Computational reducibility may well be the exception rather than the rule: Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts… - Stephen Wolfram

[F]iguring out where those pockets [of reducibility] are... is an essential thing... in science. ...If you just pick an arbitrary thing and say, "What's the answer to this question?" That question may not be one that has a computationally reducible answer. ...If you ...walk along the series of questions... you can go down this chain of reducible, answerable things, but if you just... pick a question at random... most likely it will be irreducible. ...When we engineer things, we tend to ...keep in this zone of reducibility. When we're thrown things by the natural world... [we're] not at all certain that we will be kept in this... zone...

This is what you... learn from this principle of computational equivalence. ...[I]t's both a message of ...hope, and ...[that] you're not as special as you think you are... We're just doing computations like things in nature do computations, like those gas molecules do computations, like the weather does computations. The only thing about the computations that we do that's very special is that we understand what they are... because they're connected to our purposes, our ways of thinking...

[In] Ancient Babylon... they were trying to predict three kinds of things.... where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle; and they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other.