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SolveIt comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.