Quick answer? No. Consciousness, I think, is a term we coined to describe what amounts to having introspective self awareness. I don't think everything has this property. I think we and the other apes have it in degrees. Ours of course being at the top of that list (since we are the only ones who can make such a list).
I think a dog has it, and I think a mouse has it. To varying degrees.
As you say, apes definitely have it. A female gorilla will issue a fake mating call to lure a male away from his food.
I study brains, it's what I do. All the biochem and physics and math are just side shows, hobbies.
What I can tell you is the basic layout of our brains hasn't changed since goldfish. Goldfish have a hippocampus, it works just like ours. (Just fewer cells and not as rich connections).
What we have that they don't, is 20 billion cells in the frontal lobes. I'll ask you to go back and take a look at my thread on consciousness. Any brain with that construction, is capable of introspective self awareness, as long as there are "enough" cells connecting along the timeline. "Enough" turns out to be a very small number, a few thousand could in theory handle it. What we have is a lot of "detail" in our consciousness, due mainly to the large number of cells.
Wuwei seemed interested in this too. The basic plan is actually pretty simple, what we don't yet understand are the "thresholds" needed for criticality. But dogs and cats have demonstrably critical brains, all the power spectra and fractal content are there.
See, this is where the asynchrony becomes super important. When the energy surface changes, it changes everywhere all at once. It doesn't require signal transmission, it's a form of "completion". A single flip of one neuron can change the energy surface network wide, without actually sending any signals. The signal transmission comes afterwards, it's like a neuron raising its hand saying "I did it, it was me".
Because of this, you can have "virtual transmission" from one end of the brain to the other, faster than EM signal could get there. By the time the signal arrives, the information is already in place. All it takes is "enough" neurons, and the math indicates we have enough by several orders of magnitude.
All this without even invoking entanglement, which would add yet another layer of precision. Several important discoveries have been made along these lines, just this week. A study from Harvard uses an anesthetic that binds to microtubules, and it mitigates consciousness without turning off the brain. Another study from Trinity College Dublin uses MRI to show correlations in proton spins related to neuron firing. There is a fellow named Christof Koch who's working with Google, he's a skeptic but a really smart guy (I met him), he takes the opposite view and doesn't believe in completion, he has a project underway with isotopes with varying spins that have differential effects on neurons. These studies are complex and expensive, they're like the particle colliders of neuroscience. Quite beyond the Neuralink.
