alt Hacker News> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion.
If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
And how is consciousness "a misconception and an illusion?"
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are".
This implies a lack of awareness of self, which is fundamental to the definition of consciousness. And if a being is aware of itself, then they "are".
> It's an impersonal phenomenon ... not a state of being.
If individual consciousness does not qualify as "a state of being", then whatever could?
> If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
That's easy: consciousness piggybacks on memory, which is what really creates persistence over time. But an amnesiac can be conscious in the moment and not "learn from one situation to the next". Plenty of philosophers (including Western philosophers such as David Hume) have looked into this, and the account of individual persisting consciousness as a kind of misconception or illusion (or at least, a very rough "folk" theory of personal identity) is one that elegantly explains the data. That's before you get into the kind of deep inquiry into phenomenology that Eastern meditation practitioners would be deeply familiar with.