I apologize - what I meant wasn't "drop the subject of consciousness", but "don't use the specific word 'consciousness'":

Yesterday we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism:

All [mortal, ~feathers, biped] are mortal;
Socrates is a [mortal, ~feathers, biped];
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

But the principle applies much more broadly:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest makes a sound."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not make a sound."

Clearly, since one says "sound" and one says "~sound", we must have a contradiction, right? But suppose that they both dereference their pointers before speaking:

Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test: this event generates acoustic vibrations]."
Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not match [membership test: this event generates auditory experiences]."

Now there is no longer an apparent collision - all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound. If "acoustic vibrations" came into dispute, we would just play Taboo again and say "pressure waves in a material medium"; if necessary we would play Taboo again on the word "wave" and replace it with the wave equation. (Play Taboo on "auditory experience" and you get "That form of sensory processing, within the human brain, which takes as input a linear time series of frequency mixes.")

Besides the original essay linked and quoted above, there's elaboration on the value of the exercise here.

Edit: For example, were I to begin to contribute to this conversation, I would probably talk about self-awareness, the internal trace of successive experiences attended to, and the narrative chains of internal monologue or dialogue that we observe and recall on introspection - not "consciousness".