Let's start with the assumption that "I" am somehow an artifact of my physical body.
Ultimately, every piece of my physical being could be replaced with an identical piece (each cell, every nerve) and I would still be me. This actually happens over time -- the vast majority of my childhood cells have probably been replaced by now, yet I still identify with the child as "me." So, if I'm not the physical components of my body then I must be just the set of relationships between physical components.
Furthermore, the relationships change over time. What if they all also change -- am I no longer "me?"
Computers have both static data and processes -- processes are what describe the way data sets change. How do processes affect me as a "self?" I suspect it boils down to the conundrum in the "Physical Reality" section -- given that only the current instant exists, how are physical configurations linked across instances (e.g., how come I don’t just appear sitting on the moon in the next instant?)?
It is possible that my sense of self (my consciousness) is actually just a mirage based on the concept that I am no more than a very intricate weave of relationship data, much too fine and detailed to understand at a macro level. Consciousness might just be the label I use to describe the abstractions I must make when contemplating "I."
Data, in and of itself, is meaningless. Only when meaning is assigned to it does it become information. For example, the pattern "dog" will tend to mean a small hairy animal to English speakers. However, the same set of lines will be just meaningless squiggles to someone who only speaks and reads Mandarin -- "dog" would have no more meaning to that person than a bunch of rocks distributed randomly on the beach. The data could also be represented by sequences of things over time. For example, the word "dog" could also be represented dynamically (over time) by presenting each of the letters separately, one after the other (‘d’, ‘o’, ‘g’). Either way, it would still just be data with no meaning.
Without an external observer, we don’t have a weave of information. Rather, we have a collection of meaningless data. Although we appear to be constructed of pure information, the existence of information itself requires an observer outside of that which is being observed.
As Buddhism claims, there is always a Subject (Consciousness) observing the Object(s) (Physical Reality). The implication is that Consciousness really is distinct from Physical Reality.