One of four words
Why conscious.
Take any set of things that are not aware, and arrange them however you like, and you will not get awareness out of the arrangement. A million unconscious atoms, in a million different configurations, are still just a million unconscious atoms, and no amount of adding together things that have no awareness is ever going to produce the thing itself.
This is what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness, and it has not been solved. The materialist account asks us to believe that awareness simply turns up once things get complicated enough, the way wetness turns up once you have enough water molecules together. But wetness is only a word for how the molecules are behaving, it does not need anything genuinely new to exist, and consciousness does, because consciousness is not a behaviour you can watch from the outside, it is an interior, a felt point of view, and no amount of describing behaviour from the outside ever adds up to one.
The simpler conclusion is that consciousness is not emergent. It is a property of the source.
What we call becoming aware is the source recognizing itself through the particular shape we happen to be. The brain does not generate consciousness any more than a radio generates the music coming out of it, it receives the signal, and focuses it, and narrows it down to the one station.
This sounds strange. It is less strange than the alternative, which asks us to believe that awareness arose from nothing by accident, in a universe that was unaware until it happened to assemble a brain. That is the version most of us were taught to take seriously. I find I no longer can.