Yes, and I'm calling your view here incoherent or, at least, mistaken. It isnt valid to interpret brains this way. An "algorithm" isnt something a physical sys

Yes, and I'm calling your view here incoherent or, at least, mistaken. It isnt valid to interpret brains this way. An "algorithm" isnt something a physical system can "run". These are observer-relative properties a system instantiates because of our use of it. A brain is a physical system and our model of it should be a causal model in terms of its intrinsic properties that do not "disappear" when not in use. A digital computer is an oscillating electrical field across a piece of silicon whose oscillations "correspond" to steps in an "algorithm" but only to an observer who imposes those correspondances. The program "1 + 1" on a digital computer is some state transitions of the cpu's electrical state -- it is an algorithm only when we impose an meaning on those oscillations that they do not themselves have. There is no physical distinction in the "waterfall computer" and "digital computer" that bares on them being computers. They are both computers in exactly the same way. We havent gone to the length of a water-to-lcd display, but there's no reason we couldnt. Water falling over a series of moveable rocks can (easily) be arranged to display the result of "1 + 1" on an LCD (eg., bucket/pixel, with water level = intensity, pipes to handle "graphics").