The fate of the individual ego-consciousness is obviously linked in some way to its physical expression in the body, but consciousness itself as a category and as a possibility is something more basic. We make machines and we analyse natural objects in terms of machine analogies because it is natural for us to think in that way. But we can hardly expect that that which the mind readily produces is the same as that which produces the mind. Mind is surely not epiphenomenally superimposed on a pattern of information-processing the brain happens to enact. It is far more plausible that brain and mind are both manifestations of an underlying process, and that our own ego-awarenesses are merely the tip of an ontological iceberg as yet unknown to us.
Information is an enormously useful idea, but it is an abstraction of an abstraction.
The immediacy of consciousness lies in the opposite direction. They all started by abandoning the religions of their times. Some may proselytize more than my religion and thereby gain more converts, but my religion is at least as valid.