I'd agree with all that. The idea of a "very slow consciousness" reminds me of Great-A'tuin in the Discworld novels, whose brain functions at a slow timescale. After centuries of study, telepaths were only able to glean that it is looking forward to something.

I think the absurdity also comes from the difficulty of directly measuring or evaluating the conscious process. You can ramp up the absurdity even more by fully encrypting the algorithm and destroying the encryption key. No other conscious being will ever be able to interact with that process's experience.