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.
