There is no a priori reason to believe that world has to be learnable. But if it were not, then we wouldn’t exist, nor would (most?) animals. The existing world, thus, is learnable. The human sensorium and motor system are necessarily adapted to that learnable structure, whatever it is.
I have a post or a post draft somewhere discussing this issue. The world indeed just is. It does not have to be internally predictable to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, but it needs to be somewhat internally predictable in order for the long-lived patterns we identify as “agents” or “life” to exist. Internal predictability (i.e. that an incredibly tiny part of the universe that is a human (or a bacterium) can infer enough about the world to not immediately poof away) is not something that should be a given in general. Further, even if some coarse-grained internal predictability can be found in such a world, there is no guaranteed that it can be extended to arbitrarily fine accuracy. it might well be the case in our world that at some point we hit the limit of internal predictability and from then on things will just look random for us. Who knows, maybe we hit it already, and the outstanding issues in the Standard Model of Cosmology and/or the Standard Model of Particle Physic, and/or maybe some of the Millennium prize problems, and/or the nature of consciousness are simply unknowable. I hope this is not the case, but I do not see any good argument that says “yep, we can push much further”, other than “it worked so far, if in fits and starts”.
I have a post or a post draft somewhere discussing this issue. The world indeed just is. It does not have to be internally predictable to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, but it needs to be somewhat internally predictable in order for the long-lived patterns we identify as “agents” or “life” to exist. Internal predictability (i.e. that an incredibly tiny part of the universe that is a human (or a bacterium) can infer enough about the world to not immediately poof away) is not something that should be a given in general. Further, even if some coarse-grained internal predictability can be found in such a world, there is no guaranteed that it can be extended to arbitrarily fine accuracy. it might well be the case in our world that at some point we hit the limit of internal predictability and from then on things will just look random for us. Who knows, maybe we hit it already, and the outstanding issues in the Standard Model of Cosmology and/or the Standard Model of Particle Physic, and/or maybe some of the Millennium prize problems, and/or the nature of consciousness are simply unknowable. I hope this is not the case, but I do not see any good argument that says “yep, we can push much further”, other than “it worked so far, if in fits and starts”.