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Swimmer963 comments on Checklist of Rationality Habits - Less Wrong
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I think defining "selfish" as "anything experienced internally" is very limiting definition that makes it a pretty useless word. The concept of 'selfishness' can only be applied to human behaviour/motivations–physical-world phenomena like storms can't be selfish or unselfish, it's a mind-level concept. Thus, if you pre-define all human behaviour/motivations as selfish, you're ruling out the opposite of selfishness existing at all. Which means you might as well not bother with using the word "selfish" at all, since there's nothing that isn't selfish.
There's also the argument of common usage–it doesn't matter how you define a word in your head, communication is with other people, who have their own definition of that word in their heads, and most people's definitions are likely to be the common usage of the word, since how else would they learn what the word means? Most people define "selfishness" such that some impulses are selfish (i.e. Sally taking the last piece of cake because she likes cake) and some are not selfish (Sally giving Jack the last piece of cake, even though she wants it, because Jack hasn't had any cake yet and she already had a piece.) Obviously both of those reactions are the result of impulses bouncing around between neurons, but since we don't have introspective access to our neurons firing, it's meaningful for most people to use selfishness or unselfishness as labels.
Sally doesn't give Jack the cake because Jack hasn't had any, rather, Sally gives Jack the cake because she wants to. That's why explicitly calling the motivation selfish is useful, because it clarifies that obligations are still subjective and rooted in individual values (it also clarifies that obligations don't mandate sacrifice or asceticism or any other similar nonsense). You say that it's obvious that all actions occur from internally motivated states as a result of neurons firing, but it's not obvious to most people, which is why pointing out that the action stems from the internal desires of Sally is still useful.
Why not just specify to people that motivations or obligations are "subjective and rooted in individual values"? Then you don't have to bring in the word "selfish", with all its common-usage connotations.
I want those common-usage connotations brought in because I want to eradicate the taboo around those common-usage connotations, I guess. I think that people are vilified for being selfish in lots of situations where being selfish is a good thing, at least from that person's perspective. I don't think that people should ever get mad at defectors in Prisoner's Dilemmas, for example, and I think that saying that all of morality is selfish is a good way to fix this kind of problem.
To comment on the linguistic issue, yes this particular argument is silly, but I do think it is legitimate to define a word and then later discover it points out something trivial or nonexistent. Like if we discovered that everyone would wirehead rather than actually help other people in every case, then we might say "welp, guess all drives are selfish" or something.