A person who is sleeping or in a vegetative state is not currently getting new inputs fed into some parts of their brain, so it's not surprising that their brain "lights up differently," nor does it imply anything about a piece of software that is getting new inputs that might be being integrated into its model (of course, a model that is trained and then repeatedly used without further integration is not in any way comparable to a brain).
This more abstract idea of consciousness is definitely not a solved problem - people can't even manage to agree on whether non-human animals have it. And a lot of internet arguments for why this or that neural network can't be conscious probably also rule 5 year olds out of it too.
Just neural circuits are not going to be conscious by themselves, for one they need to learn concepts from the environment and those concepts shape the neural circuits. Thus the way they act shape how they develop. You can't separate consciousness from the environment where it develops.
In other words it was not the neural net that was lacking, but the environment.
The best we can do with humans (and maybe animals) is behaviorism and inference on our own personal consciousness at this point, with brain imaging to demonstrate at least gross prediction of consciousness in humans.
It looks like we’re beginning to get the building blocks of consciousness together. But we don’t yet know how to combine the wave functions into a chorus necessary to achieve GI