Comment by RaftPeople

> but I find it almost as hard to see why evolution did.

Ignoring the concept of consciousness, it seems that self-awareness would be a strong attribute related to survival. It seems like it would help drive or amplify critical emotional states (e.g. my own survival, competition/success, love for self and relatives, etc.)

I can't see anywhere in the LLM machinery that would support the notion of self awareness in advance of the token selection process.

Possibly it could be argued that during token selection internal state is included and the result functionally looks like self awareness was included in the process, but that seems unconvincing.