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SolveIt comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's no guarantee we should be able to find any truths using any method. It's a miracle that the universe is at all comprehensible. The question isn't "when can't we learn everything?", it's "why can we learn anything at all?".
Because entities which can't do not survive.
Counterexample: Plants. Do they learn?
Of course. Leaves turn to follow the sun, roots grow in the direction of more moist soil...
Is that really learning, or just reacting to stimuli in a fixed, predetermined pattern?
Does vaccination imply memory?.. Does being warned by another's volatile metabolites that a herbivore is attacking the population?
(Higher) plants are organized by very different principles than animals; it is a never-ending debate on what constitutes 'identity' in them. Without first deciding upon that, can one speak about learning? I don't think they have it, but their patterns of predetermined answers can be very specific.
Also, there is an interesting study, 'Kin recognition, not competitive interactions, predicts root allocation in young Cakile edentula seedling pairs'. This seems to be more difficult to do than following the sun!
That just pushes the question back a step. Why can any entity learn?
In the spirit of Lumifer's comment, anything we would consider an entity would have to be able to learn or we wouldn't be considering it at all.
That would explain why all entities learn. Not why any entities learn. Ignoring things that can't learn doesn't explain the existence if things that can.
A more useful question to ask would be "how do entities, in fact, learn?" This avoids the trite answer, "because if they didn't, we wouldn't be asking the question".
I think if we follows this chain of questions, what we'll find at the end (except for turtles, of course) is the question "Why is the universe stable/regular instead of utterly chaotic?" A similar question is "Why does the universe even have negentropy?"
I don't know any answer to these questions except for "That's what our universe is".
I suppose what I want to know is the answer to "What features of our universe make it possible for entities to learn?".
Which sounds remarkably similar to DeVliegendeHollander's question, perhaps with an implicit assumption that learning won't be present in many (most?) universes.
The fact that the universe is stable/regular enough to be predictable. Subject predictability is a necessary requirement for learning.
For that matter, a world in which it is impossible for an organism to become better at surviving by modeling its environment (i.e. learning) is one in which intelligence can't evolve.
(And a world in which it is impossible for one organism to be better at surviving than another organism, is one in which evolution doesn't happen at all; indeed, life wouldn't happen.)