or maybe the issue is that I consider physical laws to be things that particles know about each other? that is, your learning system can start with effectively no knowledge about the behavior of other systems; it gains that knowledge by bumping into them, and the knowledge gets squeezed through a series of conditional resonators of some kind (this should be fully general to all possible intelligent hunks of matter!) into a squashed and rotated dynamical system that has matching transition dynamics and equivalences as the external world as demonstrated by observation. even if you include genetics, this is still true—information got into the genome by the aggregate intelligent behavior of the history of evolutionary life!
or maybe the issue is that I consider physical laws to be things that particles know about each other? that is, your learning system can start with effectively no knowledge about the behavior of other systems; it gains that knowledge by bumping into them, and the knowledge gets squeezed through a series of conditional resonators of some kind (this should be fully general to all possible intelligent hunks of matter!) into a squashed and rotated dynamical system that has matching transition dynamics and equivalences as the external world as demonstrated by observation. even if you include genetics, this is still true—information got into the genome by the aggregate intelligent behavior of the history of evolutionary life!