Jim, well, as a biologist I can tell you that forests are not arbitrary figments of the human imagination. They are the (dynamic) result of countless interactions among trees and other organisms.

Your position seems to say that unless there are sharp boundaries then anything goes. That is a false dichotomy, long recognized for instance by Wittgenstein. Boundaries do exist, but they are fuzzy and dynamic.

You speak of throwing the baby out with the bath water. That’s exactly what you are doing when you reject that selves exist in a way that helps us make of a lot of human experience. If there truly were no self, who wrote these words, or “yours”?