Also, I take it that this means you don't believe in the whole, "if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk" thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

I used that as an argument against timeless physics: If you could have consciousness in a timeless universe, than this means that you could simulate a conscious being without actually running the simulation, you could just put the data on the hard drive. I'm still waiting out for an answer on that one!