Justin Kwong

“The biological imperative to live—indeed, live forever—was burned into our brains, into our emotional self-model,
over the course of millennia. But our brand-new cognitive self-models
tell us that all attempts to realize this imperative will ultimately be futile.
Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential conflict, and we seem to be the first creatures on this planet to
experience it consciously.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“I sat pondering the idea of the absence of meaning. Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?”
― Ernesto Sábato, El túnel

“The Ego, as noted, is simply the content of your PSM [Phenomenal Self Model] at this moment (your bodily sensations, your emotional state, your perceptions, memories, acts of will, thoughts). But it can become the Ego only because you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a simulation in your brain. It is not reality itself but an image of reality - and a very special one indeed. The Ego is a transparent mental image: You - the physical person as a whole - look right through it. You do not see it. You see with it. The Ego is a tool for controlling and planning your behavior and for understanding the behavior of others”
― Thomas Metzinger

“... if suffering warrants special moral concern, the truth is that we should never forget about its existence. For even if we had abolished suffering throughout the living world, there would still be a risk that it might reemerge, and this risk would always be worth reducing.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications