> This article is about that "mental construct" guiding your desire,

That mental construct is often know as conscious activity. Once you treat it like, that it makes sense.

The issue with your article is you are confusing conscious activity with self. They are different things and if you confuse them, then things don't make sense and hence you'll think the self is an illusion.

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>How about just that "mental image" you think is the "owner" of you?

I am a body, which includes a brain, that brain has conscious and unconscious activity. So mental image is just a process in the brain, that models the body.

I'm not sure what you mean of as owner. It's just the body, most the times it's unconscious activity which drives what I do and say, but with higher level more complex activity there is conscious brain activity involved.

>That internal monologue? Is that really you? Or a heap of past habits and social norms?

The internal monologue is just conscious brain activity. No that's not me, it's a tiny aspect of me.

>Should you give importance to this mental construct?

It's just called consciousness. Just a tiny but important aspect of me.

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>Even with your definition: "the union of elements (such as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person", I am arguing exactly these are changing all the time,

So what, pretty much everything in the world is constantly changing all the time.

>this "collection of evolving soup" doesn't form a "coherent thing" i.e., self.

Not even you actually believe this. Let's use a real life example. Lets say Alice rapes and murders one of your relatives. If you catch them and are about to call the police, and Alice says don't, I'm a different person, there is no self, so it's not my fault. Would you look at them and actually think that there is no "coherent thing" called Alice which you can hold responsible for raping and killing your relative? Would you actually let them go or would you think that actually, there is this "coherent thing" called Alice that is meaningfully the same and deserves justice/rehabilitation.

Since you edited, let me respond to your other point: cancer cells, invasive plants, and deadly plagues are exactly about a unitary "self" expanding and is behaving as if it is the most important thing (think about their genetic information). Ego is a metaphor. I think you are missing the whole point if you can't catch that.

That's why the article says "self" is unimportant (you can argue all day whether it exists, everyone has their definition). Emphasizing on the idea of "self" exactly limits your worldview.

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"The modern world romanticizes finding yourself, your style, your type, etc. This “quest” is even glorified to the point that you would feel compelled to lie about what is “you” all the time, just so you could gain a foothold in society, and not be considered a pushover since all your peers have “personalities” and “styles” early, apparently."

We're not talking about the Jungian Self are we? Or is it the idea of self that Nietzsche proposes to the dwarf?

The description in the article sounds meager and flat. The post title sports unpleasant taste in comparison.

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What do you mean by "fundamentally social"? We are social if we successfully survive by forming society through millions of years.
Do you want to say we aren't fundamentally cooperative/altruistic/empathetic towards others? (somewhere along these lines)

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No, I am not conflating anything. I am just saying that such a ridoculous idea does not require evidence in order to be discarded.

Example: You can't prove I am not actually a raccoon pretending to be a woman online, but the idea is so silly it does not deserve serious consideration.

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This is why when indoctrinating kids there is usually long conversations about faith and what it means. As someone who was sent to church through childhood I was not alone in being confused by the concept. To use the word faith in relation to external stimuli voids that word it's current meaning. Faith is a concerted effort to believe; a kid doesn't need faith to know fun, nap time, the colour green, but a kid needs to be told to have faith in an omniscient being and to have faith in a man they have never met.

While I understand the point being made here regarding the word, using it interchangeably in this fashion is lighting a pedantic rage inside me. To me it would make more sense to say you believe your senses than to say you have faith in them.

(belief: an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.
"his belief in the value of hard work")

(faith: complete trust or confidence in someone or something.)

Do you really have faith in your sensory perception? Mine tricks me al the time. However I do believe my senses most of the time.

I've been really disconnected from my emotions due to CPTSD. I recently reconnected and man this is so true. There's a whole subtle world based on emotions out there that I've never been able to truly see and understand. I never even knew that because this missing piece was not an actual part of my reality since I was a kid. It's been an absolutely wild experience.

There is also no good argument for external world skepticism. It is nothing more than a hypothetical possibility, with zero empirical evidence to support it. Nor, is there any good reason to believe it to be the case.

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Then you might have misunderstood. One could develop confidence by doing meaningful things and focusing on the real-world effects of your actions, not by thinking about what successful people they are and should grow into.

Did I say there are a billion Hitlers? I exactly wrote most aren't even close, but adding the small egos of billions still wreak havoc. The biosphere collapse is the best evidence.

I don't know what you mean by "Hitler didn't go killing off tens of millions because he had some idea of who he was, he did that so he could control hundreds of millions of people." "Self" means that "master" inside his head controlling his world view, that's that.

I think it's Rand's, shall we say, "unique" take on ethics that can be seen as irresponsible or dangerous. Selfishness isn't necessarily a bad idea. Especially when it's possible to help others selfishly.

>Solidifying your “self” — what kind of person you are, your ideal preferences, your becoming, is always dangerous. That’s how Hitler went his own way and destroyed a whole “race”.

......What.

Billions of people build a foundation for who they are and become confident that their 'self' is who they are, and pretty much every one of those billions has not decided that they should exterminate an entire race of people.

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Hitler didn't go killing off tens of millions because he had some idea of who he was, he did that so he could control hundreds of millions of people.

>Wars and conflicts will never stop as long as ego prevails, it is the nature of cancer cells, invasive plants, and deadly plagues.

Except those three don't possess egos, let alone a concept of what a 'self' is, they just do as they're mindlessly designed to do. Kinda the opposite of establishing self-conception.

It doesn't help that Buddhism, which this article references multiple times, is just as guilty as other faiths and philosophies when it comes to violations against others in spite of its beliefs about the self. Belief in a 'one true god' or not clearly isn't affecting the violent nature that humans have a bothersome tendency to possess.

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Plenty of people who subscribe to the concept of having a self go on to lead completely non-violent lives, even after learning and understanding the concepts of the unimportance of a self and deciding that belief structure isn't for them. Similarly, people who belief that the self doesn't exist or is irrelevant may also go on to hurt other people regardless of what they believe to have learned and follow.

Let me elaborate. You can say that you - an individual physical organism exist by all means of course (even Buddhists acknowledge this and use person to refer to it, they also know the mind and body exist). This article is about that "mental construct" guiding your desire, what you think is normal, what kind of personality you are, who you should mingle with (I would say most people's idea of "self" stick closely to this). This article says this construct is not important.

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How about just that "mental image" you think is the "owner" of you? That internal monologue? Is that really you? Or a heap of past habits and social norms? Should you give importance to this mental construct?

Even with your definition: "the union of elements (such as body, emotions, thoughts, and sensations) that constitute the individuality and identity of a person", I am arguing exactly these are changing all the time, this "collection of evolving soup" doesn't form a "coherent thing" i.e., self.

Maybe I should rephrase it. Being social is just a means to be able to pass on more of your own genes.

So I wouldn't say we are fundamentally social.

Wrong. First, even Dawkins hated the word "selfish". He regretted and suggested to replace with "immortal" (since it is basically redundant and only misleads laymen, its use is equivalent to "persistence" in his book, it doesn't mean "selfishness" in common sense usage).

Second, almost every single thing you see in the biological world is gradually built from the result of cooperation being a stronger force than selfishness - single gene > genome > complex cells > Eukaryotes > multicellular individual > community and ecosystems etc. (Yes, things like cancer, predation, and parasitism exist but they are and must be kept to a low percentage biomass-wise, else ecosystem collapse would follow).