Something rather curious about the universe is that there are well-defined, exploitable regularities that supervene upon the most basic elements of the physical universe. We might expect the most fundamental level of reality to be defined by relatively simple, predictable laws because of the probability penalties associated with complexity. But why should we expect that physics to result in such helpful regularities on the macro level?
Are there only certain possible physical universes that produce useful macro regularities? The anthropic principle might explain some of the regularities we see- there have to be some for macro-sized organisms to exist- perhaps this is why the social sciences are so hard, our universe hasn’t been anthropically selected for regularities in the behavior of societies like it has for physics and chemistry.
Conversely, perhaps the relationship is just mathematic and macro-regularities exist for most fundamentally simple systems. Maybe The Game of Life is relevant here? Are all macro-regularities just statistical?
Something rather curious about the universe is that there are well-defined, exploitable regularities that supervene upon the most basic elements of the physical universe. We might expect the most fundamental level of reality to be defined by relatively simple, predictable laws because of the probability penalties associated with complexity. But why should we expect that physics to result in such helpful regularities on the macro level?
Are there only certain possible physical universes that produce useful macro regularities? The anthropic principle might explain some of the regularities we see- there have to be some for macro-sized organisms to exist- perhaps this is why the social sciences are so hard, our universe hasn’t been anthropically selected for regularities in the behavior of societies like it has for physics and chemistry.
Conversely, perhaps the relationship is just mathematic and macro-regularities exist for most fundamentally simple systems. Maybe The Game of Life is relevant here? Are all macro-regularities just statistical?
“Macro regularities” often have mathematical explanations
Tao, Draft article on universality
I think this is a better justification for Occam’s razor then the one based on Solomonoff induction.