Try this thought experiment. I've adapted it from one of Richard Rose's lectures.

Say you are to be guillotined at the neck. Imagine this happening. Imagine you can somehow stay conscious afterwards. Has your head been cut off or your body?

If your head has been cut off, perhaps your sense of self is in the body. Now imagine the arms and legs being sliced off. Not too hard, the 'I' still remains, meaning that the self is somewhere in the trunk.

Now imagine the trunk being cut in half horizontally, dividing the thorax from the abdomen. Is your abdomen cut away or your thorax. For me, I'm still in the thorax, around the heart area... and I'm slightly more towards the left, so maybe the heart itself or the heart chakra.

Where are you? If you'd asked me the question before this experiment, I would have guessed the self is in my head somewhere.

Here is a shortcut :- In a life-threatening situtation would you mind going for a kidney transplant ? a heart transplant ? a lung trasnplant ? I think anyone can.
BUT a brain transplant ?? lol

A slightly more extreme version: I hear you can survive and even be with half your brain gone. Now imagine half your brain is transplanted into a replica of the rest of your body. Which one is you?

haha this thread is awesome, especially in time for halloween with all the severed bodies and brains and blood and things.

here's something i wrote to someone as a possible explanation for why the head is where sense of location often comes from:

There is also still the habit to think of the head as the mind’s location simply because the brain is in the head and the brain is thought to be the primary thing that powers the mind, and so it has been seen as the highest status thing - which is funny cuz if there were no veins, or heart, or blood, or breath, or water, etc. the brain/body would die too and those aren’t perceived as the end all be all of existence. There isn’t clinging to all the tiny blood vessels or thinking they are the cause/conditioning/source of things, even though they are as necessary for human life as the brain (nevermind the fact that human life itself isn’t even necessary.. pwnd).