Is there literally anything more than some basic underlying mechanisms combining in how anything in the universe operates?

I think existance, biology and consciousness or whatever you want to label these things is much more mysterious than statistics.

Isn't most of our current understanding of how life on earth came to be (eg: primordial soup, hydrothermal vents, etc), natural evolution, all basically "just statistics"? They all require the correct "setup" (time, location, etc), but in a large enough universe, it's _statistically_ likely (mediocrity principle) and "just statistics" again, right?

Well yeah, that's tautologous because statistics is a mathematical abstraction. Everything, viewed a certain way, is "statistics". Just like everything, viewed a certain way, is "physics". And everything, viewed a certain way, is "narrative".

Mathematics models the world, it does not have substance. It is a useful way of looking and a useful way of manipulating, but many models are equally useful. Capital T Truth, beyond models is very difficult to get at. We can show that things are true for certain models well enough. Showing that something is true in all models (a universal truth) is far more difficult. You face incommensurability.

I see a lot of people in technology fall into this extremely basic logical fallacy called Reification constantly.

Do you believe in a soul? It’s fine if you do, but I don’t, and I don’t understand how people can reject the notion of soul and still say things like this.

I mean, when you really get down to it, either the particles and such operate on very specific rules, and the rules govern how all our brain and body work. Followed to the conclusion, the universe is computable and we can simulate life.

That sounds like a next token generator to me, which I think is more accurate. The word "predict" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your formulation. What exactly is being predicted?