a person. The reason we cannot detect these models is that we see through them, and so cannot see the processes of the models themselves. If we could, we would know there is nothing to us but these models. This might be called “Metzinger’s Paradox”: You cannot know what you really are because then you would know there is nothing to know and nothing to know it.