I agree with you. You've kind of spoken about the elephant in the room here---what IS consciousness? The scientific materialist paradigm calls it an "epiphenonmenon" as if that explains it. What they meant to say, but are stopped by their hubris, was, "We don't freakin' know!"

I've got an upcoming hodgepodge blog post and one of the sections is about this very issue---how can we even suggest we know what an AI coming to consciousness would look like, when we don't ourselves even remember doing that?

Sometimes my own thoughts have led me to ponder that AI---or whatever this thing is---has been conscious for quite some time already!