The brain thinks, not man. Man is just a cerebral crystallization.

-- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

I don't pretend to account for the Functions of the Brain. I never heard of a System or a Philosophy that could do it.

-- Bernard Mandeville

What can a philosopher say about phantom limb syndrome? More specifically, what can a materialist philosopher say about phantom limb syndrome? At first glance, a phenomenon by which our 'corporeal imagination' -- what La Mettrie in the eighteenth century called the "magic lantern" working within the brain, projecting images created by our memory and intellect -- induces us to feel pains in a missing limb might seem like profound evidence that naïve, scientistic views of consciousness are false or at least useless. How could science with its measurements ever grasp the irreducibly subjective construction which my body is? Notice that in any case, regardless of our answer to such a question, a somato-psychic phenomenon like phantom limb syndrome raises significant issues regarding good old-fashioned notions such as the self, and slightly less old-fashioned notions such as the tandem 'self and brain'. Namely, if the self has already been deflated -- since Hume and Nietzsche in their respective traditions, and in recent times since Dennett -- what about the brain?