[Paedor]

Wow, it's uncanny how well this post mirrored my own thoughts, down to the phrase "consciousness is observer independent". I ended up rejecting the conclusion though, for the roughly same reason Maxwell's demon doesn't actually reduce entropy. Normally I wouldn't expose people to my armchair philosophy, but here goes:

1. Consciousness, if present, should depend on dynamics. E.g. frozen snapshots of a conscious being probably shouldn't be conscious themselves.

2. (Building on 1) Because a full definition of consciousness requires dynamics, a measurement of consciousness can't just give one "conscious" snapshot. It needs to dynamically continue to measure consciousness, which is much stricter than Joe's original requirement.

3. If measurements of an iron bar are dynamically changing in order to find consciousness in random spins in the iron bar, then picking the correct measurements actually requires immense computation. In fact, it would require simulating a conscious being, while also simulating the dynamics of the iron bar. I'd argue the consciousness you're measuring is then real, but not a property of the iron bar at all.