There are some criteria for saying of some organism or state that it is conscious.
Consciousness involves experience or awareness.
Human mental life has a phenomenal side, a subjective side that the most sophisticated information-processing system might lack. To paraphrase Thomas Nagel, there is something it is like to be in a conscious mental state , something it is like for the organism itself. Conscious mental states are heterogeneous in phenomenal kind. The modern naturalistic consensus is that only some mental processes are conscious and that all mental events and processes are physical. That is, all mental states have neural realizations in Homo sapiens .