When you refer to “me” or “I,” what are you referring to? Exactly where is that “me” or “I”? What are the boundaries?
If you were to say, for example, “I hurt my hand,” does it indicate that the real “you” is separate from your hand?
If you were to say, “I hurt my self,” is there a “self” that is separate from you? Some psychologists believe there is a separate “self” where those mysterious, almost indescribable “qualia” reside, a”self” that gives you subjective feelings about the emotion of the color red and the sense of awe at a sunset or great music.
Is the real “you” your physical brain, or is it something separate from it? Or is the real “you “your entire thinking apparatus? If so, you do your thinking with far more than the 3lb lump of meat in your skull.
Scientists are beginning to understand that thinking is a full-body exercise, with the in-skull brain being but one important part.
Please take a look at the excerpts from the following article.
The secret signals our organs send to repair tissues and slow aging
Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. By Claire Ainsworth. February 2, 2026, New Scientist Magazine
Biologist Chunyi Li, saw that when deer regrew their antlers each year, this regrowth coincided with healthier-looking animals that showed much faster healing of their wounds and less scarring, leading him to suspect that the regenerating antlers somehow promoted regeneration in the wider body.
Li’s hunch was confirmed when he and his colleagues found that the growing antlers release messages that tell other parts of the body to shift into regenerative wound-healing mode – evidence of a hitherto-hidden communication network that connects distant organs.
In recent years, researchers have discovered a web of chatter among the human body’s organs and tissues, even those we once thought were dull and inert.
We now know that your fat and brain tissue converse to influence the speed at which you age, your skeleton sends information packets to the pancreas to control metabolism, and much more.
This is how we traditionally visualize our brain, but it is only a small part of the picture. Every cell in our body communicates, directly or indirectly, with every other cell via a network similar to that in our brain. In short, our entire body functions like a brain.
Crosstalk between organs These ongoing findings are emerging from the new field of inter-organ communication, which is building on the old physiological idea that organs function together as a greater whole.
We have long known that information is transmitted around the body via nerve networks and hormones, but what is extraordinary about these latest discoveries is the growing diversity of ways in which organs and tissues “talk” to each other to coordinate their action.
Every part of the body communicates with every other part via nerves and chemicals, forming a brain-like web.
Indeed, inter-organ communication is now seen as critical machinery for controlling metabolism, aging and overall health.
In addition to the nervous system and the blood/endocrine system, both of which provide inter-organ — indeed inter-cell — communication, we have:
*Paracrine & autocrine signaling (local chemistry) in which cells signal nearby cells (paracrine), or themselves (autocrine). Examples are inflammation signals, tissue repair, and tumor signaling.
*Immune system signaling: Cytokines, chemokines, antigen presentation. Cells “talk” about threats. Examples are fever, swelling and fatigue
*Gut–brain axis: Two-way communication between gut and brain. Your gut is constantly “voting” on your behavior Uses: nerves (vagus nerve), hormones, immune signals, microbiome chemicals
*Mechanical signaling: Cells respond to pressure, stretch and movement. Examples: Bones strengthen under load; muscles grow with stress; blood vessels respond to flow
*Bioelectric fields: Subtle electrical gradients across tissues guide wound healing and physical development (These are background electrical patterns, not just nerve impulses.)
*Exosomes: Extracellular vesicles (tiny packages). Cells send exosomes that carry RNA, proteins and signals
*Gene regulation signaling: Cells change behavior by turning genes on/off Triggered by: The environment, chemicals, stress
Our body produces a hormone called leptin, which helps regulate appetite and energy balance. This transformed our perception of fat: once seen as passive storage tissue, it is now thought of as a dynamic, vital organ.
Pretty much every organ or tissue is chipping in. One of the biggest surprises is bone, long thought of as a lifeless mechanical scaffold. We now know that bone functions as a sophisticated “endocrine” organ, secreting a hormone called osteocalcin that influences metabolism, male fertility and exercise performance.
It even reaches the brain, where it reduces anxiety, improves spatial memory and enhances cognition.
A 2018 study showed that these signals can be jammed by existing blood-pressure drugs known as beta-blockers, which inhibit the release of stress hormones such as adrenaline by the sympathetic nervous system.
Shin-ichiro Imai at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, thinks of this orchestration as an interconnected system that maintains stable function, or “robustness”. When this robustness falters, it leads to aging and physiological decline. “We need to integrate all the different pieces from all the different layers, like a molecular layer, cellular layer, tissue, organ layer, to understand the whole system,” he says.
Imai and his colleagues showed that a specific subset of hypothalamic neurons in mice communicates with adipose tissue via the sympathetic nervous system, triggering the release of an enzyme essential for producing NAD+, a molecule vital to cellular metabolism.
Moreover, the 2024 study concluded that “these findings clearly demonstrate the importance of the inter-tissue communication.
Other organs, including skeletal muscle and the small intestine, also converse with the hypothalamus. Imai and his colleagues have identified the hormone that skeletal muscle uses to communicate with this brain region.
The body’s diverse languages We now know that organs use a bewildering smorgasbord of languages to communicate, not just the well-known routes of hormones and nerve action.
These include metabolites, small molecules that convey information about energy status and cellular health, and new signaling molecules, such as those produced when skeletal muscles contract and act on many other tissues, including the brain and liver.
And a study from November last year found that cancer cells manipulate inter-organ signaling— in this case, via nerves — to undermine the immune response against them.
But one of the most exciting discoveries in the field of inter-organ communication is the way many of these factors are shunted around the body in mysterious bubble-like blobs known as extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are a key way for organs to send messages.
Here, too, new varieties of EVs are continually being unearthed, such as the discovery last year of particularly massive ones dubbed “blebbisomes”, which function as mobile communication centers. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the tiny exomeres and supemeres, both discovered in 2021, which aren’t encased in a membrane. Plus, there are oncosomes, produced by cancer cells.
Obesity, too, exerts some of its effects on the body via EVs. These can communicate with multiple organs, crossing the blood-brain barrier to talk to immune cells in the brain called microglia, which are involved in brain inflammation.
“We’re looking at the whole connection between obesity and dementia,” says Das. Fat also communicates with the liver via EVs, and fat-derived EVs also appear to play a role in the development of heart arrhythmias in obesity.
Recent studies also show that EVs are implicated in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, transporting microRNAs and pathological proteins from the brain to peripheral organs.
This all raises the question of why our organs need to speak so many different languages. One possibility is that the location of the conversation matters. Some signals, such as conventional hormones, are broadcast body-wide like a national radio show. Others could be locally confined, with organs whispering to each other like next-door neighbors over a garden fence.
The massive amount of inter-cell communication rivals and resembles the brain itself, and via these connections, literally is part of the brain.
What we term “thinking” is a whole-body exercise, not limited to the brain.
The following article provides one stunning example:
Just one dose of psilocybin relieves symptoms of OCD for months
Taking psilocybin – the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms – eased symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder among people who did not respond to conventional treatments, and the effects lasted at least several months.
By Chris Simms, March 5, 2026, New Scientist Magazine
“If we give you a trip, we think we can break the cycles of obsessive thinking and behavior,” says David Nutt at Imperial College London, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The whole point of OCD therapy is about teaching people to behave differently. So, rather than check the lights 15 times, you check them twice.”
About 1 to 3 percent of people have OCD, a condition characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive habits, which can be overwhelming. Treatments tend to include talking therapies and antidepressants, but between 40 and 60 percent of people with OCD don’t respond to them.
Your entire body, not just your brain, is involved in your thinking processes, over most of which you have no control.
Every chemical you ingest affects every cell in you body. In many cases the effect is minimal, even unnoticeable. In other cases, the effect is profound.
There’s a popular claim that every breath you take contains atoms once breathed by people like Jesus or Julius Caesar. It sounds like poetic nonsense. Mathematically, it isn’t.
Every breath you take contains an astronomically large number of molecules. The atmosphere, though huge, is finite. Over time, air mixes. Not perfectly, not instantly—but enough.
Now think about a human lifetime. Hundreds of millions of breaths. Each one releasing vast numbers of molecules into the air. Spread those molecules across the entire atmosphere and the fraction becomes tiny. But your next breath is enormous at the molecular level.
Tiny fraction × enormous number = not tiny anymore. The result? Each breath you take contains millions of atoms that once passed through the lungs of people who lived long ago. So when you inhale, you’re not just breathing “air.” You’re breathing a thoroughly mixed, endlessly recycled history of the planet.
Every atom is a messenger. Those atoms carry energy and structure and participate in reactions, When they enter your body, they don’t just sit there. They interact. They affect chemistry, alter electrical states, and influence cells
Your body continually receives input from air (oxygen, CO , trace gases), food (chemicals, nutrients), and internal systems (hormones, immune signals).
There is no clean boundary between “you” and “the outside world.” Separation is and illusion. We talk as if we “breathe air” and we “eat food,”, But physically, we continuously exchange matter with everything around us. Atoms move in, react, and move out. The system is not isolated. It is open and constantly mixing.
If atoms that were once in Caesar, a tree, or a cloud are now in you, the idea of a fixed, isolated self becomes very shaky. What persists is not matter. It’s a pattern of responsiveness, responsiveness is not just internal processing. It is the ongoing interaction between a system and a shared physical world.
You are not a thing. You are a process. And that process is built from pieces that have belonged to everything else.
Thus, the notion of “self” control is patently false. We simply cannot control our thoughts, and not having thought control, wecannot control our behavior, despite the illusion that we do.
Every cell in your body communicates — directly or indirectly — with every other cell via several communication channels, including: Nervous, blood/endocrine, paracrine & autocrine signaling, immune system signaling, gut–brain axis, mechanical signaling, bioelectric fields, exosomes and gene regulation signaling.
If all these chemicals and signals affect your thinking and your behavior, where does that leave the notion of free will?
If every cell in your body communicates with every other cell, while thousands of chemicals enter us from outside our bodies every day — and each of these chemicals and communications has some effect on our decision-making, our opinions, and our actions — where does that leave the notion of a “self” that makes our decisions?
The illusion goes well beyond our bodies. We literally are made of “star stuff.” Right after the Big Bang, the universe consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium. That’s it—no carbon, no oxygen, no iron. All the rest of us was forged in stars that exploded and created every known chemical.
The sun continues to affect us via its radiation and gravitation. It affects our moods, our actions, and our beliefs. The chaos of the “butterfly effect” means that even a small perturbation in your body can result in a meaningful effect on your life.
(Edward Lorenz repeated a simulation he had previously run, but rounded a value from 0.506127 to 0.506. The small alteration caused the program to produce an entirely different weather simulation.)
One can ponder the subtle changes that may have occurred in Jesus’s mind and body, ultimately giving rise to a religion with 3 to 4 billion followers and to the countless historical events that ensued. Consider how many people were born or died, how many suffered or thrived, and how many achieved success or faced failure—all as a result of minor influences stemming from one man’s thoughts.
What tiny changes in your ancestors have led to your current life situation?
SUMMARY
You are not just your brain. You are the universe.
Your brain is intricately connected to, and affected by, your body. Your thoughts, beliefs, moods, desires, and actions are not solely the product of your brain, but are the result of the trillions of interactions each second among every cell in your body.
You do not control the vast majority of those interactions, which means you cannot control your thoughts, beliefs, etc. Though you live with the persistent illusion of central control, you do and think as you are. You are in the same position as the OCD victim who cannot control his hand flapping or his thoughts and desires. The difference is that your thoughts and actions may be considered “normal, typical, average,” or in some way judged appropriate.
Imagine a world where everyone has OCD. What would “free will” mean in that context?
And just as we are connected to our bodies and environments, we also are connected to the sun, the moon, and even to the stars and the rest of the universe. We do not know, and perhaps never will know, how much we on Earth are affected by a star a million light-years distant.
The entire universe is interconnected in a vast web of influence, in which we are barely more than insignificant specks. Yet here we are, hardly above the status of ants, claiming we have control over ourselves, even without fully understanding what a “self” truly is.
When a fool panics, all of America is in danger. This is a true message from the President of the United States. The man has gone out of his mind.
You, Congresspeople, better get a hold of the situation before the world is engulfed in flames. This is exactly what happened with Hitler. He went insane, and Germany suffered.
Ignorance breeds ignorance. The tragedy of ignorance is that those who are ignorant of existing facts are too ignorant to understand new facts. Such people are uneducable.
And, you don’t even need to be a MAGA to be that ignorant. Here are excerpts of articles demonstrating irreparable ignorance.
THE WEEK April 1, 2026: WHY UNIVERSAL HEALH CARE ISN’T VIABLE by Ramesh Ponnuru the Washington Post
Medicare-f0r-all is back and it’s still a completely impractical idea.
Democrats have never generated much support for universal health care, and won’t have an easier time selling it now. Proponents admit national health care would cost upwards of $1 trillion a year and require major tax increases on the middle class.
That is 100% false, a lie promulgated by the rich to widen the Gap between the rich and the rest. The truth: The federal government could increase spending by $1 trillion, or $10 trillion, and not raise taxes by even a penny.
Beardsley Ruml, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a speech before the ABA in 1945 (the last year of WWII): “The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government.
All federal taxes must meet the test of public policy and practical effect. The public purpose which is served should never be obscured in a tax program under the mask of raising revenue.”
And no, contrary to popular myth, federal spending, even big spending, doesn’t cause inflation. All inflation is caused by shortages of crucial goods and services and is cured by government spending to cure the shortages.
Continuing with the THE WEEK article:
Sen. Bernie Sanders argues that savings on insurance premiums and deductibles would cancel out higher taxes, but voters won’t trust that rhetoric.
Heaven help us from our friends. The government neither needs nor uses any sort of savings. It simply would create the necessary dollars as it always does.
National health care would also require removing more than 300 million Americans from employer-provided insurance and individually purchased policies. Would most Americans willingly give up their existing coverage for a new government-run system of unknown cost and quality?
Democrats are on the verge of learning again that the answer is No way.
No reason is given for why national health care would require people to give up other health care. Does the current Social Security make such demands?
This is a weird bogeyman invented by the rich (who own the Washington Post, that formerly good newspaper until it was purchased by a billionaire).
A free and comprehensive , now-deductible “Medicare for All” program would benefit not only workers but all Americans.
One reason companies provide health insurance is to keep employees tied to their jobs. Currently, millions of workers are trapped in low-paying positions and poor working conditions because their company-provided insurance limits their ability to seek employment elsewhere.
It should come as no surprise that the author of the nonsensical article, Ramesh Ponnuru, is “a prominent conservative political pundit.” If there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s spending money on anything that aids the lower 90% income earners or narrows the Gap.
So, in his case, the problem may not be pure ignorism. It might also inlcude the typical right wing lack of compassion.
Then, here are excerpts from this article:
Trump prioritizes $1.5T for defense ’27 budget plan calls for trims to domestic programs’ funding By Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking, Associated Press WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.
The sizable increase for the Pentagon, some 44%, had been telegraphed by the Republican president before the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would also reduce spending on nondefense programs by 10%.
“President Trump promised to reinvest in America’s national security infrastructure, to make sure our nation is safe in a dangerous world,” wrote Budget Director Russell Vought. The president’s annual budget is considered a reflection of the administration’s values.
The administration’s values are:
More money for Trump
More money for those who can help Trump reap more money
More money for others who are rich pals of Trump
Less money for those who are not rich
Period.
The massive document typically highlights an administration’s priorities, but Congress, which handles federal spending issues, is free to reject it and often does.
Except for the MAGA-tied robot Congress of today, which seldom rejects Trump’s ideas.
“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” Trump said at a private White House event Wednesday. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.”
Anyone who understands government financing knows that while the federal government is never money-constrained, the states, which are monetarily non-sovereign, are quite financially constrained.
But Trump believes in exploiting public ignorance, and sadly, he has been rewarded for it.
Besides military spending, the document released by the White House included other priorities. It maintains current year levels of funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in support of the administration’s deportation operations, and draws on last year’s increases for the Department of Homeland Security funds to continue opening detention facilities, including 100,000 beds for adults and 30,000 for families.
Trump is hoping to put 130,000 people into “detention facilities”, aka concentration camps, similar to the notorious Alligator Alcaraz. There’s plenty of money for building horror jails to house innocent immigrants, but not enough for the health of Americans
There is a 13% increase for the Department of Justice to focus on violent criminals and the president’s promise to stop what the White House calls migrant crime.
Federal and state data show that both legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
A $10 billion fund within the National Park Service is sought for “construction and beautification” projects in Washington, D.C.
Trump repeatedly want’s “beautification, aka buildings with his name on them.
The budget also seeks a $481 million increase to enhance aviation safety and support an air traffic controller hiring surge.
A surge that has become necessary because of the Trump/Musk senseless mass-firings of good people, bad people, all people.
The budget also includes Trump’s reduction priorities by canceling more than $15 billion from the Biden-era bipartisan infrastructure law, including funds for renewable energy projects and cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA, grants.
Aside from global warming, (which Trump insists doesn’t exist,) and saving the ocean’s animals and plants (who care about them?), there is no reason to worry about renewable energy and the ocean and atmosphere in MAGA world.
There is a 19% cut for the Department of Agriculture, ending certain university grants; a 13% cut for the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and about a 12% decrease to the Health and Human Services department, including cuts to a low-income heating assistance program.
See the pattern? The federal government “can’t afford’ to help anyone except the rich.
The White House is touting cuts of what it calls “woke programs” that often direct federal investments toward lowincome communities. The budget used the word “woke” 34 times. For example, the administration is looking to cut Community Services Block Grants, which fund activities such as financial and job counseling and help people obtain adequate housing.
“Woke” means different things to different people, but in general, it means opposed to racial and sexual bigotry. Because Donald Trump is America’s bigot-in-chief, he naturally opposes anything that benefits anyone who is not a white Christian male billionaire.
The administration says its cuts would target grants “hijacked by radicals” to promote equity-building and green energy initiatives.
The president also seeks to cut $106 million in funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which it says has “pushed radical gender ideology onto children.”
Simply stated, anti-gay laws, because as everyone knows, gays are a greated danger to America than guns.
With the nation running nearly $2 trillion annual deficits and the debt swelling past $39 trillion, the federal balance sheets have long been operating in the red.
Now well understood that economic growth requires the federal government to run a deficit and every time we fail to do so we have recessions and depressions.
Two questions about the above graph of federal debt:
When do we have recessions? ANSWER: After a period of reduced federal deficits
When do we recover from recessions? ANSWER: After a period of increased federal deficits.
When do we have depressions: ANSWER: When the federal government runs a surplus (see below)
U.S. depressions come on the heels of federal surpluses.
1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807. 1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819. 1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837. 1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857. 1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873. 1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893. 1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929. 1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.
The answer to the title question — What is the most expensive thing in the world?
The Answer: Ignorance. We pay for it in many ways every day. Our own ignorance and the ignorance of others.
I told you! I told you getting Trump elected would destroy America. Biden was old, but clever. Trump is old and a fool. He’s not just a crook, but he’s deported thousands of good, tax-paying workers. He’s divided the U.S. with hate speech. After promising not to, he started a war he doesn’t know how to finish; he hired a bunch of dunces to advise him; he gave Ukraine as little help as he could, and just about has ended NATO. He even fired all of their best generals. I couldn’t have done more if they had elected me POTUS. Woops! I just heard an American fighter jet was shot down. Now all we need is for him to be stupid enough to cut healthcare for the American people and start building monuments to himself. Oh, wait. He did WHAT . . . ?
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 