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and this is a point I will strongly disagree with you on. Self awareness is a state that I think is an important factor in much of the behavior modification necessary for the survival of most animals. I put the border line between self-aware animals and non-self-aware animals in the insects between flies and bees and their reaction to windows. Many fly species will pound their head on a window for days with no change... the fact that they did not succeed at going forward does not stop them from trying again. Bees ants and wasps have to return to their nest for survival but flies just need to find food and have sex... nothing more is required for survival. A bee confronting a window tries once, then tries other windows once, then tries different corners on each window once, then tries walking around the edge of each window. Failure results in a new strategy. For me, this requires the level of thinking that encompasses a will... a plan that changes and is not stimuli-driven. A fly smells food... flies to it. A fly sees another fly... tries to have sex. A bee needs to go into different modes... find flowers, return to the hive, show where the flowers are by a dance, deposit nectar, make a wax lid... these are a lot of different activities with only stimuli based on context of what has happened in the past so memory of events and experience of failure needs to be part of their brain activity. I raise rodents and can see them plan nest structures and build them to a per-visualized plan. When someone else is stealing materials, you can see them get agitated and to also rebuild according to their original plan. This has all the earmarks of deciding to do something based on a plan with a selfish purpose. On the documentary about the making of the IMAX film about beavers, they used tame beavers and put them in a giant abandoned beaver dam lake in Alaska. To their surprise, the beavers were lazy for months and did no cutting down trees. This tells me that dam building is not instinct and beavers are basically lazy. Turns out their main activity when they did start cutting down trees was storing food (tree branches) for winter (poked into the mud of the bottom of the pond). Instinct was obviously involved as these were tame beavers but that is further emphasizing the non-instinct of the dam building. Tool use including mirrors has been used for a test of this "self-awareness". Baboons have a rather big brain and they fail this test. I have set up situations to see gerbils using mirrors as tools and I have seen both cats and dogs use mirrors as tools (I had to train the cat to do starring contests with me first as cats will not look another in the eyes to figure out that it is their reflection).

None of which relates to the understanding or the anticipation of pain, which is an important aspect of pain. That is why someone may be tricked into feeling pain where there was no such stimuli merely by providing sufficient anticipation. The ability to understand that something has caused pain in others and may cause pain in one is a level of self awareness not known in animals.