Selection effects also figure heavily in discussions regarding the eerie nature of mathematics, and as physicist Eugene Wigner said, its “unreasonable effectiveness” in physical predictions.
If you ever find yourself forced to summarise the ideas of western philosophy in a single metaphor, then the concept of a “self-modifying filter” may be your safest bet.
Information theory introduced the image of system boundaries as implicitly projecting “input categories” upon reality, parsing it into “variables” with an associated space of possible outcomes.
So far reality has been depicted as a disorderly mist, fractured with a scatter of low-entropy pockets – “systems” – that feed on each other in a swirling, co-adaptive dance towards ever-increasing complexity.
