Searle's Chinese Room: Slow Motion Intelligence

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.

So what if the room has a 100 billion people, each simulating a single neuron, passing messages to each other as if they were firings along axons.

Searle's argument is that consciousness cannot arise from computation, and he makes his point by making the converse seem laughable. But I don't find it laughable - I find it plausible and intriguing.

Searle offers no insight as to what consciousness is, but merely asserts that because his vision of computation cannot possibly create consciousness, then consciousness cannot be embodied in a machine.