The thing missing here is that it's only a ship for humans. Ships are cultural artifacts. If we said the universe was a ship that was sailing itself, that would

The thing missing here is that it's only a ship for humans. Ships are cultural artifacts. If we said the universe was a ship that was sailing itself, that would be misapplying something we make for nature itself. Independent of human culture, ships are just arrangements of matter. We make particular arrangements meaningful. Same thing applies to computers and computation. It's only meaningful to use those words for matter we arrange to do certain stuff for us.