Flake’s argument that nature is “frugal” and reuses the same simple rules for everything feels like a massive leap for us to make as a species. While he uses examples like the self-similarity in snowflakes and ferns to show how simple rules create complexity , I think we’re still too early in our development to claim we’ve figured out nature’s “program.” Now I’m not a hard science expert, but I find it hard to buy into his bold claim that nothing in nature stands above computational processes. We’re constantly discovering new things that break our old rules, and it feels a bit arrogant to assume that just because we’ve invented math and physics that can simulate a duck or an ant colony, we’ve actually decoded the fundamental “code” of the universe.
I also have a hard time with Flake’s “Silicon Laboratory” metaphor, mostly because it feels like it strips away the actual weight of being human. He talks about how groups like ant colonies or gazelle species find “solutions” through multiplicity , and while it’s true that human societies developed faster when we started sharing knowledge, being part of a group isn’t always a perfect “computational” win. In real life, groups can lead to things like mob violence or, on a completely different coin, the deep grief of losing someone – emotional experiences that a computer simulation could never truly capture. Flake seems biased by his computer science background, seeing the world as a series of number mappings. It makes me wonder, if we reduce everything to simple rules, do we lose the ability to understand things like yearning or heartbreak that don’t follow a logic-based script?