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

Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?

Reductionism in the physical sciences has been challenged by the principle of emergence. The whole system acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be predicted from the simple addition of those of its individual components. One might apply the aphorism that the new system is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a phase shift, a change in the organizational structure, going from one scale to the next.

This incessant interplay between cognition and feelings, which is to say between cortical and subcortical modules, produces what we call consciousness.