You do care about the things that philosophically unsophisticated or unphilosophical people claim define “consciousness,” but since you’re a philosophical behaviorist, (or willing to indicate that you’re one), you are performing a thought experiment that eliminates mumbo-jumbo from the debate. Important aspects of self-consciousness are self-reference, and continuity. There are others. We use these things to identify and address competence, accountability, morality, and the likelihood of future morality. Those drivers translate into actions, but there is a lot of illiterate and primitive dickering over the nature of reality that is raised by discussions of consciousness.

Still, the underlying motivators are important. After all, you wouldn’t really want to enter into business agreements with sociopaths or people who are unskilled, as both have motivation to lie, in order to take value from you. The sociopaths might also decide to kill you, if that gave them more monetary value, since they don’t value the moral creation of value, unless they’ve consciously chosen morality by dint of their educational experiences (and even then, maybe not). From a young age, sociopaths learn to lie, and rules and checks and balances are largely ineffectual, due to their presence throughout society. So, intelligent behavior alone might not actually be what you want, since sociopaths can be very intelligent. (If I’m correct in believing you are a reasonably psychologically and socially well-adjusted person.)

Nothing about “consciousness” is really “ungraspable” or “unsharable.” If it were, it would be useless, and it’s not an entirely useless term. Jeff Hawkins takes the same approach you do, though, and eliminates bogus references to “the soul” or “god” or “individual nature” or other unquantifiable phenomena by claiming to be a “zombie” without a “consciousness.” He then says that consciousness is what it feels like to have a neocortex. In some ways, this works, because there are several useful processes going on in the human-nervous-system-differentiated neocortex that produce human-level emotional and logical responses, and that’s what we’re really after.

…But we also don’t want a sociopath that lacks common, and very major typical processes, or a non-self-directed or non-self-referencing “question and answer machine.” At least, not as an end-goal, or an optimal intermediate goal (because that would greatly empower the police state, since they can print up money and access more of anything that can be controlled).

My .02.