a) Self-perception does not seem like consciousness to me at all. In meditation, if done properly, there is very little self left. It feels more like pure awareness. It is almost the opposite of the model of the self that the brain constructs.
b) I fail to see how the fact that a mechanism refers to itself should somehow give rise to the feeling of conciousness. Why would it? Nobody would predict consciousness from that if we would not already know it exists and it's easy to imagine a device that has a model of itself and is not self-aware.
I understand the need to somehow fit this into our scientific framework, and the idea that "consciousness is just what it feels to have a brain" is the best thing we have, but I don't think it explains anything. There is something we are missing.