The bridge from recursive self-modeling to phenomenal subjectivity is tenuous. There are teleological bridges (Michael Bennet's Why Anything is Conscious and others) that try to use evolutionary pressure to explain it, but they suffer from limitations of everything teleological and seems like a heuristic of neccessity more than a true epistemic stance. I think a stance for moral consideration based on that criteria is valid; I follow it myself. But I don't think it is epistemically sound when attributing actual phenomenal subjectivity.