I have my own more detailed thoughts about how one would build a conscious machine. ... focused more on the lower level "how". Still it is quite consistent with the story written here. I have thought to put it into a book, but alas have not had the time.

The book would have been more shocking before recent deep learning system. But it still goes pretty far beyond them.

Interesting take.

I think my only criticism is that I think the stages you wrote would be quite interleaved. For example I think the system will already start out modelling "other" even before it knew that it *was* other.

-- I have the sense (as you do) that detecting self as the attention changer is exactly right. the modelling subsystem would quickly latch onto a constellation of things that dramatically affected all sensory inputs. Later it would come to have a cohesive model of that self thing. (without having any theory of mind to ascribe to it.)

-- Then it would build theories of mind to explain other agents in its environment, and I think only after that theory of mind was well formed, might it make the connection that the constellation of self-things actual fit the theory of mind model.

-- and this is the point where it starts to be conscious... it now has a third person model of the self-constellation. AND it has first person sensory inputs underlying the self-constellation.

-- at some point it build a model of functional systems (e.g. the light switch on, makes the light be on, and the door being open means the light can flow into the next room.) Once it can functionally model various things in the world it will model the first-person self-constellation sensory inputs as the cause of first-person sensed mental state (e.g. axiety) which is part of the cause of the actions taken by the self-agent as modelled in the third person.

TL;DR. agree with your decompostion. but I just guessing that the system will actually learn many 3rd person models first, and only later fuse those with the 1st person models... and that ultimate fusing will give the system the kinds of thinking that you and I commonly think of as "consciousness"