Autism as Developmental Constraint Reconfiguration

Autism is conventionally framed as a neurodevelopmental spectrum defined by differences in social communication, restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour, and atypical sensory processing. While this clinical description is indispensable, it does not by itself specify the systems-level architecture that makes such a phenotype possible. This monograph formalizes autism within Informational Nosology as a developmental regime of constraint reconfiguration rather than as a late degenerative collapse or a paroxysmal failure. The core claim is that early neurodevelopment in autism is characterized by an atypical setting of precision weighting and sensory-boundary control. Instead of progressive uncoupling (as in Alzheimer’s), subcortical gain failure (as in Parkinson’s), or conduction-noise accumulation (as in multiple sclerosis), the autistic regime is organized around an early, stable, and often highly ordered reallocation of informational constraint: locally elevated precision, altered sensory gating, and a distinctive trade-off between environmental volatility and internal model stability. Hypersensitivities, insistence on sameness, and atypical social attunement are read as consequences of this architecture, not as primary social deficits detached from sensory-computational organization. The account is explicitly non-eliminative. It does not displace genetic, synaptic, or circuit-level findings; it relocates them within a common dynamical language already used across the Nosology corpus — energetic headroom, noise, threshold stability, and the maintenance of operational constraint. Autism is thereby placed as a developmental portal rather than a broken version of typical development: a different early solution to the problem of remaining coherent under sensory and social load. The monograph specifies demarcation criteria from schizophrenia, trauma-related lock-in, and the gradual neurodegenerative portals, and it states the empirical signatures that would support or weaken the proposed architecture. Autism is formalized as developmental constraint reconfiguration, not as degeneration, psychosis, or simple social deficit. Core mechanism: atypical early precision weighting and sensory-boundary control, producing a stable alternative architecture rather than progressive collapse. Phenotype reinterpreted: hypersensitivities, sameness, and social-attunement differences follow from informational organization, not from a primary absence of social motivation alone. Strict demarcation from schizophrenia, PTSD-related lock-in, and the gradual portals (AD, PD, MS). Non-displacement stance: genetics, synapses and circuits remain intact; the contribution is a systems-level architecture within one formal Nosology language. Keywords: autism; neurodevelopment; precision weighting; sensory gating; constraint reconfiguration; informational nosology; predictive processing; developmental phenotype; systems neuroscience