Some currently existing robots also have some representation of themselves, but they aren't conscious at all... I think it is true that the concept of self-model has something to do with consciousness, but it is not the source of it. (By the way, there is not much recursive about the brain modeling the body.)

Animals represent things, but they don't represent their representation.

For me, this seems to be the key point... that conscious entities have representations of their thoughts. That we can perceive them just like tables and apples in front of us, and reason about them, allowing thoughts like "I know that the thing what I see is a table" (because "I see a thought in my brain saying <<table in front of us>>").

Using this view, "conscious" just stands for "able to perceive its own thoughts as sensory input". The statement "we experience qualia" is a reasonable output for a process that has to organize inputs like <representation of: some red stuff we see, attributes: we-are-seeing-this-at-real-time>... This would also explain the fact that we tend to talk about qualia as something that physically exist but we can never be sure that others also have them: they arrive to sensory pathways just like when we see an apple (so they look like parts of reality) but we get to see only our own...

Does this sound reasonable, by the way? (can't wait for the second part, especially if it is dealing with similar topics)