[SerLava]

>For example, I started to see that the notion of "selfhood" was just a social invention or cognitive construct, because I reasoned that we're just perpetually changing aspects of nature, and our separateness is just opinion. So then I wondered how the hell anyone could be deserving of blame or credit if they don't actually exist, or if it was their "former self" who committed the crime, etc.

I have a great rebuttal to that kind of nihilism-- not that you need it anymore. People get weird ideas because they subject about half of the universe to nihilism while forgetting the other half.

If everything is just meaningless matter and meat, then so are ideas like credit and blame. "Blame" is just an abstraction for a class of neural signal configurations. Someone might say that there's nothing "wrong" or "right" when it's all just bullshit atoms, but then there's also nothing "wrong" with thinking right and wrong are real.

These ideas don't need to be somehow universal truths... they just need to help physical systems of matter do the shit that physical systems of matter "want" to do.

[alexvr]

I think it's obvious that there's also nothing wrong with thinking that nonexistent things are fundamental aspects of reality. You (not you specifically) can have mental models that are not in line with reality to your heart's content. It's not a problem. Trees and rocks don't know what's going on either.