That is, it seems pretty clear whether we are with another being in a shared environment doing things together in ways that another being has, like me, a dynamic access to the environment and an ability to communicate it.
If I am walking along with another being, some road, and I ask it: what it thinks of the day; what it thinks about what i'm waring; what it imagines the weather will be like; what it imagines will happen if we keep walking on the road... what it wants out of the day, of life; what advice it has for me...
And if it answers, and its answers "share the world with me" as others do; ie., if I can converse with it about where we all are, and what problems we have, and what we can do about them... then these debates are essentially settled.
It doesnt matter "what else" it has. The being cares, imagines, acts, reasonings, believes, and so on.
The game AI-fantatics here play is to redefine intelligence, consciousness, and the like away from this reality of what we mean and what we want. They do this because machines cannot do this, so they define it to be "whatever they can do". This impoverishes our abilities greatly, reducing "speech" to merely "text generation", as if being in the world were incidental.
No machine has ever participated in the world with us, as we participate in it. Nor has any AI research, in any computer science department, actually offered a programme to do that. It's all just "building a better mouse trap".
printf("I'm conscious!\n");
OK... The compiler will do your job for you, drop the \n and use a puts instead, but, still, it'll be very disappointed with you.