After my talk, he went into some kind of rant about how the “odd human case” didn’t mean much of anything and that it was sort of a bizarre consequen… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

As in any layered system, however, the system can become jeopardized if a core component that transfers information from one layer to another malfunctions. In the case of biological tissue, if the kinds of proteins that connect cells together are defective, then information may not be able to transfer from the individual-cell layer to the tissue layer, and the entire system could shut down. While not perfect, the layered design of biological systems is advantageous because it minimizes the number of points in the system that, if attacked, would result in catastrophic damage, and it limits the effects of attacks at other points.

I am not suggesting that single cells are conscious. I am suggesting that they may have some type of processing that is necessary or similar to the processing that results in conscious experience.

It’s difficult to get our heads around the idea that each bubble has its own capacity to evoke that feeling of being conscious; it rubs up against our own intuitions about the holistic nature of our personal consciousness. What are we and our intuitions missing? We are missing the illusion part, the part we humans (with our powerful left hemisphere inference mechanism) are so good at missing. We aren’t actually missing the illusion; rather, we are missing the fact that our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion. In reality it is made up of cognitive bubbles linked with subcortical “feeling” bubbles, stitched together by our brain in time.