The plausible assumption was that there must be a single location where all information about our internal conditions and environment is made available, decisions are taken and actions are initiated. Even Descartes—who considered mental processes to be superior to, rather than connected to, material processes in the brain, and whose free-floating res cogitanswould therefore have needed no circumscribed location—did not believe that it was possible to get by without a singular localizable controlling entity.
Public debt of the United States 1990-2004. In September 2004, the national debt of the United States had risen up to 28.43 trillion U.S. dollars. The national debt per capita had risen to 80,885 U.S. dollars in 2004.