I suppose self-awareness might be one decent measure of intelligence. But it's not a very useful one for our purposes: how exactly do we determine that an organism is self-aware?
Self aware is an awareness of oneself. This is a process and not a singular thing. It means one becomes consciously aware of actions and activities, generated by oneself, that were previously unconscious. If you were playing poker in Las Vegas, even slight twitches or touching the nose, will give away your hand. These unconscious body language activities are called "tells". One will need to become self aware of these unconscious outputs, being generated below consciousness, or else others will exploit this.
If you never played cards, there is no reason to become self aware of unconscious body language this degree. One could blissfully remain less than fully self aware and never even know the difference. Most humans are not self aware, until there is need. Self aware is not about looking in a mirror and knowing it is you, although that can help point out some things which are not under conscious control, like tells, which others can see from the outside.
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.
This definition requires comparing two or more things, so one can see a contrast. Self awareness often comes with 20/20 hindsight. When one is young, they may take all types of risks. Later in life, one may ask what was I thinking? Self awareness often comes with age, when it questions motivations that were once just blindly accepted and not thought through very well.
Self awareness is connected to free choice. One cannot have free choice while also being unconscious of motivation or affinity. In the example of the poker player and his "tells", his tell are a form of unconscious determinism, due to his lack of free choice. This determinism has a cause and effect logic that others can use to predict his hand. If he becomes self aware, now there is choice instead of determinism.
The confusion about self awareness is the assumption if you can do one self aware activity, this one thing makes you self aware. This like being able to boil water and that making you a master chef. It takes more than one thing.
A liberal or conservative person might ask themselves, why do I slant that way instead of accept both ways? The answer would require introspection leading to self awareness. To just blindly accept one way is a form of unconscious determinism that shows lack of free choice. This is closer to the norm, than being self aware, which takes a lot of introspective work. Self awareness is implicit of two centers within the brain, one which defines determinism like instincts and tells. and the other which can see these in action.
This second center of consciousness, that allows self awareness is relatively new in evolution, and seems to appear around the time of civilization 6-10k year ago. One can argue that this secondary may have been what was driving this change. These humans became self aware of natural instinct and learned to choice otherwise, thereby changing migratory human instinct into what was needed to stop.
Self awareness is not a condition of the scientific method, although the scientific method helps this to develop, by providing a consistent external platform from which the needed contrast can appear for introspection.
