I have been reading about these 'consciousness' issues a lot. And there are many books that give the impression that the genesis of a self-awareness can be understood, yet I never did!

Until I read "The crucible of consciousness - an integrated theory of mind and brain" by Zoltan Torey. Right there in the first few pages it clicked in my brain.

Most investigators agree that the development of language was crucial to the development of self-awareness. Why is that? Well language provided two capabilities: firstly, it made it possible to refer to one self. "I feel that this is wrong." 'I' and 'wrong' are all symbols; language made it possible to talk in symbols. "Food", "he", danger", all symbols for something. Secondly, while you think about the symbols, and construct language to refer to them or to discuss them, there is a rapidly oscillation-like attention-shift in your higher brain center between the symbols that we perceive, and the verbal constructs that refer to them. We are conscious of this oscillatory attention-shifting, and it is this awareness that makes us aware that there is 'something' inside us that is 'us'.

This processing is not going on on-line, so to say. It's like an independent 'think tank', if you will, which can run on itself, and then we are absorbed in thought, but still using symbols that we also use if we would put our musings on-line and spoke them. It is telling that when you think, you think in 'language', i.e. in symbols that are words or word-percept combinations.