I'm sympathetic to Hegel in the sense that I think that what is most important is consciousness itself, though I'm unsure whether the Christian framework that Hegel employs to understand it is the best way.  It seems possible to me that an entirely scientific, materialist framework is sufficient for explaining consciousness, though I don't know how, and I'm skeptical of all the available theories of which I'm aware.  

I do not believe for a moment that consciousness is a mere linguistic confusion.  (Identity might be, perhaps.  But identity has nothing to do with consciousness.)  So the Wittgensteinian, Lacanian, and Derridean traditions are unappealing to me, and seem to me to be definitively ruled out.  Nor do I find Heidegger plausible, if he insists that "language is the house of being."  It strikes me that language has little or nothing to do with consciousness.  Animals that do not have language the same way we do are, it seems to me, nonetheless obviously conscious.  (This also makes me skeptical of the way that Yudkowsky thinks about consciousness, since he denies it to chickens.)  For that matter, aphasics - people who have had damage to language areas of the brain, whether they have Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, or global aphasia - seem obviously conscious as well.  Language is entirely immaterial to this conversation.

When I read Parfit, I come to the opposite conclusion that he does.  When I think about his "teletransportation" problem, rather than convincing me that consciousness is a linguistic construction (again, identity might be), this convinces me that I should stay away from transporters.  I have to admit, with some considerable embarrassment, that it almost causes me to believe in the existence of the soul.  But mostly it makes me humble, and forces me to acknowledge that I don't understand this stuff at all.

Does Buddhism offer a better way of understanding consciousness than the Christian tradition?  Perhaps, but from my perspective, it looks like it is oriented, as it were, backwards: I do not wish to extinguish consciousness, but to keep the fire burning, to expand consciousness throughout the universe.

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