The lede:

What I find really useful about breaking apart the purpose of consciousness like this is that we can imagine evolving from simpler forms of consciousness to more advanced forms.

This got me wanting to write out my hypothesis for how we evolve their most advanced consciousness purpose, self-consciousness. Excuse me.

I like to think of self-consciousness as recursion where your cognitive processes are an input to your cognitive processes. In computer science, tail recursion can be used to create loops, loops are required for turing completeness, and machines that want complex and competitive behavior will be turing complete. So it makes sense that brains would sometimes evolve to process a series of stimuli using recursion and then eventually use that recursive ability to process itself as if it were stimuli.