DA: "The problem in falling back on the term "experience" is that it includes the notion of consciousness within itself.."

Yes, superficially there is a tautology which, when pursued leads to a regress.  The regress arguments are central to the problem of consciousness and when we try to explain our experience we immediately confront regression or recursion.  Aristotle's Regress in "On the Soul" is the clearest, and probably earliest, example:

"even if the sense which perceives sight were different from sight, we must either fall into an infinite regress, .." (Book 3, part 2)

The reason that our explanations of experience fall into an infinite regress is that we conceive of the universe as a succession of 3D sets of events, like 3D frames in a movie picture. The outcome of one 3D set is present in the next and so on.  So our explanation of "experience" becomes the transfer of a 3D set of information from the world to the retina to the visual cortex and so on.  The regress occurs because the explanation for knowing the information in one instant can only occur in the next but the next instant is just a 3D set of information so the explanation for knowing the information in this instant can only occur in the next instant.... and so the regress occurs.  Indeed, as philosophers know from the epistemological regress, the "movie frame" idea of time is doomed to regress in all its explanations, including even how events occur outside the body or mind. 

This analysis shows that if we apply the "movie frame" idea of time to our experience then we will fail to explain it, a regress occurs.  This strongly suggests that the "movie frame" or "Alexandrian" (Whitehead 1920) idea of time is fallacious.  Aristotle understood this possibility and completes the phrase quoted above with:

"or we must somewhere assume a sense which is aware of itself. If so, we ought to do this in the first case. "

What is absolutely extraordinary is that even in the first mention of the regress in the history of philosophy the author tells us that there could be other explanations yet the "movie frame" theory of events is so ingrained that philosophers simply ignore the possibility that this theory could be wrong!

Aristotle actually has a stab at explaining a sense which is aware of itself:

"The answer is that just as what is called a 'point' is, as being at once one and two, properly said to be divisible, so here, that which discriminates is qua undivided one, and active in a single moment of time, while so far forth as it is divisible it twice over uses the same dot at one and the same time. So far forth then as it takes the limit as two' it discriminates two separate objects with what in a sense is divided: while so far as it takes it as one, it does so with what is one and occupies in its activity a single moment of time."

This is almost impenetrable unless you realise that he is saying that in the same way as two spatially separated objects can project geometrically to a point so can two temporally separated objects. Perhaps he is envisaging time as a dimension with events laid out as they are in space.

Aristotle clarifies this:

"But that which mind thinks and the time in which it thinks are in this case divisible only incidentally and not as such. For in them too there is something indivisible (though, it may be, not isolable) which gives unity to the time and the whole of length; and this is found equally in every continuum whether temporal or spatial."

It appears that Aristotle has observed his experience and, instead of rejecting it as impossible because theory suggests a tautology, comes up with a version of Minkowski spacetime two and a half millennia before Minkowski.

So, in answer to DA's reply I would reject the "tautology" charge and declare that experience is precisely the place we should look for explanations.  Aristotle suggests that experience has awareness as a result of its spatio-temporal geometry and I would suggest this is a good place to start.  After all, in 1800 AD it could be claimed that the Alexandrian idea of time had swept all other ideas away but in the twenty first century Alexandrian time is only believed by the ill-educated.