You can't be sure of anything when it comes to consciousness. People have been trying to define it since the ancient Greeks.
Theories tend to fall into two camps: the mechanistic--which this is--and the philosophic--which tends to imply a higher order consciousness, a spirituality, if you will, that is rejected by most scientists as being too spooky and untestable.

Check out A.O. Wilson's theories. But keep in mind he studied ants. They may be total automatons but we aren't. And I just read about bees that like to play with balls. Why?

If our body/mind decides our actions before we are conscious of them how does it do it? What are the decisions making elements? How are they processed? And most important, why?
Certainly, we have physical reactions that do not require conscious decisions. Touch a hot bowl out of the microwave and we drop it. No, we didn't have to consider our decision. And yes, our reaction is based on some form of instinctive pain input processing. But that doesn't apply to how and why we decide to eat or what we did to produce the environment that has a microwave.
This theory is just Sociobiology, E.O Wilson's simplistic theory.

Consciousness is the personal experience of reality not its author.