You mean a consciousness, I think Joe, but a good question. I suppose it's an extension of the presumption of conservation that lies at the heart of all scientific investigation. For something (making consciousness in some way a thing) to pop into existence makes the universe in principle inexplicable. So whatever IS, comes from what was before. Hence the conservation of mass and of energy, with Einstein's brilliant unifying modification of both through the equivalence of the two. The Big Bang (and its terminal counterpart if the Universe is closed, the Gnab Gib), are in three dimensions a singularity at which three dimensional physics fails- hence in part the many (~12) dimensions of theories which attempt to take science back before the singularity to the different things that existed then, and popped into three dimensions in what was Creation to us, but might be a perfectly mundane event in that physics.

And if consciousness isn't a thing, we have to find out how not- things can interact with things.