You can't have looked at a lot of serious science, TIA. It's often tedious to read and packed with long words and convoluted sentences and diagrams. Literary genii like Darwin, Asimov, Stephen Gould and so on are sadly few and far between. That doesn't invalidate the science, just distances it from the informed public.

As for testing consciousness, in fact there's a lot of work going on in that, that shows (unsurprisingly perhaps) that it's a very strange beast- it is discontinuous (so in fact you or I are not conscious for much of the time, even when awake), it keeps changing- what you perceive is a bit like a story that you tell yourself, and it changes in the telling, that it isn't instantaneous, but takes time to develop, and so on. Much of this can be measured and quantified, in seconds, units of change etc. So, as a science, it's definitely started.