What is it like to be a bat?

I agree that when I see the word "tiger" on paper and a screen, I am looking at something that refers to a tiger. And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for spectograms, oscilliscopes, photos on screens, etc etc. But the word "tiger" only refers to a tiger because a mind make the connection between the word and the thing in my mind. Without that connection, it really is just a bunch of ink on a page. There is nothing inherent in the shape of the ink's squiggles that make it refer to a tiger.

It is not a question of "different levels and frameworks" of description in this case, or at least not solely. The examples of clouds and lightning given in the paper are not valid parallels (I know the paper doesn't offer them as parallels, but your comment did), because they do not need relations with other things to be water droplets and discharges of electricity. But a word needs a relation with something else (its referent) to be a word, otherwise it is just meaningless squiggles, sounds or pixels. And the word does not have this relation in and of itself: only a mind can give it this relation.

(You can take relation and reference as largely synonymous for the purposes of this comment.)

You can analyze the squiggles as closely as you like, but you will still not find any relation to a tiger, unless you have something else (a mind) giving it that relation. And again, the same is true for the other examples you give. Extrinsic relations exist between word and thing or oscilliscope and wave, but not intrinsic ones.

In the same way, the brain's state when it thinks of a tiger is, in and of itself, a bunch of chemical and electric states that bear no intrisic relation to a tiger. No amount of analysis of the brain's state will change this. As I stated somewhere else, a tiger and a brain state, like a tiger and the word "tiger", are two entirely different things, and are not intrinsically related to each other. You can analyze either the tiger or the brain state with whatever sophisticated technology you want, but that will not change this fact. Analyzing a bunch of squiggles will produce information about the ink, but not information about a tiger: you are still looking at ink. Analyzing chemical and electric states will produce interesting and very valuable information about the brain, but not information about a tiger: you are still looking at chemical and electric states. No amount of searching will find intrinsic relation between brain-state and thing. [I think this is also a good argument against Cartesian dualism, but that's beside the point right now.]

The relation between thought and its object must be intrinsic (assuming our thoughts are about, or can be about, reality). It cannot be extrinsic like a word or oscilliscope, because our thoughts are not given their meaning by something outside our minds. (I assume we agree on this last point after "because", and it doesn't need arguing.) Our thoughts' relations to their objects must be intrinsic to the thoughts. But they can't be intrinsic if our thoughts are our brain states, for the reason just given.

(The UMD paper responds to this objection in section 3.8: briefly, my response is that we might get the illusion of intentionality in a physical system like a computer, but no more than that.)

I certainly agree with your assessment that it's got multiple definitions and intuitions of all sorts, and that they cause chaos, and that one way of making progress is by isolating those out and clarifying.

I'm not sure I agree with this idea that the essence of consciousness is self-reflection, because that seems to exclude important things. It seems like there might be simple states of being that involve some kind of phenomenal (in the philosophy sense) experience, some amount of qualia, some amount of outwardly directed awareness, some amount of "something it's like to be". And it seems to me that there might be life forms for whom there's an engagement with an interaction with that phenomena that involves having internal mental states, but that might not necessarily have self-reflection. It might be something closer to instinctual functioning or response to incentive. It recently blew my mind to learn that there's studies strongly suggesting honey bees are conscious. And from my perspective that raises questions for things all the way down to fruit flies. It seems like there might be a continuum a simple states through complex ones and that some of the simpler ones might not include self-awareness.

If such a thing as sense of self is necessarily implicit in such a way that satisfies that definition, anytime we talk about qualia, then it would seem to be a moot point. Which raises another issue, which is that some of these things might be correctly regarded as entangled, and having an integral relation between them.

I also think I kind of agree and disagree about qualia being well defined. I think it's probably the closest to what most people have in mind when they say there's no such thing as a definition of consciousness. And I think it's a sense of despair toward the broader research project of tying an understanding of qualia to an understanding of the physical world that relies on third-person descriptions.

Now all of that said you seem like you don't have an attitude of treating the definition problem as one that preempts and stops everything, so there's a pretty fundamental way in which I'm probably in agreement with you more than disagreement. I think that clarifications of the type that you're talking about give us everything we need to iterate forward in a constructive way in talking about it and researching it.

Neuroscience denialism is fascinating to me. It flies under the radar because we mostly hear about global warming denial, evolution denial or flat earther denial. But we have mountains of evidence of wakeful mental states being tied to measurable effects.

Facial recognition is specific to a particular brain region, clearly tied to a mental event sufficient for working definition of a form of conscious activity, and only active when someone is conscious and picturing or imaging a face. Remarkably, damage to the area responsible for facial recognition can predict faceblindness. That is more than enough for a working definition of conscious activity, and that's just one example from mountains of them.

Others include everything from wakefulness under anesthesia (which can be tested for and predicted based on EEGs), as well as which brain activity distinguish locked-in syndrome from persistent vegetative states. Not to mention mountains of evidence for how physical circumstances predict mental states, everything from psychedelics to iron deficiency.

You can always retreat to the claim that nothing short of direct access to another's subjectivity "counts" but that's not how science works. We don't directly see dark matter either (or electrons or neutrons or magnetic fields etc), we see its effects and build theories around them.