And while a Turing machine has a state register, this can be simulated by just using N lookup tables instead of one lookup table. It seems like we have to believe that 1), the mathematical structure of a UTM relative to a giant lookup table, which is very minimal indeed, is the key element required for consciousness, ...

TMs also have the notable ability to not halt for some inputs. And if you wanted to precompute those results, writing NULL values into your GLUT, I'd really like to know where the heck you got your Halting Oracle from. The mathematical structures are very different. For a UTM, the problem of whether it will halt for an arbitrary input is undecidable; in a GLUT with NULL values, you can just look up the input string and are done.