Oh goodie....let's start with an ad hominum whack at me for openers. And you think I haven't done any of my own thinking about this because????
Your reply reminds me of something Richard Lewontin once wrote:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute….
Lewontin has the mindset of a Marxist -- which is hardly surprising, because he is a Marxist. And like Marx, he is a materialist; and like Marx, apparently he "forbids" all questioning of his materialist "system." To permit questioning risks disturbing the "internal logic" of his system, which refuses any engagement with external reality.
I accept entirely the view that we may not yet know all the physical laws. But I strongly disagree with you that the physical laws are "human constructs." I think they are human discoveries. There is no way to reconcile this difference of perception between us.
However many physical laws there might ultimately be, so far we know of only 103 bits-worth of 'em. [cf Chaitin] So, what we do know about cannot explain the complexity measures that already have been quantified for various living systems. Maybe physics will catch up with biology someday? Your argument that the explanation is forthcoming at some unknown and possibly quite remote future time sounds like a cop-out to me.
Another thing I've been thinking over lately is that the physical laws themselves are examples of nonphenomenal -- that is, non-material -- reality. So is information. Even if they were purely human constructs -- which I strongly doubt they are -- this would only be to say that humans help construct the nonphenomenal world, which in turn affects the phenomenal world. As a materialist, I expect you absolutely deny any concept of nonphenomenal reality on principle.
You wrote that the physical laws "work well for engineering purposes, but they do not definitively describe nature." Are you at all interested in "describing nature," js1138? Or is such an inquiry forbidden by some rule I'm not aware of, which rule would also be an example of nonphenomenal reality?
What is matter, by the way?