Mine was a straight question you should be able to answer directly for any debate to go forward, not any "rhetorical move" nor any "approach" involving anything. Any rhetorical moves or approaches of mine, reductive or not, conceding or refuting, would come after your answer but couldn't come before it because your point needs this disambiguation.

So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything could be implied, define what consciousness is to you in a way you don't consider reductive, so we can clearly see what there would be to reduce at all.

>reductive approaches to consciousness

There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient.

If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different animals. You have to explain what consciousness is in that framework, and not from your own subjective experiences.

I'm not aware of anyone lacking all those experiences who isn't brain dead. What does approximating an experience by a machine mean? A chatbot can pretend to be cold. It can't actually feel cold as it has no body.

I'm sorry, then what was that "more scientific" reason you gave for?

The basis is that this is what we know to be human consciousness is to a degree relateably similar to our own. I do see your point but IMO, a dramatically different form of 'consciousness' comes with the risk of being something completely different from what we consider 'consciousness'. One of the great challenges with speaking about 'Self-awareness' aka consciousness (sometimes incorrectly confused with sentience, sapience, phenomenal experience etc) in AI is that we largely lack the vocabulary to properly capture the mutli-dimensional phenomena that most understand simply as 'consciousness'. IMHO, an ant or dog is 'conscious' in that it can perceive the outside world and make decisions about how to respond to it or operate within it... but we know that we operate at a different level of self-awareness including metacognition. Other forms of 'consciousness' will certainly manifest in future AI systems and perhaps already have but the models and architectures of today lack a number of key features that a human like consciousness would be based upon... a short list might include a persistent, unified self-model across time; continuous learning and development, embodied perception, interaction with the world; intrinsic goals, drives, emotions and deeply integrated metacognition—awareness of its own thoughts, uncertainty, attention, and intentions.

I think you would have to justify why humans share a kind of consciousness that is tangibly different from AI while maintaining that we have no apparent means of discriminating between the two. It would seem that it's a difference without meaning.

Do you not think humans are conscious?