[lisper]

> if the foundation underlying those simple emergent concepts turns out to be horrible complex

That is extremely unlikely. The simplicity of the universe is not just an artifact of our best theories, it appears to be baked into the very structure of those theories. If our current theories are even in the ballpark, then there are very few places that hidden complexity could possibly hide.

Take quantum randomness, for example. It used to be thought that the apparent randomness could just be papering over our ignorance of some hidden underlying mechanism, but it turns out that we can prove that this is not the case. We can eliminate entire classes of theories based on finite observations, and one of the classes that we can eliminate (with very high probability) is theories with high Kolmogorov complexity.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I assume you’re taking about the Bell experiments. Imagine that it’s the nonlocality side of things that ends up being correct. In that case, a full foundation of QM could be a nightmare.

Regardless, we don’t have a full unified theory of everything, so it seems premature to say we know how complex it’ll end up needing to be.

Also, the universe isn’t just an time evolution differential equation. It’s that, plus all the initial/boundary conditions. Saying the Kolmogorov complexity of the universe is small while only looking at the side that’s simplifiable seems circular.