That's an interesting point! I suppose the definition of 'consciousness' implies a certain timescale in my internally unexamined definition but there's no reason that need be the case!

If I understand your initial argument as implicitly revised here, it's basically "whatever consciousness is, it doesn't happen at the scale of some small number of bits". But some fungi are among the largest organisms on the planet. If this kind of signaling is going on within them, imagine the throughput, even if the individual signaling rates are low.

I wonder if there could be conscious life inside neutron stars, organized through nuclear reactions not chemical and therefore going much faster.

There is a book about this! It's Dragons Egg by R. Forward and it's pretty good!

>>I don't disagree, but couldn't consciousness play out at different time scales?

I think you are correct in this insight. I also think that the perceived [or relative] rhythm of the passage of time would have huge implications here in this case: from the fungal perspective, "our" world would be "seen" at very high speed, which would prevent any form of interaction. It would even prevent reciprocal detection.

This "perceived time rate" difference could happen on an astronomical scale and might contain the explanation of informational paradoxes such as Fermi's.