I'm simply suggesting that we try seeing where we go if we reject this hypothesis and instead treat consciousness as a thing that itself has survival utility. Doing so does cause dualism to creep in awfully quickly, but I'm not really so ideologically committed to pure physicalism that I'm unwilling to take the thought experiment seriously.
What you've stimulated for me is the question of whether brains and their processes could have the same utility without the quality of interiority? We can make obvious observations like "the pain of intense heat incentivizes the animal to stop touching fires". Was it necessary that the animal feel the pain, or could the exact same behavioral modification have been duly recorded in some neural adjustment without the interior experience?
My personal intuition is that 1. it is possible for a machine with the right interfaces running a sophisticated enough turing machine to replicate the above, and 2. such a turing machine would not have the same quality of interiority that we have. This suggests that consciousness doesn't have some inherent utility. Except! From my internal observations, consciousness seems to have the quality that it focuses inputs and computation. I filter out noise, center my reasoning/recall/attention on one or two things at a time. Perhaps this ability to filter and focus allows for more peak "thought" or "processing" given equal grey matter mass or energy input. So my thesis is that the evolutionary advantage of consciousness is that it was a software based way to extract more performance out of brains given hardware limitations.
The philosophical objection to the idea that consciousness is functional is that, it this were so, then consciousness would be able to affect the physical world. I feel this way, and because (and ONLY because) I felt that way I move my arm. But how did my actual "feeling" of anything cause my neural network to exhibit different outward behavior than it would have had I not felt anything at all?
From there, the claim is that you need to import dualism (by saying that the world of feelings somehow communicates back with the particles that and energy that make up the neurons).
I don't think that's the only way to solve the problem, but it's a common objection.
fixed that for me. too late for edit.