What is it you understand when you encounter a mind? Not merely an other point of view, one for which you appear as object, but also and more fundamentally an other self-reference. There are many creatures and devices that appear to behave in mind-like ways so that we project a version of subjectivity onto them, but we do not necessarily treat them as alter-egos. When a device behaves 'as if it had a mind of its own' it's not that it shows as having intentions towards us but towards itself, and this is the basis for the compassionate or hostile feelings we experience towards it. Imagine a system that was programmed to have a certain single goal and was given a toolbox to build a large variety of environmental receptors and effectors. Having a goal means that it can generate behaviours but if the goal is rigidly determined from the outside the behaviours would likely appear (to us) to be readily interpretable and to refer back to the (intentions of the) programmer rather than to the system. If the system is now augmented so that it is able to modify its own goals then its behaviour would become unpredictable and the underlying intentions would appear to be self-referential. In this way you could imagine that the problem of the origin of desire might be solved without recourse to consciousness. A living organism is the paradigmatic self-referential system, and theory of mind, or at a simpler level, teleology, is our most economical way of understanding it. The gene, however is more like the simpler system with a single and unmodifiable goal. But genes do not exist in isolation. It is a community of interdependent genes that  gives rise to the explosion of complexity out of which the organism with its potential for goal revision and self-reference can appear. Theory of mind arises in a natural way out of the interaction of self-referential systems. Is this enough to 'do away with consciousness'? Is theory of consciousness no more than a sort of 'kludge' in theory of mind? Why not? Consciousness has the peculiar property that that the more emphatically we 'do away' with it the brighter it seems to become.