The dispensable lexicon that we are:

To arrive at any scientific destination our departure begins with a subjective struggle with human biases – rivalry within an imagined social hierarchy not being the least of them. In this struggle, if we forbid the word “ego,” any effective human strategy will require that we substitute another word of equal subjective utility, which of course will be equally irrelevant after arrival at our destination -- a formal presentation of our ‘science’ – all of which however was wholly dependent upon getting around our human biases.
 
I am a “mechanist” and so I hold that within a formal scientific presentation there is no substantial basis to mentalisms such as “Ego” or “Self” or even an “established Neuroscience.”  The entire journey however from human bias to scientific discovery is still only the distance from one end of subjectivity to another, separated only by “mentalisms” that do not have “substantial basis.” These mental concepts however help each of us navigate our unavoidable subjectivity.

We can infer a mechanical projector with a corresponding projection that we experience as a self, an ego, a subjective struggle, or a developing science.  We can then infer that this Ego must not really exist, but we do not and cannot thereby sponge away our subjective experience … since that experience is the projection: all of consciousness is a projection.

‘Words, words, words.’ Ego belongs to the subjective word-set; science to the objective word-set. But “elimination” of the former, as a useful and ever-relevant concept, by the sudden imposition of the latter is a misunderstanding at best. We never get to the other side of cognition. We can switch words here if we like, but if we believe that in doing so we sponge away the unavoidable subjective experience of “Ego” or “Self” then we cover a vast, unexplored body of knowledge with a merely true statement in one context, with a strawman fallacy in another context.  

For example, the key difference between Newton’s and Einstein’s views of the universe is that Einstein put the fact of separate subjective experiences back into the equation, giving birth to the theory of  “relativity.” Two individuals can experience time and space differently. Of course, the idea of “relativity” has no substantial basis in formal neuroscience and of course that is not a refutation of relativity. Likewise, of course “ego” has no substantial basis in formal neuroscience and of course that is not a refutation of observations of human self-interested behavior, here referred to conveniently as “Ego.”

Most important of all, as a human strategy, it is of tremendous disadvantage to forbid the inclusion of a concept of self, even when when forming the most rigid, formal scientific conclusions: our human biases will have their way with us.

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