Other thoughts about self

Take the vital principle of life.
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When we take the self apart to find its essence.
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We discover that it is not there.
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This has certainly been the case in neuroscience.
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Which has found that properties such as consciousness and memory are not localized anywhere in the brain.
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Buddhism arrived at an identical finding millennia before.
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That the self has no objective, discrete reality.
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The self emerges from relationships spanning the entire cosmos.
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There are no separate individuals.
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All are interconnected.
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Interdependent.
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Inter defined.
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The vision of life.
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The organism, and therefore the self as an arbitrarily-bounded open subsystem itself composed of numerous interdependent sub-subsystems, and is therefore without a discrete objective reality.
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This conflicts with many of the founding assumptions of modern philosophy, medicine, economics, religion, law, and psychology.
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The new conception of self will give birth to momentous changes in all these areas.
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The Cartesian self is fundamental to the dualism that informs so much of modern thought 
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I think, therefore I am.
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Descartes believed in an irreducible kernel of selfhood or am-ness that is the true "I", discrete and separate.
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That conception of self is wholly consistent with the intuitions of the Age of Separation.
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Now we are discovering that at the very basis of life, no such self exists.
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And we shall observe that fact again and again.
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Level after level.
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Through the cell.
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The organism.
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The ecosystem.
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To the whole planet.
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The progressive alienation of ourselves from the community of life.
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Our progressive distancing from nature.
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Is based ultimately on an illusion.
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The Scientific Revolution gave voice to this illusion.
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And yet today many areas of science are undermining its very foundations.
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Foundations they helped to create.
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As with everything in nature there is a beginning, middle and end.
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Now we are in the end phases of reductionism