Maybe I am missing something, but looked at in terms of biological evolution, this does not seem hard at all.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how consciousness can convey survival advantages. I'm pretty sure I have gone into detail when responding to one or more of your other articles so I shan't repeat myself.
Anything that, when manifested partially or completely, conveys survival advantage, can come about as a result of biological evolution. Nature has had many hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution on earth. Those time spans are so huge our minds can only encompass them in the driest intellectual sense. Given all that nature is fully capable to have brought consciousness about through the grinding of biological evolution. As Dostoyevsky said in Notes From Underground, nature does not ask our leave. She does not care if we understand how the consciousness she has wrought "works" or if we think it "makes sense" any more than she cares if we object to the "spooky action at a distance" aspects of the world of subatomic particles. We posit those particles in order to explain to ourselves what we are seeing when we examine smaller and smaller slices of the universe, because we need a story in order to do so. Now we are back at narrative consciousness. Our consciousness IS narrative. Every time we look at something we backfill the object's narrative. I look at my coffee maker and everything I know or think I know about coffee makers clicks into place. You can easily see the survival advantage if you replace "coffee maker" with "tiger."
Again, she doesn't care if we "understand." Maybe some day we will, maybe not.