I would assume these researchers are well aware of such problems. I still think it's very important to research it.
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...
Ketamine is indeed safer than many other anesthetics in terms of the risk of respiratory depression, which is why it is a common choice for veterinary anesthesia. However, it's not uniformly better than more conventional anesthetics. Its half-life is substantially longer than that of propofol, so it actually takes longer to recover from. There is also some evidence that repeated administration of ketamine can produce brain damage, although it's unclear whether this is clinically relevant.
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 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...