Where do you think consciousness is held? Here's a tale: My sister and I had to travel through a graveyard to get to school when I was in third grade, and she had just entered school. I told her that ghosts might appear. Sis told me that it had made her afraid. The lesson is that her awareness, her situational awareness was instantaneous in nature out to about 20 feet of her mass. So our consciousness is what our brain does. It's interactive with our environment. We, as paracites on the brain, only 15 percent of it's activity. It allows us, and is in command of our consciousness, whether it allows it to exist or not. Further, our brains are naturally biogenic. That is, they behave as super-microorganisms that respect the biological imperatives of survival, and ... our laws should probably recognize the same.