Yes, we're stuck at the first step, defining consciousness. My definition, which I am confident to be "correct", is that consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts - my state of mind and my ability to have state of mind.

This means that consciousness is fundamentally subjective and outside the scope of physics and science. That's why physics / science will always struggle to deal with consciousness. In order to understand consciousness, you need to make a huge paradigm shift, that there's something outside of science.

Consciousness can be thought as a window through which we observe the world and we use science to summarize patterns in our observations. But science can't explain or even define the window. Everything in science eventually boils down to subjective observations / perceptions, e.g. we see (subjective perception) that when we drop an apple, it falls.