[1]
Indeed, after hearing me present a version of the target paper (at TCU in 2014), Michael Tye told me that even on a charitable reading, the claim lacks a truth value. At least, that’s what I understood him to mean.
[2]
It is also possible that something other than consciousness could carry out most (but not all) of the functions consciousness performs in us and other organisms; this is also a debate for another time.
[3]
See Hofstadter 2007, ch. 7, “The Epi Phenomenon”, for a nice analogy in this connection: the illusion of a marble in the center of a box of envelopes arises just from the stacking of the envelopes (with their repeated structure).