I recently read Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. I think there are some interesting ideas there and in Matthew Lieberman's

I recently read Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. I think there are some interesting ideas there and in Matthew Lieberman's Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect about the evolutionary value of consciousness that are a bit of a different take, in that consciousness's advantage might be seen as an improvement to collaboration and that identity is more of a means to that end than an end in itself.