Sure they do. Saying that people don't have control over anything is like saying "the light switches in my house don't control the lights because the switches can't do anything without a person flipping them". Just because there's no spontaneous self-generated action that a switch can perform by itself doesn't mean that the switch isn't controlling something.

Looking at this from a different angle, do you believe that a digital simulation of your brain would produce the same kind of subjective experience of consciousness within the computer that you yourself perceive? Is subjective experience simply a side effect of certain types of computation? That may be true, but if you believe that, you start to get into some profoundly bizarre implications about the nature of reality. Check out the novel "Permutation City" by Greg Egan for a great exploration of this topic.