But I submit they can be fulfilled on a variety of platforms. For exampe, why should consciousness even be restricted to one body. Perhaps we're talking about a hive, where each worker is "dumb", but the collective has an evolved intelligence.
Coordination between the units could be by sound, pheremones, even radio.

This hive mind could be a lot smarter than we are, yet think much slower. There's still no reason they couldn't build machines that operated much faster than they do. We certainly can: electronics, computers, even internal combustion engines operate at hundreds, thousands, even millions of cycles per second. We can't even do ten.

Squid use flashing colors to transmit holographic-type skin patterns we can't understand. Maybe we can't understand whale songs because they are exchanging Fourier Transforms.

We need to think out of the box. We may have a very good design, but it need not be the only one.