Does your body and all its varied inhabitants control your consciousness, or does your brain control your consciousness?

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Neither. Consciousness controls body and brain. This is the essence of free will.

A lot of people seem to be under the impression that physical determinism, the fact that matter operates according to rules and math, and that you can predict many many things about the world, that it means our behavior is scripted and out of our control.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Knowing how someone is going to act doesn’t mean that that act wasn’t freely decided on. If I offered you a choice, accept $5 to do some small task for me, or to accept $10 to do the exact same task, which would you choose? Let me guess, you chose to receive $10. Did I take away your free will to choose $5 because I knew you were going to choose $10? If I wasn’t sure you’d pick $10, would that have restored your free will?

Of course not, because the impetus to action resides in you, not in me. Okay, what if I instead held a gun to your head and told you to give me $5. Does this constrain your free will? Of course it does, I’m making a threat to take away your very existence if you don’t act the way I want you to.

How much free will this act takes away from you is a debatable topic, and we can dive into the weeds on just what sorts of choices are important, but the main thesis is that knowledge doesn’t impede will, action does. No amount of choice offering by me takes away your freedom to choose between them. I have to do something to you in order to strip away your freedom, just knowing doesn’t do that.

Your consciousness is the thing that looks at all the available options and makes a decision. Sensation streams into it constantly, from the body, from the world. All of the sensation gets processed by the brain and it provides you with experience. The experience of things is what provokes the decision.

The decision overrides unconscious direction. If you commanded your left arm to move and that arm didn’t move, then you’d rightly deduce that something was wrong. You’re paralyzed somehow. The natural order is disrupted and you have to use your mind in order to figure out what’s going on. Eventually you figure something out, using your consciousness to experience the situation, and that conclusion becomes the new natural order.

Information flows into the brain, mind, and creates something called experience, which then provokes action. You are in control. You. You make the decisions, you are the one that reacts.

What are you? That’s the mystery.