Manzotti: Now you’re going too fast. Let’s stay with the body a moment. Of course it’s absolutely central. There would be no experience without it. Yet we are not our bodies. We are something else. Think about it. We do not experience being neurons and blood vessels. We do not experience being bowels and internal organs. Science teaches us that we are made of such stuff, and constantly invites us to contemplate models of our skeletons and innards and so on, and to identify with them. Yet for thousands of years people never thought of themselves like that at all. Because actually our lives are made up of external events, people, objects, landscapes, and of course the body’s interaction with these things. What was Homer’s experience made of? Chariots, walls, towns, spears, wounds, armors, seas, ships, sails, sacrifices. What was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s experience made of? Fast cars, designer clothes, expensive houses, pink cocktails, jazz. As regards their bodies, Homer and Fitzgerald were made of the same stuff, neurons and cells. But their experiences, hence their minds, have little in common. [...]
Manzotti: Of course. But you take my point. The body’s perceptual apparatus, eyes, ears, nervous system, selects which object becomes your experience, carves out a world that is you, but it does not concoct this object in the neurons in the brain. The object is out there. Your experience is out there and you with it. The body is a selector and a facilitator, not a host or a container. [...]
This is always the case with experience of the body. One part of the body perceives another part, but not itself. Notice that we never feel the brain, because there is nothing beyond it, as it were, in the nervous system, that might allow the brain to become manifest to us as an object. No anesthesia is required for the brain itself when a surgeon operates on it, because the brain doesn’t feel pain. It allows other objects to exist and become part of our world, within the body and without, but isn’t experienced itself. [...]
Manzotti: Yes. The self is just as physical as the body, and equally important. It exerts its influence through the causal conduit that the body offers; it is that particular world that the body both brings into existence and reacts to. The body is the fulcrum, if you like, but the external object, your experience, all your experience, over the years, is the lever, the self. The lever is only a lever because the fulcrum allows it to be so. But the fulcrum is only a fulcrum because there is the lever.
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