Indeed. What do you think we’re talking about?

What Sam thinks is concisely put in the quote at the start of my article. But I can expand on that some more.

We can even take the word “you” out of the equation if that’s troublesome. We can simply put it like this: are thoughts controlled by consciousness? The answer is “no”. There, done.

We can then debate what the word “you” means, and whether there is such a thing as a separate self.