If we take a signal like a certain sound that evokes an experience, or we can even ask the person to do some conscious processing based on the sound, the sound could be a question like "what is the color of the sky?". We can follow the signal: We can see first some mechanical preprocessing steps in the ear, then some neural preprocessing steps, and the signal is branched out, lots of different brain areas are probably activated and then again some fine movement post processing steps are done so that the person finally answers "blue".

I think it would be premature say that all the trivial very low level preprocessing steps in the ear are just as a relevant part of the conscious experience of hearing the question, as the understanding of the question.

Say, in a stretched analogy, if someone would like to understand how the computer can calculate some ray tracing or use some compression algorithms, it would not be that important to just understand how on die caches or PCI express lanes work. The important bit is to understand how instructions cause the ALU:s to wrangle the bits in registers, that's the core of the magic, most of the other stuff is relatively trivial pre- and postprocessing.

So in this sense I think the question is well posed.

There's also practical implications. Think if we could have reliable anesthesia (or the hypnosis part of it, you might still need pain killers and muscle relaxants). We might have very few side effects. We would not have to give big doses just to be safe. This could mean much faster recovery after anesthesia. Also costs of anesthesia would drop immensely if it could be even better controlled than it is now. It costs a lot to stay in a hospital. Also if you're unconscious, you have to be taken care of, again tying people...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine

As long as we're on the topic of targeting the claustrum specifically with pharmaceutical agents, I'll point out that the claustrum has a particularly high density of kappa opioid receptors, which are the target of salvinorin A, the active constituent of the psychotropic plant Salvia divinorum [1]. Of course we have no evidence the plant's effects are specifically related to its action in the claustrum.

[1] Smythies, J., Edelstein, L., & Ramachandran, V. (2012). Hypotheses relating to the function of the claustrum. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6. doi:10.3389/fnint.2012.00053

If the claustrum is a junction connecting myriad systems, enabling coordinated forms of mental life, possibly consciousness, then in a sense, it could really be a key to consciousness.

Calling this critical juncture key to consciousness is not saying the claustrum is a theater where a homunculus watches everything come together, or that consciousness happens in the claustrum.

Consciousness is a state of the brain where disparate systems interact, and the claustrum may be key to explaining that coordination in consciousness.

Borrowing the car analogy in the article, the ignition system isn't where a car "runs". Nonetheless, the ignition is key to explaining how everything that comes together to put the car in a running state. I think people are misreading what the investigator meant when he suggests the claustrum might be key to explaining the conscious state.

Am I wrong here? Somebody quote me the passage I'm missing where the investigators say the claustrum is where consciousness happens, rather than just saying that the claustrum may be key to understanding how consciousness happens.

What if instead of a cable junction for AWS, it was more like a clock in a CPU? Then it is part of what "really happens," but only a part.

Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens.

So the example is not that different.

Not quite as much. If the cable junction fails, someone downstream of that junction won't have access to the calculations, but someone upstream of it still will. Whereas, if the clock in a CPU fails, there's no calculations happening anywhere.