My current conclusion would be this:

In all these situations, starting with Yanni and Laurel, the reality is the information, and consciousness is the experience of the information.

OK, some might say the reality is the tree seen by the man with the tongue prosthesis, or the sound recording that is perceived as Yanni or Laurel. But the different perceptions of the sound recording make it clear that so-called objective reality depends on agreement among observers. Of course, there is usually a lot of agreement among people about such things… And still, there is the famous double-slit experiment for the QM people.

But since agreement about some piece of observation depends on the perceptions people have of the “reality” observed, surely the best test of what is, is what is perceived. We have no way of measuring or knowing what is perceived that is itself independent of perception. And perception is the experience of the information.

But consciousness is not itself information. So what are we who are conscious?

We can’t perceive the perceiver. We can perceive the body we are in, but we know through veridical near-death experiences that perception can occur, and occur well, in the local absence of the body. And we know from evidential mediumship that entities exist who perceive us here whose bodies are long since decayed into their molecular and atomic constituencies.