Are eyes more complex than computers? What makes them more complex or less complex?

Eyes have fewer atoms than computers, but I think a more pertinent measure of complexity is its “functional units,” as I’ll call them. In eyes, you could say it’s their cells. In computers, you could say it’s the individual transistors. (There are other functional units in computers, but there are more transistors than anything else by far, mainly in the CPU and even more in the RAM, and even more in the SSD; or actually, if the computer has an HDD then there are more areas of magnetic charge than anything else, if you can consider those to be functional units.)

According to Google, an eye has about 100 million cells. Computers have 100 million transistors in the CPU, trillions in an SSD, and just as many areas of magnetic charge in an HDD. That would crudely make computers more complex, IMO.

But then, cells actually have organelles, which are also functional units. There’s still not trillions of organelles in an eye, but you may even go down as far as the atom or molecule in an eye, because they’re all involved in microbiology/metabolism/etc., whereas in computers, the individual atoms don’t really do anything dynamic. They’re just static and work in aggregate. I mean, I suppose they transmit electricity and such, but the atoms and molecules of an eye are more free-standing/free-moving, and they’re involved in more varied and complex operations (bonding, re-bonding, etc.), so perhaps that counts as more dynamicism and hence more unitary functionality.

And I believe the human eye has more atoms than computers have transistors or whatever. A cell has trillions of atoms, so at 100 million cells, that’s 100s of trillions of atoms. A computer wouldn’t have 100s of trillions of functional units unless it had at least a few dozen of terabytes of storage, which isn’t common for personal computers. And even if it did, storage isn’t really dynamically interacting in a rich system: the bits just sit there, waiting to be separately processed and occasionally changed by the CPU. Though, possibly, arguably, the information present in the storage drive is just as rich with meaning/content as the interactions of atoms or molecules in an eye, I don’t know.

So, in conclusion, I’m not really sure which is more complex. It basically comes down to whether it’s fair to consider the individual atoms or molecules of an eye as “functional units” (as opposed to just the individual cells) and also whether those supposed functional units are as richly/meaningfully involved/dynamic/interactive as as the “functional units” of a PC.

One thing I’ll note, though, is that I believe that, either way, an eye is way more sophisticated/advanced than a PC. The operation of the eye is the result of billions of years of evolution/survival of the fittest over genomes involving billions of organisms, or many orders of magnitude more than that if you count all up all the generations over the entire course of evolution.

Biology acts more holistically than human tech, which is more crude and modular; it’s self-healing, self-growing and self-reproducing (which human tech could only dream of being in the crudest, most limited ways); it works meaningfully on smaller scales; and it’s literally alive. (And I believe the “machinery” of living systems doesn’t just involve billiard ball mechanics; life/consciousness itself is probably a factor in its functionality, which would make its workings literally partially magical, transcendental and cosmic. (Even if you consider that to be pure woo, the other points about biology being more sophisticated still stand)).