>That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term

While I have a lot of problems with their comment (which I elaborated on in a reply of my own), I don't think that using it as a catch-all term is a problem (to the extent that they would agree with that characterization). In fact, I think it's truer to the spirit of the problem than the definition that you're offering. I think a lot of times when people make the objection that we haven't defined it, they're not just saying we haven't selected from one of several available permutations, I take it to mean that there's a fundamental sense in which the idea itself hasn't agreeably crystallized into a definition, which among other things, is a meta question about which of the competing definitions is the right one to use.

I do think there is a tension in that position, because it creates a chicken and egg problem where you can't research it until you define it, but you can't define it until you research it. But I think there's a way out of it by treating them in as integrally related, and taking a practical attitude of believing in the possibility of progress without yet having a final answer in hand.

I understand that this notion of self-reflecting for some people is key, but I think choosing to prioritize other things can be for good reasons rather than, as you seem to be contending, having accidentally skipped the step of selecting a preferred definition from a handful of alternatives, and not having selected the best one. My feeling is much closer to that of the article, at least in a certain way, which is about the fact that there's "something it's like to be" at all, prior to the question of whether there's self-reflection.

In fact, I'd be curious to know what you call the mental state of being for such things as creatures with a kind of outwardly directed awareness of world, with qualia, with "something it's like to be", but which fall short of having self-reflective mental states. Because if your term for such things is that they don't involve consciousness I think it's not the GP who is departing from appropriate definitions. And if self-reflection is necessarily implied in the having of such things as qualia, then you could say it's implicitly accounted for by someone who wants to talk about qualia.