An interesting justification for complexity reduction and “missing information” problems I recently read involves thinking of incomplete information as residing in channels or pipes, and the completed information is a full pipe or channel using its full bandwidth.
From that point of view, which does presume the pre-existence or self-building of potential channels, there’s a bit of top-down causation, like a fulfilment of an existing purpose unseen otherwise or too confusing (zooming in too close), nevertheless can justify digitizing / breaking information into discrete scales; a scale being the unrealized bandwidth of a communication channel or pipe.