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bogus comments on Physicalism: consciousness as the last sense - Less Wrong
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To anyone who really suffers from doubt about the physical nature of consciousness (...only sometimes, and I'm not proud of it) this line of thinking is pretty exasperating. Yes, the easy problem is easy, and most responsible dualists are happy enough admitting that the mind operates through physical means detectable on an MRI and we gain information about our own mental states through physical neural function...
...none of which makes any difference to the question that non-physicalists actually worry about, the so-called hard problem. Even calling consciousness a "sense" is admitting the lack of a solution to the hard problem: senses are the modalities by which objects are perceived. So our inner states are the objects, consciousness is the modality, and then who's doing the perceiving? More consciousness? Who's perceiving that? Hofstadter's solution of the strange loop is interesting but so nontechnical as to be useless.
Calling consciousness a sense, insofar as it's not just an equivocation on the term "consciousness", passes the recursive buck. The subjective level at which the senses bottom out remains just as poorly understood as before. This is more of an argument that thinking is purely physical (and a good one). I'm hoping you'll get to what I think of as "consciousness" later on in the series.
On the other hand, thanks for that link to the voice recording made in 1860. Getting to hear the oldest accessible human sound in the world? Pretty neat.
A physical substrate, of course. Note that I am not using the word "brain": we don't know anything about what the substrate looks like from a materialistic point of view, except that it is somehow strongly related to the brain, and the fine-grained states and processes of the physical substrate should comprehensively explain our inner phenomenology.[1]
[1] This is a surprisingly strong condition. Fourier analysis on a waveform cannot comprehensively account for our auditory perceptions, because it doesn't account for psychoacoustics. Spectrum analysis on a source of visible light cannot explain the perception of color, since e.g. people have different cone photoreceptors, etc.