A bucket of water as a computer for speech recognition:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-39432-7_63

A "liquid state machine" I saw referenced in James Bridle's "Ways of Being". Bridle reminds us: the world isn't like a computer. Instead, computers are like the world.

Everything is like the world in its own way. Then we can imagine many ways in which computers could be like the world - the Turing machines in current ubiquity are only one of those ways.

What other ways could there be?

The bucket itself is not 'thinking', but it is processing. To extend this in reminiscence of Cryptonomicon, is the ocean a massive analogue computer? Maybe closer to Solaris than we thought.