I don't mean to suggest that animals don't also have consciousness, or that it's not important to explaining their behavior too.
Descartes was a genius, but he was no Alan Turing, and Alan-fucking-Turing got it wrong on the most famous thing named after him (among the lay population at least). The Turing Test was a great idea, but it’s now trivially useless.
Humans are special to (mostly) themselves and (substantially) other humans.
They are not special to the universe. We’ve had this argument, it was called the “Inquisition” at least once, and we eventually cleared up once and for all what celestial body rotates around the bigger one.