Is a watermill a computer? X users spar over whether animal brains were the first computers
bitforth · x · 2026-10-05
An X thread debates what counts as computation. @hyonschu posted a photo of a watermill asking "is this a computer?" to challenge the claim that animal brains are literally the first computers. @bitforth fired back that it's a hilariously bad counterexample: watermill gearing encodes ratios, governors implement feedback, and mechanical states represent information — add adjustable gates and outputs become conditional on inputs. It's just not general-purpose computation, and grinding grain doesn't make the transformation non-computational. ctjlewis maintains brains are the first computers in a concrete sense, and adds that planting a seed could abstractly "execute" the watermelon's genetic life-program — though he admits that level of abstraction is mostly meaningless.
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