While I take your meaning I'm not sure this is a helpful path forward.

We're not fully sure what conciousness is or how it happens. We could split hairs about sentience, sapience, emergent properties, etc, and maybe even do so meaningfully but our semantics, today, will remain necessarily continental. Even if we progress our understanding beyond that point and discover real answers to those hard questions... Will we be able to define the boundaries between states? Will we be able to even sat such boundaries exist?

Addressing your argument directly: can sentience exist apart from perception of environment? I'd say it must. If so then how is sense and reaction an indicator such a system carries within it a theory of mind? It can't be. It's not enough.

The cart is firmly in front of the horse in all discussion and debate of LLMs as concious, sentient, or sapient. Partly because such claims in the affirmative are not yet testable (nevermind falsifiable) claims and, more to the point of the discussion at hand, partly because we do not know what it is we are talking about.

Anyone claiming otherwise is guilty either of magical thinking or of peddling snake oil and, in either case, has misjudged the importance of first answering more fundamental lines of inquiry.