[antonfire]

> But the fact remains that a hand or a heart or a lung can be removed or replaced without loss of self. A brain can't.

Here's a related observation that tipped me a bit away from thinking about my body as the meatsack carrying my brain: cutting off a hand doesn't cut off the experience or sensation of having a hand. (E.g. people with missing limbs have phantom pain.)

Lots of emotions are at least partly "embodied". People feel love in the chest. Fear in the stomach.

Not sure about anybody else, but I feel frustration in my elbows. I strongly suspect that if my arms were removed, I would still feel frustration in my elbows. I don't think removing my physical arms would remove all the ways "having arms" is baked into my experience. Even if an external physicalist account accurately places those phenomena "in the brain" and not "in the arms", that's not really all that relevant to an internal account of someone actually having the experience.

As I see it, a human's brain-from-the-inside (mind? soul?) is "body-shaped" in a lot of ways. When I hear warnings against "reducing ourselves to a bunch of 'computers", I read them as prompts to recognize this. As warnings against recognizing and engaging with *only* the parts of one's experience that can fit into an "abstract reasoner" model.