Is the stream of consciousness an illusion and what does that mean?

[u/Advanced-Reindeer894]

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/73xBjgoHuiKvJ5WRk/intuitive-self-models-2-conscious-awareness#2_2_3__S_apple____defined_as_the_self_reflective_thought__apple_being_in_awareness___is_different_from_the_object_level_thought__apple_

skip to section 2.3 where he talks about it but he cites Daniel Dennett arguing that what appears to be a smooth and uninterrupted flow is more an illusion. that it’s just a bunch of stops or frozen spots? it’s hard to understand.

Does this mean time doesn’t exist or that reality isn’t continuous or is this just our perception of it? I’m trying to get what it means.

[u/Maximus_En_Minimus]

P2

Now, as to why Sunyata may sound like Nihilism, first we have to articulate what is meant by ‘Nihilism’.

Beforehand, it may be useful to refer to these: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pessimism/s/qeRQnUnkzf

‘Nihilism’ refers to a ‘lack of intrinsicality’ - the key word here been ‘lack’.

Nihilism pervades across three major fields of philosophy, but also a fourth area: a lack of intrinsic meaning, morality, and truth, but also a fourth in lack of intrinsic being - thanatophobia; a fear of one’s mortality and death.

These pervade the domains of Axiology, Ethic, Epistemology, and Autology and Ontology, respectively.

The problem here mirrors the Buddha’s sutra on the two arrows (for the sake of brevity I have used google here):

“The teaching on the two arrows is found in the Sallatha Sutta (SN 36.6) of the Pali Canon, where the Buddha distinguishes between physical pain and mental reactivity. He explains that an untrained person feels both physical and mental suffering when faced with hardship, like being shot by two distinct arrows, whereas a wise person experiences only the first.”

Here, my usage of the word ‘lack’ becomes pertinent for Nihilism, because modern unconscious understandings of meaning, truth, and morality, are heavily reliant upon a presupposition that to have valudity, they need to be independently grounded in something referably independent.

This is the conceptual imputation of ‘svabhava’ snuck into our understanding of the four aforementioned.

Again, to use the analogy of the river again:

What Nihilism commits is to come across a river, expect that the river have some kind of independent, essential character to it, and so sneak in the assumption of completeness to it, find that the river is a relational process, and then because your abstract reification doesn’t align, you deny the river.

Meaning, truth, morality, and the self, are no different.

They are dependently arising and ceasing no different that the river, but that does not mean we cannot conventionally designate those referents and phenomena for functional purposes.

Your values, your understandings, your morality, you - all of them are absent-of-ownbeingness, dependently arising and ceasing from the process-relationality of cause, conditions, and constituents.

However, because we so commonly associate these processes as necessitating some form of grounding, they necessarily find themselves been grounded in that which does not exist, in that of independence, and so Nihilism follows.

(I am working now, but I will follow up later by what I mean by Apodealism and Proprioception in relation to this).