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We are not viewing our own brain, we are viewing the world processed by our brain.

"Once we accept the indisputable fact that what we are observing in conscious experience is the functional architecture of our own brain..."

Is this really an indisputable fact? What we are observing in conscious perceptual experience is the world as it is processed by the functional architecture of our own brain; it is not necessarily the functional architecture itself. It's one thing for you to think that we are actually seeing the functional architecture itself (different intelligent scientists may have different views on this), but it is a completely different (and entirely more obnoxious) thing to state that this is an "indisputable fact".

This is the central paradigmatic issue!

This is IT! That there is the central paradigmatic issue that I raise. Do we see the world itself, as it is "processed by" our brain? Or is what we see in conscious experience an internal replica of the world? Do we see through perceptual processes, or are those processes themselves our experience?

You are right that different intelligent scientists may have different views on this issue, and they certainly do. But one of those views is right, and the other is wrong. And this epistemological question is by no means inconsequential, it has profound implications on our concept of what the brain computes and why.

According to the naive view, perception is like looking through a warped and dirty windshield. The dirt screens out some of the view of the world, but whatever we do see of the world through the dirty glass, we see it out there in the world where it lies, “as it is processed by” by the dirty windshield. The structure of the world exists independent of us, and our brain plays no part in maintaining it there, our brain simply observes it there.

According to the representationalist view, perception is more like viewing a TV monitor of a remote scene, with the TV camera and monitor being parts of our own physical brain. In this view the world that we experience is entirely a construct of our brain. The world of experience is inside our head, not outside of it. It is part of our selves, not of the external world, and what we see in conscious experience is exactly that representation.

The problem with the naive view is that it finesses the question of the ontology (what it actually is, its ultimate nature) of the volumetric colored structure of our subjective experience. We know our experience is not out in the world itself. In the case of dreams and hallucination and Gestalt illusions that is abundantly clear, and so also for non-illusory perception. But the naive realist says that it is not in the brain either, at least not in the form of a volumetric three-dimensional structure of as high a resolution as we experience. But if the structure of experience is not inside your brain, then why would we experience it as a spatial structure at all? How do I get to experience a structure that is not in my brain?

How would you demonstrate the principle behind this mystical structural perception in an artificial vision system? How could you get an artificial brain/mind to experience a volumetric structure without giving it a volumetric imaging mechanism in its brain? How would you get this artificial brain to see THROUGH its' 2-D photosensor array and experience a volumetric 3-D world out beyond the lens?

Direct perception is just plain magic!

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