I am not certain you can directly link evolutionary pressures to (if you believe the model) a purely emergent phenomenon. Now, I don’t think anything is pure anything, but the thought is that once you reach a certain level of “complexity” (define that!) that awareness/consciousness/whatever term you use “just arises.”
https://mathrising.com/?p=1286
It is all highly theoretical and even the term used are not real well defined, add in the fact that we are dealing with an N of 1 in terms of models we are “sure” are conscious, it lends itself poorly to definitive experimentation and well to speculation.
