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Lightwave comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - Less Wrong
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Going even further, some philosophers suggest that consciousness isn't even continuous, e.g. as you refocus your attention, as you blink, there are gaps that we don't notice. Just like how there are gaps in your vision when you move your eyes from one place to another, but to you it appears as a continuous experience.
Consciousness is complex. It is a structured thing, not an indivisible atom. It is changeable, not fixed. It has parts and degrees and shifting, uncertain edges.
This worries some people.
Well of course it worries people! Precisely the function of consciousness (at least in my current view) is to "paint a picture" of wholeness and continuity that enables self-reflective cognition. Problem is, any given system doesn't have the memory to store its whole self within its internal representational data-structures, so it has to abstract over itself rather imperfectly.
The problem is that we currently don't know the structure, so the discord between the continuous, whole, coherent internal feeling of the abstraction and the disjointed, sharp-edged, many-pieced truth we can empirically detect is really disturbing.
It will stop being disturbing about five minutes after we figure out what's actually going on, when everything will once again add up to normality.
It seems to only worry people when they notice unfamiliar (to them) aspects of the complexity of consciousness. Familiar changes in consciousness, such as sleep, dreams, alcohol, and moods, they never see a problem with.
We only ever have approxmate models of external things, too.