1. ‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’ ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul.’ If one believes that these remarks embody important truths, one should, perhaps, feel a puzzle about why many people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by the philosophers are willing, with only the slightest prompting, to speak in ways that appear to conflict dramatically with Wittgenstein's thought. Many apparently find no difficulty in the idea that we could ascribe thoughts, sensations, emotions and so on to things which in no way resemble or behave like a living human being: to disembodied ‘minds’, ‘souls’ or brains floating in tanks. And with a little more pressing, many will agree that it is never to the living human being that these states are, strictly speaking, correctly ascribed but, rather, to something contained in it. Now if this widespread tendency is a confusion, we need an explanation of its existence. We need this partly because without that it will be difficult to undermine the tendency, and partly because we might expect that such a widespread tendency is a distortion of some truth.

It has been remarked by a number of philosophers that behaviourism and dualism are brothers under the skin. The same is true of the mind-brain identity thesis and dualism. One thing that strikingly unites them is the tendency to ‘concentrate’ the human being. Each draws attention away from the extended human form: the one locating the essential person in a lump of matter inside the skull, the other in a lump of non-matter having no position in space. In one sense this tendency to ‘concentrate’ the person is not transparent in standard formulations of materialism. These speak of a mind-brain identity thesis, not a person-brain identity thesis. The sense that both dualist and materialist attach to the term ‘mind’ is, however, itself symptomatic of this desire to concentrate. Sensations are, for example, spoken of as being part of an individual's ‘mental’ life – as occurring ‘in the mind’. In practice, however, we contrast ‘physical’ pain with ‘mental’ pain.