Comment by guerrilla

> is simplicity a side effect of our minds' pattern matching preferences?

That's a good point and I tend to think so. Think about this: pretty much everything (any object or property we observe) is an abstraction. People talk about people who are bad at abstracting and we know what they mean, but actually everyone is abstracting everything. Our actual experience without abstraction is just a bunch of unassociated colors and sensations and whatnot.