This book started with the idea that when we take a photograph, or encounter someone, we sense that there is a real “person” or “character” whom we can know and to whom we can relate, and therefore that, when others see us, they encounter someone whom I refer to as “me” But the question has been: what is that “me” and how does it relate to my experience of being myself? Various options have been considered and eliminated. “Me” cannot simply refer to the neural activity that goes on in my brain. It is intimately related to it, of course, and if there were no brain activity I would not be here as a functioning, sensing, thinking being. Indeed, I could not live without the operation of the brain in controlling my temperature and other systems. My brain is crucial to my existence; it makes possible the complex processes or experience and response and all the elements of memory and intentionality that I experience as being “me” but that's not the same thing as saying that the brain is me.

But it is equally difficult to think of people as mental entities radically different from their bodies, for all that we know of other people is mediated to us via their physical gestures: what they say and what they do. That's not to deny the value of what psychology reveals, or the deeply ingrained sense that we are more than our physical bodies, but the idea of a disembodied self does not match our everyday experience, where people are fully embodied.