"maybe we should consider parallel processes funneled into different fewer parallel processes then?"

Not that I want to throw numbers around, but consider what's going on in our nervous system, which consists of 100 billion neurons and over 500 trillion synaptic connections, not to mention god knows how many molecules and more atoms and even more subatomic particles - and this is just for starters. The cores of the smallest of these elements transition into waves that appear to possibly extend to the limits of our known universe. Parallelism extents far beyond our apparent serial decision making capabilities we *appear* to unceasingly utilize to get us from point A to point B. Our awareness is a minuscule subset of operations that has evolved specifically to keep us alive until our genes have had the opportunity to propagate themselves, to keep their container functioning until that time when the process has been completed. It's really no more than a story we make up as we go along. And as we're discussed elsewhere, we *may* not even be responsible for making up the story in the first place.

Seemingly, the majority of the required information and functionality for our physical persistence is in place by the time the containers emerge from their hosts, and of course, in our specie, a certain amount has to be passed on from the big containers to the little ones, yet this is a relatively new feature from a geological perspective, though apparently required by our high end, super-charged, state-of-the-art models.

Massive parallelism not only exists within us but within the seamless connection to our environment, and again, we're aware of only a tiny tiny fraction of the complexity; it's simply beyond our level of comprehension because comprehending it is not a requirement - we'll get along just fine without the electric windows. And because our capabilities of being actively aware are so extraordinary limited with respect to what is actually going on in a global sense, we end up calling what we are aware of as being serial. It's simply a way of making a distinction. It's the best we can do, though merely a stab at a comparison, neither of whose elements we're capable of fathoming. Both the definitions and the comparison are figurative really, sort of like comparing a raindrop to the Pacific Ocean.