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> The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant.

Also even if you somehow oversaw this, the author is effectively describing the XOR function. If you take a fixed bitstring (the iron atoms) and xor it with every possible bitstring of the same length (the observers), you get... every possible bitstring of the same length! That's a well-known property of XOR and the reason why you can "decrypt" one-time-pads to every message you like if you just apply the right key.

This means if you accepted the author's proposition that for one observer, the iron bar is running consciousness.exe, then for another observer, the bar will run Doom or WoW or a bitcoin miner or whatever else you want.

The problem is that the things we colloquially call "computers" are also observer-independent: A server will run its program and update its internal state even if no human is watching. That's one thing that distinguishes computation by computers from computation with pen and paper.

So if you add this together, you can prove that computers are not computation, which I think is contradictory.

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"Of course it is simplest to build a computer where the high voltage states correspond to 1s and the low voltages states 0s or vice versa. But there is no requirement that we build our computers that way. We could build a perfectly valid computer where the high voltage states of even valued registers correspond to 1s and where they correspond to 0s in the odd valued registers, or a computer where the mapping flips on every 13th clock cycle. The system only “computes” because of the way we have encoded information."