Agreed. Regarding parallel vs sequential... I'm pretty convinced that any Turing-complete system in the physical universe can exhibit consciousnes. And I expec

Agreed. Regarding parallel vs sequential... I'm pretty convinced that any Turing-complete system in the physical universe can exhibit consciousnes. And I expect that a description of consciousness will take the form of a map from descriptions of qualia to descriptions of algorithms, rather than mapping to descriptions of something lower level. In other words, I expect that the best description of consciousness will talk about mathematical substructures of the theory of computation. Talking about parallel vs sequential architecture is an example of such a substructure, and therefore may be worth including in a description of consciousness.