> It really depends whether it's "easier" for the network to learn an intuitive physics, versus a laundry list of superficial hacks that let it minimise loss all the same.
Human innate understanding of physics is a laundry list of superficial hacks. People needs education and mental effort to go beyond that innate but limited understanding.
When it is said that humans innately understand physics, no one means that people innately understand the equations and can solve physics problems. I think we all know how laughable such a claim would be, because how much people struggle when learning physics and how few people even get to a moderate level (not even Goldstein, but at least calculus based physics with partial derivatives).
What people mean when saying people innately understand physics is that they have a working knowledge of many of the implications. Things like that gravity is uniformly applied from a single direction and that is the direction towards ground. That objects move in arcs or "ballistic trajectories", that straight lines are uncommon, that wires hang with hyperbolic function shapes even if they don't know that word, that snow is created from cold, that the sun creates heat, many lighting effects (which is how we also form many illusions), and so on.
Essentially, humans know that things do not fall up. One could argue that this is based on a "laundry list of superficial hacks" and they wouldn't be wrong, but they also wouldn't be right. Even when wrong, the human formulations are (more often than not) causally formulated. That is, explainable _and_ rational (rational does not mean correct, but that it follows some logic. The logic doesn't need to be right. In fact, no logic is, just some are less wrong than others).
Human innate understanding of physics is a laundry list of superficial hacks. People needs education and mental effort to go beyond that innate but limited understanding.