This is fun. I haven't thought about this for a while.
You are completely ignoring the experiential aspect of reality. Buddhism (at it's best, at it's worse it's as bad as the others) treats meditation as a science of interior experience. There are actual things you can do to change the way you perceive yourself, and you can learn things from them by a process which is analogous to science. It features hypothesis testing, experimentation, validation by a community of peers. We can learn intriguing things by looking at the places their practice, which produces measurable permanent effects on the brain, interacts with what they describe experientially. Your worldview leaves no room for this. Go do the experiments. It's easy. It's proven to make you feel better. You will directly perceive why it's wrong to think of experience as just an interaction of localized matter in time. I can't convince you of cell biology without showing you a microscope. And I can't convince you of consciousness and how it relates to these other things if you do not directly use the technology in these areas. I don't understand why people don't think it's scientific. There are confirmable results. Just look through the right door.
And when you do, you will find that rather then stepping into a room, you have a reversal of perception, and your construction of yourself becomes something you step out of. It is exactly that thought "What you call awareness is an illusion" that will flip in this way. What we call awareness is what is aware of the reality that is actually the illusion. This awareness has no properties, no features, it is what all properties and features arise and are experienced in (as you, me, and all the other experiential phenomena). You can perceive it, but when you do, the you you perceive is an object of perception. When the you that is not what you think of as you perceives you instead of perceives through you, your perception inverts and broadens. You can see this, yourself, for yourself, if you let yourself see, at which point there will be no you to be doing the seeing, you see? Do you see at least why you should do the experiments to try to see?
You are completely ignoring the experiential aspect of reality. Buddhism (at it's best, at it's worse it's as bad as the others) treats meditation as a science of interior experience. There are actual things you can do to change the way you perceive yourself, and you can learn things from them by a process which is analogous to science. It features hypothesis testing, experimentation, validation by a community of peers. We can learn intriguing things by looking at the places their practice, which produces measurable permanent effects on the brain, interacts with what they describe experientially. Your worldview leaves no room for this. Go do the experiments. It's easy. It's proven to make you feel better. You will directly perceive why it's wrong to think of experience as just an interaction of localized matter in time. I can't convince you of cell biology without showing you a microscope. And I can't convince you of consciousness and how it relates to these other things if you do not directly use the technology in these areas. I don't understand why people don't think it's scientific. There are confirmable results. Just look through the right door.
And when you do, you will find that rather then stepping into a room, you have a reversal of perception, and your construction of yourself becomes something you step out of. It is exactly that thought "What you call awareness is an illusion" that will flip in this way. What we call awareness is what is aware of the reality that is actually the illusion. This awareness has no properties, no features, it is what all properties and features arise and are experienced in (as you, me, and all the other experiential phenomena). You can perceive it, but when you do, the you you perceive is an object of perception. When the you that is not what you think of as you perceives you instead of perceives through you, your perception inverts and broadens. You can see this, yourself, for yourself, if you let yourself see, at which point there will be no you to be doing the seeing, you see? Do you see at least why you should do the experiments to try to see?