I think we're conflating two different things here: establishing what phenomenon we're referring to, and establishing the properties that reliably identify or explain that phenomenon.
I'm referring specifically to subjective experience: what it's like to feel pain, perceive color, experience emotions, dream, etc. We have a meaningful starting point for investigation, even if we disagree about the underlying nature of those experiences.
I agree with your banana example, at least to a point. We can identify bananas without understanding their molecular composition. But notice what you've actually demonstrated: we can recognize instances of a phenomenon without fully understanding what constitutes it...
You can describe the observable characteristics of a banana and use them to identify other bananas. But what happens when you encounter something that shares those characteristics without being a banana, or a banana that doesn't exhibit the characteristics you've chosen? You need to investigate further, potentially refining your classification criteria.
Now consider consciousness. Unlike a banana, subjective experience isn't directly observable by third parties. I can recognize my own experiences, but determining whether another entity has comparable experiences is a different problem entirely. That's why establishing reliable criteria matters.
Your Florgleblorp analogy would apply if I were referring to something for which we had no identifiable phenomenon whatsoever. But that's not what I'm doing. I'm referring to subjective experience, and asking what constitutes it and how we can determine whether it exists in other systems.
I absolutely agree that we need provisional definitions and operational criteria to conduct research. What I reject is treating those criteria as though their validity were established simply because we've agreed to define consciousness in those terms.
Here’s my own example for you: we could define consciousness as the ability to verbally report internal states. That's a perfectly testable definition. But whether it actually identifies subjective experience, rather than merely the ability to produce convincing reports, remains a question. There’s nothing there to differentiate between correlation and causation.
So I'm not arguing that we should investigate something without knowing what we're talking about. I'm arguing that our initial characterization of a phenomenon shouldn't be confused with a validated scientific account of what constitutes it or how to detect it.
If you want to prove consciousness, I stand my ground on the argument that you first need to qualify consciousness as a thing. What is it?
You may find that consciousness is actually something which was deeply misunderstood and unexpected. Such a discovery would allow you to draw genuinely meaningful conclusions about whether or not LLMs can ever truly be conscious. That’s how you form a theory.
You suggested, earlier, that someone may be able to detect consciousness by measuring whether the agent’s observation can collapse a waveform. But quantum mechanics does not establish that consciousness is required to collapse a wavefunction. In physics, an observer is not necessarily a conscious entity. A measurement apparatus can register a quantum event without any human being present. The measurement can occur whether someone watches the results live, reviews them tomorrow, or never examines them. By the same logic, an LLM could pass your hypothesized test.
Simply deciding that LLMs shouldn’t count as conscious, without even truly understanding what qualifies consciousness, is just moving the goalpost. Or bikeshedding, perhaps.