Asklemmy

Brain neurons are slower than silicon, by a lot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time)

114.6 ps (pico second, One trillionth of one second): The time for the fastest overclocked processor as of 2014 to execute one machine cycle.

1 ms (millisecond, one thousandth of a second): The time for a neuron in the human brain to fire one impulse and return to rest

That's about 1,000,000,000 or a billion times slower.

If you went the organic angle you'd want some bs about bit width or multiplexing, or how neurons don't get interference or ringing or something.

Edit: or if organic stuff wasn't faster, but you could make it at home without a die machine, you just mask some nutrients onto a petri dish, and it grows, so everyone has their own custom little brains that tell them the time, some real horror shit.

Fungi CPU

https://youtu.be/5mIWo6dgTmI

Watch the vid at 2x speed, because 70% of what he says is just filling to lengthen the vid. Look in the comments for a guy named Kruger, he's actually a researcher on those kind of things and his comment is very interesting.

It’s not the hardest of sci-fi and ultimately there’s isn’t a ton in the narrative specifically about this, but there’s some really interesting stuff in The Expanse series (book, not show) that touches on this kind of thing.

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but have you read the Rosewater trilogy? It's not humans, it's aliens who are invading earth by replacing the cells in our bodies. They have a biological fungus based data network that humans mistake for telepathy and mysticism. It causes lots of "supernatural" effects, but it turns out they're all based on biological computation.

Set in Nigeria in the 2080s, by a Nigerian author.

I don't remember any sources, but I remember in the late 90's there was some online chatter about "biological computers" being the Next Big Thing. In short, cells forming a computational neural net. No idea what, if anything, came of it, or if it was even seriously researched or implemented.

Thought Emporium has done some videos about this:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw

I'd imagine it's like this, but with chemical-induced early maturation and imhumane selective breeding practices. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo

The dune series has a lot on maxim8sing human thinking and will as an alternative to an AI driven future.

Night’s Dawn Trilogy, Peter F Hamilton. Better than his later stuff in my opinion

reminds me of the Invid from Robotech 3rd generation.

https://robotech.fandom.com/wiki/Invid

The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata is sort of what you're looking for. It's not hard sci-fi, but it has a strong emphasis on organic computation. Books so far in the series are: Edges, Silver, Needle, and Blade.

There's a three book prequel series, The Nanotech Succession as well. It's not required to read it before The inverted frontier but it's quite good so I would if I were you.

You'd probably want to segregate the hard-tech from the soft/bio-tech:

IF you require deterministic-performance, THEN stay away from meat-implimentation.

IF you require sentience-sensitivity, THEN stay away from hard-tech implimentation.

( same principle as requiring both people & systems, in order to project effective force, economically, militarily, in disaster-relief, in any domain,

same principle as using both a wordsless-wholistic metaphor-understanding sentience in one's right-hemisphere, vs a reductionistic sentience in one's left, as the split-brain patients showed.

2 orthogonal systems, collaborating .. produces greater results than either-kind would on its own! )

Organic-sentience and machine-compute, organic doing the high-level-decisions, & machines doing the low-level-competencies, seems much more realistic.