I've been leaning towards a similar mode of thinking, and like to make the point when people get too obsessed about how the universe is a simulation or a neural network.
What I have been missing is a nice list with previous examples of this line of thinking. The only good one that comes to mind is how seafaring and the ubiquity of maps was one such moment in history. I'd be curious if you have other examples.
I kind of take the opposite view. I suspect all of the analogies - the clockwork, machine, computer, network universe - may all be right. I think all of these advances and corresponding analogies better help us understand nature, and I think people making these analogies did so for good reasons. The development of the technologies opened the door to new types of system conceptualizations.
I do think these types of analogies don't really work for the brain, though, or at least only scratch the surface. (Clearly the brain networks and computes, but there's much more going on.)
I'm a physicalist, but I suspect it might take longer to fully understand the brain than it'll take to fully understand the universe. (At least to a feasible level of universe detail; the difference is there'll probably be a point where we'll know we know the brain, but we won't necessarily ever be able to know if we've fully cracked the universe at the root, even if we can explain all observed phenomena.)
Sure, I’m not saying that these theories were inherently wrong, just that the idea of the universe being akin to [current technology] is almost certainly incomplete at best and extremely misleading at worst.
What I have been missing is a nice list with previous examples of this line of thinking. The only good one that comes to mind is how seafaring and the ubiquity of maps was one such moment in history. I'd be curious if you have other examples.