Start with this: why do you think that the "self" is a different property from a VW's colour?
In this particular case I would look to properties other than color. Color is not an emergent property. It's a more straightforward property. If I tear the fender off a yellow VW, the fender is still yellow. The concept of emergence is that a simple component of a complex entity does not exhibit an emergent property. An emergent property arises only out of the synergistic behavior of the composition working properly together.
Hence, "going 60 mph" is a better property to talk about. And we clarify and revise the property we can understand the commonality better. By "going 60 mph" we mean "can propel itself at 60 mph over reasonably flat surfaces." The key concept is self-propulsion. A lot of ordinary objects can reach 60 mph if you drop them off a tall cliff. And let's lower the speed a bit -- say 10 mph.
A detached fender is still yellow but, as merely a component of the VW, does not exhibit the property of "can propel itself at 10 mph." It can't propel itself at all. Various components from the engine -- say, a piston ring -- directly contributes to the VW's emergent property of self-propulsion but cannot exhibit that property by itself.
The sense of identity is an emergent property of a functioning brain, but of course in order for that brain to function it has to receive oxygen, water, and nutrients, and has to eliminate waste products. The rest of the body provides those things. It develops the sense only by exposure to a varied environment. The body also provides that.
Another emergent property of the human organism is the ability to propel itself at 10 mph, just like the VW. That property becomes useful when seeking food or escaping predators, which aids the survival of the species. Because it does that, we can say it has an evolutionary factor. My left leg, by itself, does not have the property to propel itself at 10 mph. It works in concert with the rest of my body to achieve locomotion. Locomotion is just as much an emergent property as my intelligence and sense of self, requires just the same sorts of things as my sense of self, and -- by coincidence -- shares with a Volkswagen the emergent property of "can propel itself at 10 mph over reasonably flat terrain."
Jabba's line of reasoning wants to beg the question that the sense of self is some magical property that is different, somehow, that any other kind of emergent property. Under H it isn't. "Has a sense of self" is an emergent property of no different character than "can propel itself." Jabba has spoken at length about how his sense of self is magical because he can experience with a profound subjective effect. H is not required to consider that this is any other kind of observation than that which serves other sorts of science. There is no "wow factor" to the subjective experience of self that transcends H. There is a subjective experience to running at 10 mph too. Just because we can subjectively experience it doesn't mean "propel itself at 10 mph" is some "new" sort of property. That's just special pleading at its best.
A sense of identity leads to a sense of community. Early humans formed bands, and the sense of community that stems from a sense of identity compelled us to evolve laws and other social structures that mitigated conflict between identity and community. Other species have social orders too. Hence it is reasonable to suppose other species have some semblance of a sense of self. Since communities have evolutionarily-valuable survival traits, the sense of self has evolutionarily-desirable traits. Species that develop a sense of self as an emergent property of their organisms have a survival factor.
Emergence is important because Jabba seems to want to drive the wedge between the relatively "simple" properties of color and more complex properties that arise in systems only via emergence. Jabba says his sense of self is so profound and marvelous that it can't just "accidentally" arise. It's the irreducible-complexity argument all over again, and with all such arguments it can be supported only by vigorous question begging and vigorously reversing the burden of proof. In other words, it has no support. Jabba insists there's some magical "ME" out there that he can't define in any terms other than that which would not be present in a hypothetically perfect copy of his organism. That's where the circularity spins.
