The Absence of Self in the Age of Ozempic

At a time when a single injection can reshape not only our bodies but also our desires, it seems worth asking: what, exactly, is us?

For most of history, it was assumed that a person was a unified, coherent thing — a soul, a mind, a will. Today, we are less certain. We watch drugs alter our moods, our habits, even our self-control, sometimes in a matter of hours. We watch carefully engineered molecules like Ozempic suppress cravings that once felt inseparable from who we were.

The unsettling possibility is that the "self" — the part of you that feels permanent and central — might not be fundamental at all. It could be just another biological process, another arrangement of molecules.

We are left with strange questions: if the self is not real, if it can be altered by chemistry, what remains? And how should we live knowing this?

The Self Is Just Chemistry: Metzinger’s Revolution

Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One offers one of the most radical theses in modern philosophy: There is no self. There is only a "self-model" — a dynamic, biological process the brain generates, like a simulation that it mistakes for reality.

In Metzinger's view, consciousness does not "contain" a self. Rather, consciousness itself creates the appearance of a self, the way a mirror shows a face without possessing one. This model updates in real time: responding to changes in internal chemistry, external conditions, and accumulated memories. But it remains a model — not a thing.

This view has found echoes in neuroscience as well. In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions — like the self — are not fundamental, but constructed predictions based on internal and external signals. The feeling of having a self may simply be the brain’s most elaborate prediction yet.

If this sounds abstract, consider how easily chemistry can change who we believe we are. A few hours after taking MDMA, a person who was anxious and withdrawn might feel euphoric, social, fearless. A course of antidepressants can, for many, mean the difference between persistent despair and manageable optimism. An injection of Ozempic can dull the cravings that once dominated someone’s every meal, leading to behavior that they might later describe as "more like myself" — or just as easily, "not myself at all."

When brain chemistry shifts, the “self” shifts. Sometimes, it shifts so rapidly that it’s hard not to notice the machinery behind the curtain. The feeling of being a consistent person, with consistent wants and thoughts, turns out to be more fragile than we like to admit.

In Metzinger's world, personality is not a stable core. It's an emergent phenomenon: a shimmering surface atop a chaotic churn of molecules and fields.

Free Will, God's Plan, or Just Chemical Sloshing?

If the self is just a model created by the brain, then the idea of free will becomes difficult to defend. Free will traditionally assumes a stable subject making deliberate choices. But if the "subject" is just an emergent process, what is really choosing?

Philosophers have wrestled with this problem for centuries. Some, like Max Stirner, argued that what we call the ego is simply a creation — a tool for survival, not an eternal truth. Others, like Jean-Paul Sartre, insisted that even in a meaningless world, we are "condemned to be free", responsible for shaping ourselves through choices, even if those choices are made in absurdity. Simone de Beauvoir echoed this in her work, suggesting that freedom only exists when it is exercised in relation to others.

Still others, like Albert Camus, proposed that the universe's indifference does not free us but burdens us. To act meaningfully without assurance of meaning is the deepest form of rebellion.

Against these existentialist ideas stands a different intuition: that life follows a plan. Many religious traditions, especially Christianity, offer the comfort of design — that every thought and action occurs according to God's will.

In a way, this vision is not so different from the grand arcs of science fiction. Watching the Star Wars saga unfold, it often feels as if every event — every betrayal, every battle, every victory — was simply another step in the long, careful strategy of Palpatine. A galactic-scale "God's plan," complete with its own deus ex machina moments.

But Metzinger’s perspective leaves little room for either existentialist creation or divine orchestration. If what we call "I" is just the byproduct of chemical processes and self-modeling in a biological system, then freedom itself may be no more real than the self that supposedly wields it.

Choices could simply be the natural unfolding of complex causes: shifts in neurotransmitters, sensory inputs, memories, and learned behaviors. The experience of choosing would remain — as vivid and undeniable as the experience of tasting sugar — but it would not require a metaphysical chooser behind the curtain.

This view does not eliminate ethics, or responsibility, or meaning. It simply reframes them. The hand that signs the law, the voice that speaks the promise, the mind that dreams the future — all of them might just be emergent phenomena, intricate dances of atoms and fields, no less real for being provisional.

If free will exists, it may not be what we imagined. If it does not, we are still left to live as though it does.

Everything You See Is a Glitch

If the self is not what it seems, neither is the world it inhabits. At the most fundamental level, modern physics tells a story even stranger than Metzinger's. It is a story without solid objects, without stable substances — only fields and distortions.

Quantum field theory, the most successful framework we have for understanding reality, describes the universe not as a collection of particles, but as a restless ocean of fields, rippling and fluctuating even in the emptiest vacuum. What we call a "particle" — an electron, a quark, a photon — is just a localized excitation in one of these fields. It is not a thing moving through space. It is a ripple, a disturbance, a temporary crest in an invisible sea.

Matter, then, is an illusion — a convenient shorthand for patterns of disruption.
Energy? Matter? Doesn’t matter — all the same.
The chair you sit on, the hand you use to write, the brain in which your thoughts arise — all of them are assemblies of waves in overlapping fields. Solidness, hardness, texture, even color — these are emergent experiences, built from the way our limited senses interpret the ceaseless fluctuations beneath.

In a sense, quantum field theory does not just dissolve objects. It dissolves everything we might think of as substance. The world we navigate is a rough, usable approximation — a map drawn by a mind that evolved to throw spears, cook food, and raise children, not to perceive vibrating mathematical structures beyond human scale.

If the self is a model, so too is reality. Our perceptions are not windows onto the real world; they are adaptations — evolved hallucinations that allow a biological system to survive inside a vibrating, indifferent cosmos.

Rolling the Cosmic Dice (Or Not)

Quantum mechanics adds a twist to the story. At first glance, it seems to say that the universe is not deterministic at all. Particles do not have exact positions until measured. Outcomes are not guaranteed but spread across probabilities. Reality, at its finest grain, appears to play dice. Quantum mechanics, as far as we can tell, is inherently probabilistic.

From the perspective of classical physics, this was a shocking departure. Isaac Newton’s world was a clockwork: perfectly predictable, perfectly ordered, if only you knew the starting conditions well enough. Quantum mechanics shattered that certainty. Not because we lacked information, but because randomness seemed built into the structure of reality itself.

Yet even here, the story is not simple. Some physicists have argued that quantum randomness might not be the final word. It could be that what looks random in three dimensions of space and one of time is actually deterministic when seen from a higher-dimensional perspective. Theories like string theory, brane cosmology, and other unification attempts suggest that our universe may be just a slice of a richer, higher-dimensional reality. In that fuller landscape, what looks like uncertainty might be the shadow of a perfectly determined system, hidden by our limited vantage point.

We cannot yet know. The tools we have — particle accelerators, quantum computers, astronomical surveys — reach astonishingly far, but they do not yet pierce the deepest foundations. For now, we live inside a probabilistic haze, glimpsing patterns but not guarantees.

It is tempting to think that if reality is deterministic at a deeper level, then everything — from the movements of galaxies to the firing of neurons in a brain — follows an inescapable script. It is equally tempting to believe that if randomness is fundamental, then at least some things happen without cause, without necessity.

Both possibilities are unsettling. One leaves no room for real choice. The other leaves no room for meaning.

And yet, regardless of what the final answer may be, we continue. We make decisions. We build futures. We act as if the world were partly ours to shape — even if it is only the self-model acting inside the field distortions of an indifferent cosmos.

Chemical Puppets aka Build-a-Self Workshop

If the self is just a process balanced on chemistry, it is no surprise that altering that chemistry can alter the self.

Modern medicine has made this literal. Antidepressants like SSRIs do not change who you are, at least not in a narrative sense. But they reshape the field conditions under which the self-model operates. A brain flooded with more serotonin will build a different emotional landscape than a brain trapped in scarcity. What felt unbearable last month might seem manageable today, not because the facts have changed, but because the underlying chemical ratios have shifted.

Drugs like Ozempic extend this reach beyond mood into deeper layers of motivation. Hunger, once thought of as a simple biological drive, turns out to be a complex pattern of chemical signals and feedback loops. Manipulate them, and you manipulate not just appetite, but desire itself — the feeling of wanting.

The effect can be rapid. People describe it in simple terms: "I just don't think about food anymore." But beneath the surface, what has changed is nothing less than the chemistry of will.

If the boundary between self and body was already thin, drugs like MDMA erase it completely. A dose of MDMA can transform a withdrawn, anxious person into someone overflowing with love, trust, and connection — for a few hours. The comedown is often brutal, a crash into depleted serotonin and dopamine reserves, leaving behind a hollow echo of the earlier self.

Happiness, despair, craving, motivation — all of it floats on chemistry. Change the chemicals, change the self.

This is not new. During World War II, German soldiers were issued Pervitin — an early form of methamphetamine — to stay awake and fight for days at a time without rest. It worked. Troops marched and fought with machine-like stamina, pushing beyond ordinary human limits. But the price was high: addiction, psychosis, collapse. The same chemistry that allowed superhuman performance burned the machinery down.

Whether through sanctioned pharmaceuticals or illicit experiments, we have been hacking the self for decades. The tools get sharper, the changes faster, but the principle remains: we are chemical puppets, and the strings are easier to pull than we once believed.

(And sure, technically, you can also hack yourself with things like sleep, exercise, meditation, and eating vegetables. But come on — who reads the fine print?)

What Now?

Not much. You are still bound to live with the perception of self, like Metzinger said.

Even if you know that the self is an illusion, even if you understand that matter is just a ripple in an invisible field, you still have to get up in the morning. You still have to follow laws, talk to people, sign papers, promise things, make plans. The illusion is too persistent to step outside of. And in any case, evolution did not design you to be a dispassionate observer of fields. It designed you to survive, to act, to care.

Knowing that you are made of chemicals does not dissolve your responsibilities. It does not give you permission to abandon others or yourself. It simply gives you a new way to understand struggle: less as failure, and more as imbalance.

When someone falls into addiction, depression, obesity, rage — it is tempting to think they have "failed" morally. That they have made bad choices, lacked discipline, shown weakness. But if the self is a fluid construction balanced atop chemical tides, then much of what we call weakness is really a system pushed out of balance.

You are not bad because you are tired, or heavy, or sad. You are not broken because you sometimes cannot will yourself into better action. You are a dynamic process, and sometimes the process goes off course.

Knowing this does not absolve you. But it can free you from pointless self-hatred. If the chemicals are off, you can adjust them. Seek help, seek tools, seek interventions — not because you are a sinner or a failure, but because you are an unstable pattern that can be gently re-tuned.

The self is an illusion. But so is hopelessness.

The difference is that one illusion lets you walk forward. The other traps you where you stand.

Meat Wagons and Mercy

Next time light bounces off a meat wagon — the complicated moving system of bones, muscles, blood, and chemicals we call a person — and the signal travels through your perceptors, reaching the processing unit in your brain where judgments begin to form...

Pause.

Remember that what you are looking at is not really a "person" in the sense of a fixed, stable entity. It is a fragile, flickering self-model. It is a distortion in fields, balanced precariously atop shifting chemical tides. It is a process doing its best to maintain equilibrium, even if that best looks ugly, slow, or confused.

The self, as Metzinger told us, is an illusion.
But they don't know that.

And honestly, it wouldn't help if they did.

As Mr. Peanutbutter once put it:

"The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn't a search for meaning. It's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you'll be dead."

So if you're going to add anything to another flickering system's brief passage through the void, you might as well add a little unimportant kindness. A meaningless smile, a gesture nobody remembers, a moment that doesn't fix anything — but still tilts the field, even for a second, toward something gentler.

Nothing matters. And because nothing matters, kindness is as good a nonsense as any.