[omnicognate]

Except that for the most part we don't know "how sensory organs encode information as spike trains". This is the problem of "neural coding" and is very much at the stage of unproven hypotheses.

Meanwhile we have abundant evidence that continuous variables such as the precise timing of individual spikes have physiological effects.

[XorNot]

That's just rejecting information processing by one descriptive system and pretending another isn't information processing. Analog computers are possible, just difficult to build and make reproducible in a useful way for mankind.

But then of course, any analog process can be simulated by a sufficiently high fidelity digital one (i.e. digital music encoding). So all you've really got to is "it might take a considerably more powerful computer to fully reproduce the analog effects of human consciousness".