At first, you feel very powerful urges to start breathing. You' are no longer there to veto its urges to start breathing, so you lose the bet. You see, there are several different functions in the brain, and not all of them have the same agenda. People have gone on hunger strikes throughout history and have starved themselves to death. Priests, nuns, and monks practice lifetime celibacy.
People quit drug and alcohol addictions every day.
Breathing is one of the few exceptions. You can't veto the urge to breathe. I can work with those concepts. It is me, to be sure, because it's part of my body in the same sense that my hand is me, being part of my body. What a way to describe it.