I largely agree, but it feels a bit like side-stepping the real question. We can make decisions that are completely orthogonal (and a lot of times opposite) to whatever would increase our "fitness". This agency is what's peculiar about consciousness in my opinion. Personally I think it is some sort of parallel, rouge system that has branched of from the higher level controller mechanism that you describe.
That's the amazing thing about evolution: the products of evolution don't have to be well engineered, they don't have to be perfect, they don't even really have to make sense. They only have to confer a marginal benefit to individuals with respect to their reproduction.
There are plenty of examples of bad design in evolution, human consciousness included (anxiety, depression etc). It's only necessary that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for the feature to stick around.
It is amazing indeed! At some point our memes, language and culture became more powerful than any natural mutations. Perhaps this was helped by these irrational/rogue features of our consciousness.
