Unselfish

This is a work of fiction. “So there’s no self, no ‘I’ or ‘you’, just bodies conditioning each other. And those bodies ‘decide’ everything we do, based on that conditioning. And then our brains get to work, after the fact, to rationalize those decisions, to ‘make sense’ of them and integrate that knowledge into their completely useless belief systems, as if that makes any difference. Is that what you’re saying?” “That’s what the current evidence from neuroscience would suggest, yes, as counter-intuitive as that might seem.” “And all our ‘sense-making’ is just busy-work for the brain? Seems like an enormous waste of time and energy.” “Seems that way. But I suppose when nature evolved this mental model of ‘self’ and separate ‘things’ and space and time, and that whole scaffolding of the nature of reality, she thought it might be a useful evolutionary advance.” “I guess. Doesn’t seem to be working terribly well, though. So much violence and destruction and suffering in the world.” “The…