Voluntary and Autonomous Form a Pernicious Binary

There is a broad range in what a person can feel from one sensorial cluster to another — bone density or shortness of breath or heart rate or unease — and on top of that there is great variability in interoceptive sensitivity from person to person. But if skill at feeling is variable, so is the ability to influence the processes you just glimpsed. What the now-rejected voluntary/autonomous boundary did was to smash all that complexity into a simple binary: can you control it or not? This seems like a stupid boundary to me, but it is also a pernicious one. Once the false binary is applied, all sorts of other conclusions follow: that bone density or nostril dominance or heart rate can't be influenced, that the brain is in better control than it is, that some parts of you deserve attention and others don't, that intelligence lives in the conscious mind and nowhere else in the organism, that what can't be willed can't be learned. Many, many more processes are discernible and influenceable than 20th century scientists thought, and the influence is not so much an act of will as a successful surfing. And yes: there is broad variability in our ability to influence our own processes — and this is what Moshé Feldenkrais designed into every one of his lessons.