Comment by uoaei

Consciousness is only defined in the philosophy of mind as "phenomenological experience", full stop, i.e., "experiencing the color yellow" as something beyond just a certain wavelength incident upon and mechanistic reaction within the organism.

"Consciousness" as defined in colloquial settings, such as the one we inhabit now, is usually substantially more elaborate than thae one used by philosophers and includes things like capacity to develop cognitive models of the outside world and the capacity to reason about their environment having placed themselves within it. I usually reserve the words "awareness" and "sentience" for these two latter concepts to distinguish between the bare experiential aspects which are typically the subject of this kind of discussion and the more familiar everyday (though extremely high-level) experiences we have as intelligent beings.

It's important to maintain the distinction or else discussions very quickly devolve into people talking past each other with differing definitions. It's no surprise people don't know the basics of this when they're not philosophers, and it's only a slight surprise that people on HN will deviate so greatly from these conventions while nonetheless projecting an air of competency.