I agree with the first part but your framing still relies on ill-defined terms. What is your definition of self-awareness? Intelligence? Knowledge?

I suspect that if you attempt to rigorously define consciousness all the way down without handwaving, you might discover that it doesn't exist after all, or just decompose it into low-level abstractions while having the original meaning slip away (which is the same).

You may also want to look at functional equivalence analogies provided by mechinterp and functional anatomy of large models (not necessarily language ones). Evolutionary analogies as well.