The relationship between consciousness and desire could use some clarification. In regarding an interacting system of non-conscious entities you might speak of persistent tendencies but not properly of desire, although this term could easily arise in rough descriptive speech. A machine might seem to have a desire when it thwarts you in new and unexpected ways, it's desire being a peculiarly reversed caricature of your own. For an embodied consciousness speaking on its own behalf, however, consciousness and desire are taken to function in a generally symbiotic fashion. If consciousness is appearance and transparency then its native idiom is instrumental rationality; the goals are supplied by desire and if these remain consistent with the means employed to realise them, then the two systems almost become one. Thirst might furnish a simple example. The need for hydration becomes salient as a conscious desire for a drink and so you set about acquiring one, with the result, if successful, that the need is satisfied and ceases to impress itself on you. Because the process for acquiring the drink is highly context dependent it makes sense for it to go through consciousness so that high level planning and execution can be brought to bear. Life-forms regarded as too primitive to 'possess' consciousness, however, often demonstrate surprisingly creative agency in satisfying their needs, and observing this produces a sense of wonder in the observer, as if somehow consciousness and desire were impossibly present in these organisms, or else on reflection, prompting an estrangement of the observer's own desires from his or her consciousness. So, begin with this sense that desire (the collective term for desires) has a mind of its own independent of consciousness, and then add that self-consciousness initially arises as ancillary to this unconscious mind of desire.