It's probably easier to think of consciousness as "learned". That is, we have these brains that can extract patterns from noisy or sparse inputs, and the notion of a "self" is just something it learned to recognize. The rest of the "common sense" that guides our course through the world is basically just adaptation and learnings of how to preserve that self in a given environment.

It's interesting to think of situations where the self becomes subordinate... family, sex, certain types of anger, etc. There are some old and deep patterns in the brain that can override the control of "self"... and they roughly correspond to very primitive parts of the brain that govern simpler and essential fight or flight mechanisms.