Language is not our friend here.

I'm definitely not referring to "self-consciousness" as I know that term — meaning a hyper-awareness of your actions due to a concern with how others perceive you.

I'm thinking of consciousness as some mix of being self-aware and as a necessary property of something in order to be self-aware, which is similar to the above but without the neuroticism.

(You can increase self-awareness. I don't know if you can increase consciousness. Teasing apart the two is a bit too much for the comments section — essay on it's way).

Either way, thinking of consciousness in this way leads to the idea we were playing with that it may have emerged out of a social organism's need to increase it's knowledge and awareness of it's own behaviours — if you think of all the things humans need to do to be socially successful, most of contain some aspect of being self-aware.

I hope that clarifies my thought at least, if not the definitions or the comments above.