There are clever theories which go a way towards explaining the self: enactive practical and social predictive modeling turned around, due to cultural injury, on to the subject and lo, the cogito which objectifies and absorbs a deeper formation once known as soul, etc. Imagine that this was worked out to the end so that studying it were like meeting your maker - seeing how it was all put together: all the mystifications would blink out, even qualia no longer believable other than as a components of a self-referential twist. What would be left over? Not any thing and not nothing either (the nothing is just a conceptual couterpart of something), what you are naked and finally freed. If you can't see how this is the only liberation there could be then go back and start all over again.