I've sometimes wondered if consciousness is something like a continuous internal narrative that naturally arises when an intelligent system experiences the world through a single source (like a body). That sounds similar to what you're saying.

Regardless, I think people tend to take consciousness a bit too seriously and my intuition is consciousness is going to have a similar fate to the heliocentric model of the universe. In other words, we'll discover that consciousness isn't really "special" just like we found out that the earth is just another planet among trillions and trillions.