Dear Glenn,
You seem to making heavy weather of this.

It is indeed obvious in your NAND gate example that the operation of the gates plays no part in the meaning of the output being about them handling signals (You said recorded which seems the wrong word here but never mind.) It is precisely for this sort of reason that my model is constructed the way it is. I can understand why you might not understand that but I am not sure I can help if you cannot.

It relates to the business about meaning to something in the brain being determined by site and timing of arrival. I agree that most of the neuroscientists who think they are working on consciousness and experience do not actually understand that their entire field is predicated on this. Ramachandran is a good example. He produced a howler about a blind man's brain seeing red when connected by a wire or axon to a seeing man's brain. But if you talk to what I might call real neuroscientists, like Semir Zecki who is perhaps the most eminent vision physiologist alive and worked with Huxley of Hodgkin and Huxley, he would instantly agree with me. A message meaning something like 'there is red to the right of centre' will be carried by a neuron connected to rods to the left of the fovea. These neurons are otherwise exactly like any other sensory neuron in their signalling. So any component of the brain can only know that the signal is supposed to mean red right of centre by the fact that the signal is coming along that path - i.e. by the site where it arrives, since paths to sites of arrival are fixed in brains. There is no 'person' floating about like ectoplasm in the head that can sense an 'assembly' of neurons dancing some strange minuet that means red right of centre. I well remember Semir's account of how ridiculous this sort of idea is. He has a magical twinkle in his eye and he switched it on, accompanied by  raising of eyebrows when he said 'and they all believe it swirls about the cortex and you get IGNITION!!!' (referring I think to Dehaene or Tononi or someone). 

The problem we have in science at the moment is that the dumbed down popular version has more or less completely replaced the real version. The real version has a direct inheritance from Newton (the same dinner table at Trinity where Huxley was Master) and Descartes and his rigorous view of locality. The dumb view spends all its time saying Descartes was a mystic and making the error they accuse him of in a far worse form.

To understand all this you need to sit down and draw diagrams and see what could be possible. It is not easy because the diagrams rapidly get very complicated but it has to work the way I have suggested.