If you genuinely believe in emergent phenomena, then these laws genuinely do not describe all the things that happen in the universe. I do not believe in emergence in this form, but some philosophers of science do.
But what I ought to have asked is whether he thinks it's because the rules we know are incorrect or missing a few key features, or whether at some fundamental level they just can't do what he used to think they did. To my worldview, it borders on magical thinking to believe they couldn't describe everything in the universe. On the other hand, intuitively, it seems deeply unsatisfying (not to mention empirically unproven) to claim they do. It's a big question for sure.
That's kind of where physics is at, no? Until you succeed in building an apparatus that lets you see individual pixels, it's a continuous canvas for all intents & purposes.
Some discrete & deterministic layer underneath it all is a more elegant possibility imho. Might suit people who prefer "nature at its deepest level is math" worldview. But why would reality 'bother' to fit into that shoe? It just is. Whatever that is. Discrete or continuous, deterministic or probabilistic.
The real meaning of the commutation relation is not that there is a fundamental _relation_ between sets of observables but, I would argue, that at a deep level pairs of non-commuting observables like x and p, share a single ontological substance which we can view partially as either position or velocity depending on how we arrange our measuring apparatus.
That's a big if, which quickly shot down my then early and naive absolute determinism view when Heisenberg uncertainty principle reared its head:
σx•σp >= h/2π
That said, if that's what you mean, then it's been my belief for a long time that if we were given a book with all the true laws of physics at the lowest level we would still need to spend centuries deriving useful approximations for our practical concerns at the larger scales.
In the case of Descension the constraints are somewhat artificial and imposed by the artist. Arguably, the phenomena supervenes upon the physical structure of those constraints. But consider some living organism. It's various physical parts might be replaced by other parts with similar properties (with respect to their function) and the organism would keep existing as itself. But there isn't any particular substance which maintains the constraints which define the organism. Some philosophers of science (eg Terrance Deacon) uphold that this means emergent phenomenon do not supervene upon their material constituents per se, and are thus not determined by the laws of physics which dictate their properties. I don't buy it, but it is a position.
[1] https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/02/anish-kapoor-decensio...
It sort of reminds me of the Philosophy of Mathematics[1], where there are some schools of thought that I consider vaguely ridiculous too. Like some schools of Platonism suggesting mathematical objects actually exist somehow instead of it just being a convenient linguistic shorthand.