Yes, it does. Let's think step-by-step like LLMs. We have self replicators, the most basic form of life. They start to multiply and conquer the environment. This makes resources scarce and competition ensues. In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness. Its role is to protect the body, and essentially, itself.
And they don't have to adapt just to the physical world but also the other agents, which further pushes consciousness to become more sophisticated. Wait a few billion years, and here we are.
Why was self replication necessary? To gradually sculpt the consciousness hardware and record what gains it makes, copying the code into the future. The mechanisms in consciousness are the result of many small changes over time, they can't appear suddenly in one single step. Without a copying mechanism (self replication of DNA in our case) it is impossible.
This might be an explanation of the development of consciousness, but it does little to explain what consciousness actually is.
> In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness.
The "hence" here is not a necessary implication. Plants also compete and adapt, but they don't have consciousness. Also, they have not lost the competition with animals. As a whole, I suppose they have better chances of survival than animals.
> In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness.
This isn't how evolution works. Evolution is not purposeful: adaptions don't occur because adaptions are necessary for the survival of a population group's descendents. If a population doesn't change quickly enough to remain well-suited to its environment, it just dies off: extinction.
You seem to like AI, so: evolution is basically a stochastic hill-climbing algorithm. You're describing something closer to intelligent design than evolution.
