Michael Levin explains on a recent Lex Fridman podcast that

We traditionally see hardware as real, and software as a program that runs on it. But what if software is real? And it simply runs on hardware. Hardware is a manifestation of software.

This is not about computers, this is about substrates and causal structures in the world. Patterns of evolution are software, organic species are the hardware.

Causal patterns, the invariants, those are real