I don’t see why not. The only reason the two go hand-in-hand for humanity is that evolution by its very nature favors self preservation (or at least preservation of the species). If you had a conscious mind that was a product of design rather than evolution then you could simply create it to be indifferent to its own fate.
I like the way you’ve framed self awareness in terms of a modality in which one layers ‘meaning’ onto the universe. A minimal expression of this might be that for self awareness to be an emergent property of a system that processes information, the system must be actively parsing what is ‘self’ and what is ‘other’. It can’t be indifferent to this distinction. If the system exhibits value-based decision making behaviors that can impact survival (i.e. if the question is even relevant), then the fact that the ‘self’ is perceived may mean that it’s a small step to the expectation that the ‘self’ will be treated as having an effective value (or a cost).
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