Be careful. The medical definition of consciousness is along the lines of ‘aware of and reacting to surroundings’. The definition is objective (observer separate from subject) and applies to all animals including humans. Other objective states include asleep, anaesthetised, comatose, dead, etc.
The term is used here with a quite different intent, to designate a subjective internal state, a kind of ‘brain model of the brain’. This makes a good read: Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).