Recently I've become interested in consciousness. For a long time I was a completely indoctrinated materialist without ever having really taken a hard look at the foundations of my beliefs.
I grew up in a religious home, mostly Christians (Dad's side) and Muslims (Mom converted and remarried), all firm believers in God. I have to credit my mothers midlife conversion for planting the seed that eventually blossomed into atheism and agnosticism. It is very easy to indoctrinate a child into the culturally dominant religion, but it's a lot more difficult than you would imagine to convert a child who was in the process of building a logical framework on top of their foundational religious beliefs.
It obviously leads to a lot of questions, children are naturally logical and I was no different. I ended up rejecting religion so strongly that, without realizing it, I self indoctrinated myself into the materialistic world view. Only now am I starting to realize that I may have overcorrected, science doesn't have all of the answers and there are some rather large elephants in the room that science tends to ignore.
For me, the biggest problem with a purely materialist worldview where we're all meat robots and our conscious experience is simply an illusion, a byproduct of neurons firing off in our brains, is that it takes away our free will. It means our actions can be predicted deterministically by parameters outside of our immediate control.
This leads to my second issue: that in a universe without consciousness or free will there is also, fundamentally, no meaning. It's all just a happy accident, right down to the fact that we happen to be experiencing it, pure coincidence.
I don't know about you, but I find it a little suspicious that a purely materialistic world view robs us of our free will just a surely as an omnipotent and omniscient deity does.
A conscious universe represents another philosophical path where, by accepting that conscious experience is fundamental I can regain my free will and inject meaning back into my existence. Instead of feeling that on the timescale of the universe, my 40 years of life are meaningless, as a conscious being whose purpose is experience conscious awareness, then every millisecond that I'm awake matters.
The trade off is that I'm able to choose to accept that the universe is not completely deterministic, and that we can't know in advance what the universe is evolving into.
I think I'm okay with that.