You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come
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.
> 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.
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.
Made my day
Some are quite famous, but that’s irrelevant in the face of thousands of years of utter failure to be more than pure entertainment. Try and find any philosophical statement from all that navel gazing which both means something and is generally accepted as true.
Lao Tzu