> A dog does not claim to be conscious.

So you need to handle that somehow, but you can't just patch dogs (or octopuses) into "conscious" group, because you can draw a straight line between humans and bacteria and, along pretty much any obvious metric you choose, there's thousands if not millions of species of life forms currently existing to uniformly space through intermediary points. If the border between "conscious" and "unconscious" includes humans in the "conscious" set and bacteria in "unconscious", then you need to explain why the two animals closest to it on either side are where transition happens.