evolution

[Angrboda]

I will repeat for the dumb and hard of hearing.  Machines do not have consciousness.  They are not aware.  As to consciousness having advantages, you seem to be misinformed about the credibility of debate.  I'm sure your mind is closed to debate, but that's a you problem, not a fact about the debate.  There are basically two possible things going on with consciousness.  A) the things in consciousness have effects that flow downward from consciousness to the rest of the brain.  B) the things in the brain that are not conscious have effects that flow up into consciousness.  Your errant machine analogies, as flawed as they are, do nothing to resolve this question as machines do not have anything that can credibly be demonstrated to be like consciousness in humans or any other animal.  And your other closed-minded notions like model-control theory cannot be demonstrated because you have not isolated comparable systems in the brain and tied them to consciousness.  A primary obstacle to doing so is lack of any identification of the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness.  What you have is a bundle of conjectures and theories and no actual way to tie them to brains and actual consciousness.  You may think that doesn't open the door a crack to allow for debate, but that's because you're full of shit.

That's you being unconvinced by a given explanation for and of self awareness in humans.  I'm totally onboard.  

I agree that the distance between ourselves and any minimally self aware machine is vast.  The distance between that minimally self aware machine and any unaware but otherwise identical machine is comparatively minor.  I suspect it's both A and B.  Minimally self aware machines all have at least one ability A.  I think it's impossible to maintain, with certainty, that every real or purported ability of a specifically human self awareness is in set A.  I think we have at least one ability A, though.  That we can attend to and direct our attention at least as well as a sorting machine on a factory track.  That this confers advantages to us just as it confers advantages to that machine - even if those advantages don't really explain why it's there.

If, for example, as Vulcan put it, a specifically human self awareness is a bob ross thing.

And yet the machine does it entirely without any awareness. You've refuted your own arguments. Describing machines as aware is an analogy, an analogy which is strained far past the breaking point when you attempt to use it as a basis for conclusions about animal consciousness. Regardless of where one may come down in terms of beliefs about machine consciousness, indisputably the mechanism by which we attend to things is significantly different from the way a machine attends to things that the analogy is rendered impotent. We have attentional processes at some abstract level in the brain. Whether consciousness controls such processes or is controlled by them is not resolved by clumsy and stupid analogies to sorting machines. If machines are in any meaningful sense aware, it is painfully obvious that they are aware in a different way than we are. You cannot draw conclusions based on machine awareness because it and animal consciousness are distinctly different processes. That you think you can naively draw a line from one to the other simply suggests a lack of competence in navigating the subject.