My Body, your Body, Dog's Body, what Body?

The body, what is it? I seem to have a body such as it is, I'm typing with it, and there's your body reading this article but is that what we really ARE?

Sometimes when you are with another body you will both say the exact same thing at the same time, or you'll get a flash of insight and you'll say to the other body, "I know just what you are going to say" or "I feel your pain" or "Snap, I had the same thought" or any number of seemingly other coincidental remarks.

What if we have fallen for the greatest trick in the Universe, what if a body is just like a television set, it transmits and receives signals, and like a telephone, it is a communication device. What if that is all it is, and we have just become so used to the bodies limits that we have wrongly assumed that we ARE it.

What about those times when you seem to know something that you couldn't possibly have accessed through the body? When you think of someone far away and they turn up on your doorstep moments after you have the thought?

OK lets go back to the television set, what if one night you went off to bed as usual and after falling into a deep sleep I sneek into you bedroom and re-linked all your neural pathways (much as they are now doing for the chronically disabled, to computers) to your television set.

I could link your visual cortex to a video camera and your motor cortex to on/off, sound and picture quality buttons, your speech centers to the audio system and finally after it was all done I switch you on.

You wake up but your body remains laying in the bed, limp, you still feel like you but you are now a television set, you see with new eyes and you know deeply what it is to change channels. You see the room much as you saw it before you went to sleep only now you are seeing it through a different lens.

When you raise your hand your volume goes up and when you think the program guide displays and searches for matching content. You are completely incensed at first, you are no longer the body you thought you were, now you are an audio visual center.

You realize quickly that you cannot reverse the changes so you begin to get used to your new media existence. Only a matter of months pass and you are happily playing shows, editing your thoughts and making a movie about your life when there is a knock at the door.

Old friends have come to visit you, they let themselves in and look around the house for you eventually finding you old model (your body) laying on the bed emaciated and unmoving. You don't understand why they are talking to this thing instead of you, you are behind them on the wall but they still recognize you as that thing laying almost dead on the bed.

Your perception of yourself has transfered to what your brain now tells you is you, you are now happily a television set, or are you?

Are you in fact that body you think you are in now, or are you really the television on the wall, are you merely a bunch of neurons that can be surgically redirected into any machine, or are you something else entirely?