DH tries to make an analogy between consciousness and “feedback phenomena” of a special sort.

This is the kind of thing he talks about:

If an organism uses categories to discriminate external objects in the environment, it will be hard to avoid categorising itself ( or at least parts of itself) – being an object of perception to oneself is not the function of sense ( supposedly you just want to perceive food, a mate , or whatever..) so these self-perceptions are “side-effects” .. yet they might have causal consequences ..

he tries to make a similar move with consciousness and symbols
but I havent got that far yet:)

i cant say i find it very convincing yet