I notice that you didn't object when orthonormal wrote that.

I don't necessarily read everything on LW. I didn't pay all that much attention to the original post, because a wall of text on yet another thought experiment designed to elucidate the nature of qualia wasn't something I wanted to read. But I noticed your comment, and my response, had I made one, to orthonormal's "we'll call this her conscious subgraph" would have been on the same lines.

I'm not sure that identifying consciousness with access to verbal ability is the right way to go, but it is the approach taken "in this line of thinking", and I was trying to explore its implications.

I think that this line of thinking leads nowhere, as every other line of thinking on the subject has done. Maybe I should write a top-level post on this, but it seems to me that no-one, on LessWrong or anywhere else that I've read, has explicitly faced up to the basic problem of consciousness/subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it. You have the unstoppable force of materialism, the fundamental insight that "it's all atoms!", which has successfully solved or dissolved so many questions about the world, and then you have the immovable rock of conscious experience. The two are starkly incompatible. The question is too big to Ignore, Worshipping the mystery isn't an option (and is just a way of Ignoring while pretending not to), but no-one has any idea of what an Explanation could even look like. Every purported explanation of consciousness, on closer examination, turns out to be an explanation of something else, such as how an unconscious system might come to make assertions about consciousness.

I don't have a solution either. Explain, Worship, or Ignore? I can't hit any of those buttons.