I don't think anyone here is arguing with that. Consciousness is always embodied in our own lived experience of it (though many humans have experienced what they cannot explain as intersections with consciousnesses and information that do not originate with a physically present entity of some kind). I think that we unquestionably need to investigate the bodily substrate of consciousness as, in my view, facilitated by the brain. That's why Evan Thompson's Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind is essential reading for researchers of consciousness.
Speech and written language also affect us as meaningful utterances of our fellow humans. Indeed, the manner in which experience and reflections on experience are expressed in language are as significant as -- and in many cases more significant than -- the denotative content of 'what' is being expressed. Poetry is the sublime example of this; political speech is often a debased example when its goals and intentions are to mislead and manipulate its audience toward inferior ends.
Yes, we live in and experience the world at the macro level expressed in what we call classical reality in our zone of the universe's physical being. We have no idea yet how reality as we experience it is informed or enformed by micro processes and relationships deeper in nature (quantum consciousness researchers and other scientists are attempting to discover how the quantum substrate produces the local classical reality we live in). I think those of us participating in this conversation are all interested in all of it.
The key questions are 'what are the units?' and 'how do they -- through the processes of their interaction -- produce the complexity we recognize in nature, life, and consciousness/mind'? For Maturana, Varela, Thompson et al, we need to understand life -- thus biology -- to begin to understand consciousness. We also need to understand developmental systems theory and information theory. How indeed does nature as a system of systems producing life also produce individual consciousness, which we experience, as you say, in a "seamless stream" of our own being and thinking in response to the historically worlded world we live in -- a world brought to its present condition by the confluence of many distinct historically developed culture. These cultures have all developed in and out of the confluence of nature and mind in human history produced socially, by innumerable individual consciousnesses working together and against one another. How can an information-based theory of consciousness of the type presented by Tononi -- where 'information' operates at levels beneath the level of embodied consciousness, ultimately producing consciousness {when? where?} -- account for the history of our species activities and ideas on earth?
I think Tononi does not understand, and thus does not attempt to respond to, the qualitative nature of consciousness that arose at least 50,000 years ago according to some anthropologists (and I would guess far earlier than that). We have only to observe the interactions of members of still-extant species from which we evolved, the protohuman species that eventuated in homo sapiens, to recognize the qualitative nature of their consciousnesses in their behaviors toward one another. See de Waals.
I think it would be more precise to say that processes in the brain and their interconnections enable consciousness and thinking about consciousness and mind, not that those processes "create experience." What creates experience is interaction between conscious beings such as ourselves and the environment in which we exist, in which we begin to move as soon as we can crawl or stand. Exploring the world around us we gradually discover ourselves as consciousnesses involved with the nature that meets (or does not meet) our felt needs and with the others among whom we live and whom we recognize as like ourselves in their consciousness, situation, desires, fears, goals, etc..
I agree.
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