I think that you and those you see as your opponents may simply be talking past each other. You define consciousness so that being conscious logically guarantees being aware of your surroundings. In arguments about external-world skepticism, consciousness has traditionally been given a weaker definition, a definition that doesn't logically guarantee being aware of your surroundings. In the classic evil demon scenario, your conscious mental states are caused by the evil demon and not by your surroundings (not even indirectly). You're conscious -- that is, you're not in the midst of an experiential blank -- but your conscious states are unreliable indicators of your surroundings. Sometimes the term "perception" is used to distinguish conscious states that reliably represent the environment from conscious states that represent it unreliably .

I hasten to add that it takes a lot of argument to get from (1) the admission that consciousness can be inaccurate to (2) the conclusion that we never achieve external-world knowledge via our conscious states. I don't find any of those arguments compelling, but even so the refutation of skepticism isn't as easy as alleging that skeptics misuse the word "consciousness."