As a somatic bodywork practitioner, the idea that the body model is a hypothesis the brain keeps confirming shows up in what I witness in sessions. Clients carry tensions and contractions they've never consciously attended to, ones that have been running as background processes sometimes for years, shaping posture, emotional patterns, and behavior. When I guide someone to direct conscious attention to a sensation and stay with it, or add in other new factors to the model such as breath regulation, touch, or co-regulation, the model does update and oftentimes in striking ways.

Where I find myself pushing back on this piece is mostly the title and its implied direction of travel. In my experience, the body isn't a limitation we might one day route around. Not to say you necessarily imply this, but I'm not sure a less embodied version of the self would be a more evolved one. It might just be one with less access to what the body already carries, including states of consciousness, embodied cognitive capacities, insight, and potentially other realities that don't require VR or BCI to access in the first place.

I also think that the same curiosity that drives BCI and XR research should also drive us to ask what we're missing in the body itself and whether better tools for listening to somatic intelligence might be a more tractable and less risky path to the expanded cognition you're describing (like funding someone who's rigorously testing some generalizations from Michael Levin's research into domains that are consequential for the mental health, flourishing, cognitive augmentation, etc. of humans). 

Also, I touched on the relationship between predictive processing and interoceptive sensitivity from a somatic practitioner's perspective here, if it's of interest: maricrook.substack.com/…