The Chicken and Egg: Consciousness

So I was running through some logically nonsense gymnastics with coworkers today and read the meme: You do not have a skeleton in you, you are a brain, piloting a bone mech, utilizing meat armor.

I realized this is mostly true, but we were already talking about how your brain is nearly incapable of interacting with this external reality directly, it actually depends on carefully constructed virtual reality generators (your sense receivers: eyes, ears, etc) to feed it specific information in a way it can interpret as a reality that it can interact with. It's like we depend on illusion and artifice to even function, which was interesting.

Then I realized, rather than saying that we are a brain, it would be scientifically be more accurate by today's knowledge to say we are an electrochemical storm trapped with in a gooey structure. The shape of the gooey structure is also critical to how the storm is shaped, however, though the storm shapes the gooey structure as well.

My question then is: which came first, the electrochemical storm, or the gooey structure?  Strictly using science, this seems like a much harder question to answer than the chicken and egg, as neither really feels necessary or compelled to exist without the other, but they are also clearly separate things, each required for the other to have persistent meaning in terms of generating consciousness. I know from a pure biology standpoint there are ample precursors here, but is there a definitive answer in one of those that can explain which half of the paired stimulus response mechanism and signal would have needed to develop first for life to exist? 

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