But where does the data flow to?
Data flow is just what it says - data flowing from one place to another.
Data flow is not conscious perception
Of course perception is all about data flow; the whole point of perception is to gather information about an oganism's immediate external environment so that appropriate responses can be triggered. To simplify a complex phenomenon, just consider visual perception and how we see. Light is not merely some homogenous form of radiation, it is always chock full of information about the last thing it encountered. Light cannot pass through us but the information in it does, it interacts with us courtesy of light sensitive proteins in a retina initially and then by successive transformations as the information flows through ganglia, twin optic nerves, both hemisphere's occipital lobes and then back and forth many times between visual cortex, thalamus, amygdala, neocortex and more. Hundreds of years ago we might have imagined that if we cut open a head we would expect to find the eyes connected to a central component in the brain; also connected to this would be auditory channels originating from the ears. This, we would proclaim, is the organ of the self, the soul, see how it receives information directly from sense organs. Now we know this understanding is naive, things are way more complex. There is no single central organ to be in receipt of sensory information, there is no single entity of awareness, but rather what we experience (as vision, say) is the phenomenology of information flowing through us as it propagates through the brain.
To look at something is the simplest thing in the world, but underlying that apparent simplicity is an information processing system of phenomenal complexity. It is a conceptual fail to imagine that there must be some singular entity within us somehow 'watching' all that information flow coming along the optic nerves - if that were the case then that entity would need to have its own internal visual system. Invoking some mythic internal entity boils down to the same class of fail as invoking god to explain bigger matters - it is an apparently simple way out of something hard, near impossible, to understand, but these simple explanations always turn out to be irrational when examined.
