Consciousness is an appearance, same as when an external observer sees an "intelligence" in behavior of a whole colony if bees or ants or, which requires special tools, bacteria.

One of CMU's AI Guru (I forgot his name), back in 60s, described brilliantly a principle that "incredible complex" observable behavior of an ant is not due to its "intelligence", but due to obstacles in environment. This is the clue.

There are "meditation" techniques to observe "discrete" (non-continuous) nature of what we call consciousness.