The Senses Require Consciousness

Not even combined can any of the senses allow someone to reflect on the senses and the perceptions they generate.  For this to occur, there must already be a mind without which the senses are inactive and incapable of supplying perceptions of the outside world, whether accurate or inaccurate in how closely those perceptions resemble it.  The senses do not give rise to consciousness, for they can only exist if a consciousness experiences them!  Consciousness is therefore something more foundational to life.  The senses are neither whatever physical objects they might give information about nor the source of all perception.  In fact, they are not even the same thing as the body they are integrated with; they are ways of experiencing perceptions of physical environments.

The senses clearly have a distinct relationship with the body: if a consciousness resides in a body and experiences sensory perceptions, that will impact what it is like for it to inhabit its body.  What the senses will never do is define the very nature of consciousness.  At most, the nature of the senses is that they allow a mind to experience perceptions of things that at least seem to exist or take place externally.  These perceptions fill the mind with different kinds of experiences that it otherwise would not have, but they are not an inherent part of consciousness in the sense that a mind without senses entirely logically possible.  It is the senses that need the mind, not the other way around!

If consciousness was the senses, it also would be impossible for anyone to imagine or think about the concept of something because senses do not think.  They only provide perceptions, which could be largely misaligned with the external world, and require additional types of conscious experience to reflect on those experiences.  In turn, consciousness would be blank and devoid of knowledge without grasping the laws of logic.  None of these things are identical, yet it is easy to find people who at least talk as if they are the same, even if they actually have thought about the metaphysics of phenomenology enough to have realized these things must be separate aspects of reality.

Ultimately, the senses cannot intake or generate perceptions without a conscious mind doing the perceiving, but a mind does not need senses to perceive at least itself (its thoughts and introspective states) and basic logical truths, as it could think and reason out certain things all left to itself.  It takes an enormous amount of stupidity to conflate consciousness with the senses when the latter is just an extension of the former.  Without senses, what a mind cannot do is experience certain perceptions of outside stimuli.  That is all.  It is entirely erroneous to think that because the senses are such a vital part of human life that they are what makes up the mind.  Even though daily life involves the senses to a significant extent, the whole set of them is only a secondary component of consciousness after the grasp of logic and purely psychological experiences that can only take place within a mind.