It very much depends what people mean when they say consciousness or self awareness is an illusion. For example, we only spend spend small portions of our live

It very much depends what people mean when they say consciousness or self awareness is an illusion. For example, we only spend spend small portions of our lives in a fully conciliatory state aware of the present. Much of the time we are in undressing sleep, or in a state of fugue or flow in which we are acting unconsciously. When we become consciously aware of the present sometimes it can be disorienting as we transition into full consciousness. So consciousness comes and goes frequently every day. I imagine these semi-conscious or flow states are the standard mental mode for many animals. Thus consciousness if not illusory is certainly ephemeral and transitory. Then there’s the fact that our conscious experience of the rodent is largely synthetic. That is, in many ways it is a post-hoc construction. We take many actions unconsciously and then construct post-hoc logical justifications for why we did them. We experience deja vu, or e.g. when a phone rings sometimes we think we experienced knowing the phones was going to ring before we are aware of the sound. We construct a conscious experience after the fact and sometimes we get it wrong. Conscious thoughts are only a small part of our ongoing mental activity, including decision making, and not always in the driving seat. We are so much more than our conscious experience, which is only a fairly small subset of our actual ongoing mental activity, which itself is continuously influenced by the needs and responses of the body beyond the brain.