Since LW2.0 went up, on and off. Been meaning to delurk since at least Less Online earlier this year. There's more interesting stuff going on of late!
What do you think of Daniel Böttger's "Consciousness as Recursive Reflections"? If qualia are instantiated as self-sustaining oscillations in the brain, which can merge to form larger patterns of thought that can recursively reflect on themselves, then this is a nonmagical physical process that could be simulated. It seems to me that if that simulation was sufficiently faithful that its oscillations could process information about themselves, those oscillations would be conscious in the same sense that our thoughts are conscious.
In this context, "i" often stands for "index", as in an offset into an array.