Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe. It's a foundation of our own experience, but if you take a mechanicistic, reductionist approach, consciousness is pretty high in the ranking of things. I'm not saying its explanation must be necessarily complex, but so far the simple explanations didn't work.

> Neural networks can be expressed in fraction of that complexity

That's not an explanation. That's a rule to construct them. Same for evolution: one thing is to define a basic rule that underlies a phenomena, another thing is to explain why we like peanut butter and jelly using evolutionary psychology. The basic rule doesn't capture much. And sometimes, maybe, there's not even a basic rule to begin with, because we conflate a lot of stuff in concepts that have no root or relationships in the physical world.