One of four words
Why conscious.
Take any set of things that are not aware, and arrange them in any way you like. You will not produce awareness. A million unconscious atoms in a million configurations remain a million unconscious atoms. You cannot stack zeros and get a one.
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 appears at some level of complexity, the way wetness appears when you have enough water molecules. But wetness is just a description of how molecules behave together. It does not require a new kind of thing. Consciousness does. It is not a behaviour but an interior — a felt point of view — and no description of behaviour produces a felt point of view.
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 broadcast. It receives, focuses, and limits.
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.