The goal of AI is to predict the future and use this prediction as a basis for choosing its further course of action. AI tries to understand how the world works which means that it should find a model of the world. That model consists of internal states and the function that drives transitions from one internal state to another. AI will need that model in order to predict the next observation, i.e. in order to predict the future.
For AI to gain self-awareness, it must find the answer to the questions "Where am I?" and "What is going on?". The answer to these questions is hidden in the internal state of the world. An AI which does not endeavor to understand the world is weak AI. The way to creating a strong AI goes through the description of the internal state of the world.
If we are to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), it would not be sufficient just to learn how to describe the internal state of the world. We also need to move from single-step to multi-step reasoning. This means that we should be able to start from the current state of the world and mentally take several steps into the future, and thereby select the course of action that works best for us.