I think you’re getting hung up on the words rather than the content. While our definitions of terms may be rather vague, the properties I described are not cyclically defined.

To be aware of the difference between self means to be able to sense stimuli originating from the self, sense stimuli not from the self, and learn relationships between them.

As long as aspects of the self (like current and past thoughts) are able to be sensed (encoded into a representation which the mind can work with directly; in our case neural spike chains) exist and senses which compare those senses with other senses or past senses and finally that the mind can learn patterns in those encodings (like spiking neural nets) then it should be possible for conscious awareness to arise. (If you’re curious about the kind of learning that needs to happen you should look into Tolman-Eichenbaum machines, though non-spiking ones aren’t reallly capable of self learning)

I hope that’s a clear enough “empirical” explanation for you.

As for qualia, you are entirely wrong. What you describe would not prove that my raw experience of green is the same as your green, only that we both have qualia which can arise from the color green. You can say that it’s not pragmatic to think about that which cannot be known, and I’ll agree that qualia must be represented in a physical way and thus be recreatable in that persons brain, but the complexity of human brains actually precludes the ability to define what actually is the qualia and what are other thoughts. The difference between individuals likely precludes the ability to say “oh when these neurons are active it means this” because other people have different neural structures, similar? Absolutely, similar enough that for any experience you could find exactly the same neurons that would fire the same way as in someone else? Absolutely not.

Your last statements make it seem like you don’t understand the diffference between learning and knowledge. LLMs don’t learn when you use them. Neither do most modern chess models. They actually don’t learn at all unless they are being trained by an outside source who gives them an input, expects an output, and then computes the weight changes needed to get closer to the answer via gradient descent.

A typical ANN trained this way does not learn from new experiences furthermore, it is not capable of referencing its own thoughts because it doesn’t have any.

The self is that which acts, did you know LLMs aren’t capable of being aware they took any action? Are you aware chess engines can’t do that either? There is no comparison mechanism between what was and what is and what made that change. They cannot be self aware the same way a program hardcoded to kill processes other than itself is unaware. They literally lack any sense of their own actions directly. Once again, you not only need to be able to sense that information, but the program then needs a sense which compares that sensation to other sensations and learns the differences, changing the way it responds to those stimuli. You need learning.

I don’t reject the idea of machines being conscious, in fact I’m literally trying to make a conscious machine just to see if I can (which yeah to most people sounds insane). But I do not think we agree on much else because learning is absolutely essential for any thing to be capable of a conscious action.

What measurable neurological means?

We also can't know "for certain" that a rock isn't screaming silently, or that there isn't a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. Science doesn't deal in absolute certainties; it deals in probabilities based on evidence. There is zero evidence for plant consciousness and massive evidence against it.

Consciousness, as far as we observe it in the entire animal kingdom, is an emergent property of a centralized nervous system processing information. Plants lack neurons, a brain, or any substrate capable of integrating information into a unified experience.

Claiming a plant might be conscious is like claiming a calculator might be running Call of Duty. It’s not that we "don't know", it's that the hardware simply cannot run that software.

Evolutionarily, consciousness (and specifically the ability to feel pain or fear) is a mechanism to trigger escape or avoidance. Since plants are sessile (they cannot move), developing a complex, energy-expensive system to "feel" damage would be a massive evolutionary disadvantage. Why would nature select for an organism that can feel being eaten but do absolutely nothing about it?

Your definition of consciousness as any "internal state correlating to external state" is functionally too broad; by this metric, a mercury thermometer possesses a "world model" and is therefore conscious, which renders the term useless for distinguishing complex biology from simple causality. Phenomena like crown shyness are better explained by mechanical feedback loops, essentially biological if/then statements based on light and abrasion, rather than a self-aware "sense of self." A true "thought" or "world model" requires the capacity for "offline" simulation (counterfactuals) decoupled from immediate sensory input, whereas plants are entirely reactive ("online") and current AI lacks continuous internal state. Ultimately, you are conflating reception (reflexive data intake) with perception (integrated awareness), failing to distinguish between the mechanism of a map and the subjective experience of the territory.