[ordu]

It is a funny statement, I like it. But due to a different reason: all we know about reality is our theories. How we could state, that rules of the universe are simple? As I see it, we could state, that our theories are full of simple rules. But the universe have no theories nor rules outside of human's mind. It is completely our inventions, our dreams, our hopes that the universe have some rules.

We could state that our simple rules works, but what does it mean "to work"? For example, a spider sees reality not like us, it feels vibrations of it's web, runs to a source of vibrations and start to bite, to wrap intruding object with web. It would do it to a tuning fork, if you pressed it to spider's web. His simple rules of reality works though. Despite the fact that sometimes spider bites steel of a tuning fork without any benefits for the spider.

How could we know that our theories not just extended version of spider's? With the same issues, like they make us to do something absolutely pointless. How could we evaluate this fact? To ask our theories? But our theories already predicted that this pointless thing we do would be a good thing. We might ask our theories again and we'd get the same answer.

This statement seems as a tautology for me. Our rules are simple, because they are simple. Our theories work because they tell us, that they work.

[MauranKilom]

I think there is a disconnect between the "rules of the universe" that the quote talks about and the "our simple rules" that your comment focuses on. Without getting too philosophical, I think we can agree that there are "rules" how the universe works (which is what the quote talks about), which are not necessarily the same as the rules that our theories postulate (what you talk about), although we of course try to get closer and closer.

That we can only observe, talk about and know reality in our subjective ways does not mean that there is no underlying mechanism by which reality "works". The quote points out that this "mechanism" is apparently sufficiently simple that we can effectively form and test hypotheses about it.

For example, we have no all-encompassing explanation of the universe that concludes R = U/I for electric circuits. Yet we can observe it to be accurate independently from the infinity of conceivable influences - there appears to be no influence on this observation from your lunch, the day of the week, whether your car is green or somebody was just born in Taiwan. We can't explain why these have no influence. We could imagine a reality where all of these (and infinitely many others) are confounders, in which case we could not effectively form theories about these rules. Yet the actual number of things influencing R = U/I observations in our reality are evidently very finite, allowing us to identify them and build our theories.

[ordu]

> Without getting too philosophical, I think we can agree that there are "rules" how the universe works...

Well, maybe I am too philosophical, because I feel myself reluctant to agree. I accept science method because I know nothing better. But I doubt the idea, that there are no possibility to invent something better.

> we have no all-encompassing explanation of the universe that concludes R = U/I for electric circuits

I'm not a physicist to argue with it. But somewhere deep inside me I see R = U/I as a tautology too. R, U and I was defined by a way, that made R=U/I true. There is some information about the universe encoded in this rule, but there also information about us there. How to separate information about the universe from information about us?

[DiogenesKynikos]

Science has an empirical aspect that you're ignoring here. Our theories are tied to nature through experiment. They are more than just inventions of the human mind. People come up with new ideas about nature all the time. Most of them are wrong, and we find that out by doing experiments.

[ordu]

Yes. If we take a look at social sciences struggling with experimental method, we'll see, that they get better with time. When experiments do not work, people somehow figure out how to do experiments better, and it changes things. It gives a hope that experimental method could falsify itself, so when it stops working we will be able to notice it. So if we do not see it to fail, we could assume that it works.