Waking up the Flying Man

Avicenna’s Flying Man is standardly taken to support the ontological independence of the conscious self from the body. I argue that this inference is unfounded. I distinguish what is absent from the content of self-awareness – the body as a consciously identified object – from what may remain among its conditions – the body as a causal and constitutive basis of conscious experience, and argue that body-identification, not total sensory absence, is the epistemically operative feature through which the dualist conclusion is generated. A virtual reality countermodel physically realizes the relevant dissociation while preserving constitutive dependence on the body, defeating the evidential schema by which dualists take phenomenological dissociation to be evidence for ontological independence. A dilemma follows: either the relevant isolation is representational and evidentially neutral, or it is total phenomenological disembodiment, whose positive conceivability remains unestablished.