There seems to be a trend recently to push consciousness “down the stack” of intelligent behaviours and consider it to be fundamental. As has been pointed out in another comment though, our own experience as humans is that we often perform highly complex tasks requiring intelligent behaviour unconsciously. Driving, or reading for example. Sometimes I’ll drive a route, or read a chapter, but afterwards I won’t be able to tell you what happened on the route, and won’t remember anything I read, because I was thinking about something else at the time, or maybe was just ‘zoned out’.

I suspect that the self reflective aspect of consciousness evolved to help us learn and develop new skills. It’s at least partly for responding to entirely novel situations using new behaviours. But once a new behaviour is embedded we can often do it largely unconsciously. So I don’t see complex behaviours performed instinctively or by rote as indicating conscious thought.