"The ego will always be able to find ways to keep the aspirant busy in self-improvement, thus binding him or her to the fact that the self is still there behind all the improvements. For why should the ego kill itself?"

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Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky