1. Your nearest definition of consciousness "emergent properties of lower level functions" or something along those lines doesn't really cut it, either. To say that something is an emergent property of another thing, without showing the steps of that emergence is kind of like defining red as "an emergent property of the sun and a sheet of cellophane". It's HOW it emerges that's the hard question.
2. If you were pleased to hear another person's discovery that "my experience of experiencing is irrefutable", you might like to read Descartes's account from over 400 years ago in his Discourse on Method.
He veered off into some strange and tenuous territory, but the opening of that book is excellent and it uses that discovery (a.k.a. the Cogito - I think, therefore I am) as the first axiom from which to build a whole philosophical system, and it's a really interesting read.
This is the guy who invented algebraic geometry, from which we get the Cartesian plane, and the idea of ordered pairs, which is such a fundamentally useful idea that it's hard to see just how brilliant a discovery it was. He had some things to say about consciousness that have not yet been improved upon.
EDITED to say that the book I was talking about was Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, for anyone interested. He decides, "let's doubt that anything at all exists, just doubt everything - where does that take us?"