Activities fall into two clear categories, and the difference matters more than it first appears to. Some are automatic: breathing, digestion, the heartbeat, occurring on their own, with consent but without any active participation. Others are intentional: seeing, speaking, walking, thinking, getting angry, and here responsibility clearly belongs somewhere specific.
This carries real weight, because it closes off a familiar excuse. Nobody can genuinely harm someone and then claim the mind simply did it on its own, as if it were an unrelated malfunction. Responsibility for what happens in the intentional realm belongs to the one doing the intending, not to some separate, blameless mechanism.
Among intentional activities, a further split shows up. Some require both the self and the body together. Walking needs legs capable of moving and a will that actually chooses to move them. A perfectly healthy pair of legs will not walk on their own without that choice, just as broken legs won't walk no matter how strong the choice is. Other activities require only the self. Thinking, believing, feeling a particular way, these continue whether the body is sitting perfectly still or in the middle of vigorous movement.
The body does communicate upward, sending information the self can act on. A wound signals as pain. But sending a signal is not the same as controlling the response to it. How to actually respond stays entirely with the self. Someone deeply absorbed in an activity can fail to even notice an injury until well after it happened, proof that the signal alone doesn't dictate the reaction.
The practical upshot is worth sitting with directly. The body is a remarkable, mostly self-managing instrument. But it is an instrument, reporting information and executing decisions, not the one making them. Whoever assumes otherwise, treating the body as the one actually steering, ends up confused about where responsibility, and real control, actually sit.