What is the Consciousness according to Bhagavad Gita?

Consciousness is a quality of a substance that is different to matter.

We can call the substance anti-matter, non-matter, superior substance, or spiritual substance, the name is not so important as the fact that it is completely different to matter.

It is alive, and conscious, while matter is unconscious and dead.

Life is evident by observing it’s effect on matter - birth, growth, maintenance, by-products, dwindling and death. This is well known, and conscious accompanies life. We are alive and conscious because we are different from matter. We are a small spark of this superior substance and we are embedded in a material body.

Through the material body we interact with the world, but the material body is a machine only, made of matter. We are the life and consciousness of the machine. We are in our machine of a human being, someone else is in a machine called elephant, someone else mosquito, shark, tulip, there are millions of machines in which life is present. Wherever there is life there is consciousness. Consciousness is one of the qualities of this superior energy. It is the capacity to be aware of, or to know something. It’s one of the qualities that distinguishes something living from something dead.

However brilliant and artificially intelligent a computer is, it will never become conscious because it will always be dead. It can mimic a human’s response to a stimulus, but it has no senses. We have eyes and a way to transmit what passes in front of the eyes to the brain, and we have a mind that interprets what goes to the brain, but we see because we have the sense of sight. We are aware of what we see because we are conscious.

A machine can record what passes in front of a lens, it can interpret the images and respond accordingly, but in all of this, the machine doesn’t see anything

because it doesn’t have the sense of sight,

because it’s not conscious,

because it’s not alive,

because it consists purely of inferior energy, matter, and has no superior energy incorporated in the unit.

Consciousness is inherent in the superior substance and cannot be separated from it any more than wetness can be separated from water.

More details are in Bhagavad Gita.

O son of Bharata, as the sun alone illuminates all this universe, so does the living entity, one within the body, illuminate the entire body by consciousness. 
PURPORT 
There are various theories regarding consciousness. Here in Bhagavad-gita the example of the sun and the sunshine is given. As the sun is situated in one place but is illuminating the whole universe, so a small particle of spirit soul, although situated in the heart of this body, is illuminating the whole body by consciousness. Thus consciousness is the proof of the presence of the soul, as sunshine or light is the proof of the presence of the sun. When the soul is present in the body, there is consciousness all over the body, and as soon as the soul has passed from the body there is no more consciousness. This can be easily understood by any intelligent man. Therefore consciousness is not a product of the combinations of matter. It is the symptom of the living entity. Bg 13.34 
Bg 7.4 - Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego-all together these eight constitute My separated material energies. 
Bg 7.5 - Besides these, O mighty-armed Arjuna, there is another, superior energy of Mine, which comprises the living entities who are exploiting the resources of this material, inferior nature.

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