I've gone back and forth with AI on this stuff quite a bit, and there are many, many theories of consciousness, which is why when you were vague about the "more core" concepts, I asked for which ones specifically.

And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.

Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.

Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.

Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.

In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.