For me, it argues that the brain IS the whole story of human consciousness. But also that there is a filter that intervenes between the "raw" sensory input and the conscious mind, telling it whether something "hurt" last time (all the previous times) this sensation happened.

This filter uses (what it can access of) your previous experience to interpret the sensory input, and when the inputs are turned off (sleep), keeps interpreting the noise as sensation- you dream (I dreamed last night that the Bishop awarded me a PhD and membership of the IEE at my mother's funeral).

The fact that it can be SEEN using MRI suggests strongly that we are dealing with fairly "ordinary" physical processes here. No angelometer needed.

As for binary, I thought we'd pickled that red herring months ago. Infinitely graded? Lets settle for "so many states as to be effectively analog", and remember those great analog computers, baroque in their complexity, that the graduate students were allowed to play with back in the 70s.