Am I actually in charge?

The foreign bacteria in your gut had a much more direct audience with your brain than your cells do. Question is, is it an Embassy? Are they Diplomats? ... or are they Oligarchs? >!As long as they call me sugar mommy for giving them sweets!<

To be fair, they outnumber your cells by something like ten to one.
I love democracy.

Drink a gallon of bleach and learn how much power you have over those little fuckers!

It cleans you out, but leaves you hollow inside.

My cells are dumb terminals and I’m their virtual server.

I have epilepsy so my brain gets DDOSed from time to time
- Wow that’s a really apt analogy and I laughed way harder than I expected.
- You should probably set up cloudflare or something for that.
  Lol for real though, my ex had a seizure disorder. It sucked. There was a medication that they had her use for a bit, but it honestly made her so high for hours that taking the medication was worse than her seizures, so she stopped.
GO BACK TO CHESS CLUB, NERD.
- Seriously can you guys just leave me alone? Chess is really cool, and you’d find that out if you just tried it. Sportz is dumb anyway.

Biology is complexity built upon simplicity. By asking this question, you are actually asking the same question philosophers and religions have asked for millennia: do we have a soul/free will?

No. If we are governed by the same forces as the rest of the universe, then even free will is an illusion caused by the myriad of interactions between the particles making up our bodies and the particles that make up the rest of the universe. If we could know the current state of every particle in the universe, we could accurately predict the future. Your destiny was set into motion the moment the universe exploded into existence trillions of years ago at the advent of the big bang. Knowing this not only doesn't change the outcome, it was part of the design for you to know in the first place.
Or maybe I'm just high. 🤷🏻‍♂️
- That's determinism, a very popular and nice logical philosophical thought. Sadly, it's completely disproved by quantum physics.
- I disagree. I see it that Will is the ability of a particle or system of particles to affect change in the universe around it and alter the course of destiny. If we could know the current state of every particle in the universe, we could accurately predict the future, if nothing was then ever acted upon again. But particles possessing Will can alter their environment and effect a ripple of change that could then mean the entire prediction falls apart.

Cancer is when they rise up against you, and your human cells stop being a part of a macroscopic animal and begin a new life as a species of human-dna-having single cellular parasites

My cells better fall in line or I will drink a bottle of draino and mutually destroy us all.

There’s that whole thing in “Dune” of “he who has the power to destroy a thing, rules that thing.” So yeah, we are in charge, even if we are fairly hands-off managers!
- Ah, so it's my constant suicidal ideations that are why I don't have any real health problems.. It all makes sense now!

That was a really interesting article, though the implication does seem to be that you do indeed make some decisions longterm but that all decisions in the moment are basically automatic and rationalized later. If I decide that today I'm building a table thats a genuine conscious decision but the building of the table up to and potentially even including its actual design are probably falling back on automatic mechanisms.
Honestly doesn't seem much different from muscle memory, riding a bike starts out as a very concious effort but ends up being automatic, it would make sense that thinking can be subject to a similar mechanism.