Do you believe in consciousness? If you do what exactly would you define it as? and what evidence do you have for its existence?

Why are you asking this group instead of performing your own research?

There is plenty of online literature on this topic. When you ask such open-ended questions with no supporting material your questioning comes across as parasitical.

Instead of answering your questions I'll suggest a way of thinking about consciousness that you might be able use to direct your research.

I'll start with the context principle, context creates meaning and in its absence there is no meaning. So to identify consciousness, you must adopt the right context. Also, different contexts may result in different meanings of consciousness. You should not just identify different definitions of consciousness, you should also identify which contexts they are valid within.

The ideal would be to find the context that allows you to define the essential entities and relationships of consciousness. This will give you a domain model for consciousness. This domain model is an abstraction layer, hiding its implementation details. This abstraction will almost certainly be leaky, which would help explain the origin of qualia as lower level abstractions leaking through to the consciousness abstraction.

The separation of the consciousness domain model from its context will be tricky. For example the qualia of the color red is a lower level abstraction than consciousness. The label "red" for this qualia is culturally dependent and is a higher level abstraction than consciousness. Somewhere in the middle is our ability to "think" about red and its qualia in a conscious way.