evolution

[Angrboda]

Might be in the same territory there as the difference between facts of evolution and the theory of evolution.  It's an observed fact that self awareness is advantageous.  You can see this in life and you can see it in machines.  You can test the conjecture.  We can build identical machines except for the presence, in one, of self monitoring inputs.  We can render a human being unconscious or impaired and drop them in the jungle (or just watch them do it to themselves in the proverbial concrete jungle).

The hypothesis, here, is that this observable fact itself accounts for the existence and persistence of self awareness in living organisms up to and including in human beings.

No. There is plenty of reason to believe that consciousness is fully or partially epiphenomenal. Utility is not observed but inferred from assumptions about the role consciousness plays in our behavior, and those assumptions are far from proven. It's a hypothesis, not a fact, observed or otherwise. That you believe in a specific plausible explanation for consciousness does not make that explanation true. That's your ego talking. And the analogy to machines is false on multiple levels. Machines do not have consciousness. That's merely you believing the stories you've told yourself, not reality.