Changing My Mind on Consciousness and Static Information
I had assumed that for information to be conscious some form of processing (i.e. state transitions) would be required. But just recently I thought back to Yudkowsky's description of a block universe (containing time as a dimension) and realised that there is no definite need for processing. As long as the complete set of information contains the processing steps then we should still have the same expectations for consciousness even though the total set of information can be viewed as static. Of course that's increasing the amount of information by a large factor, but the principle seems sound.

It's an arresting thought that this line of reasoning leads to this conclusion. I could make consciousness with enough ink and paper.