@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica I don't think those things need go that way. One can recognise patterns and non-fundamental kinds as real and causally efficacious (tables, organisms, trains, etc) and think that they are realized without remainder by lower-level stuff. Only very strong versions of reductionism, currently rather unpopular, would deny that.

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica

so the big question is what gives rise to the high-level laws as types, right? This is where the notion of constraint seems potentially essential and missing from that standard non-reductionist picture since constraints are (metaphysically) neither 'objects' nor laws ('rules')?

and we would want to distinguish as different two metaphysical pictures: one where constraints constrain the fundamental level objects and another where the constrain higher level types qua type?

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica

thanks this is really helpful! setting aside that (from my brief forays in to philosophy) it seems we don't really have a consensual, worked out, notion of either 'law' or 'cause', I think what our exchanges are slowly clarifying for me is that I feel like there is a lack of sharpness in my understanding of the metaphysical picture of the standard non-reductionist view we're (I think) talking about: If one takes the GoL metaphor seriously then there are 1/2

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica
2/3 2 types of "laws"- the fundamental rules of the game which are priviliged in being 'real' and high-level generalisations or regularities ('gliders are destroyed by impact with blinkers') that are true generalisations between, in some sense, epiphenomenal high-level 'patterns' ('glider' etc).

Our causal machinery isn't terribly helpful in distinguishing these, because -from a counterfactual perspective- 'the blinker caused the destruction of the glider' works

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica

3/3 but I think (as per my potential example of the GoL paper with different timing constraints), constraints could genuinely affect how the system turns out (thus seeming 'causal' in a sense) by impacting how the fundamental rules unfold, while being neither 'objects' nor fundamental rules not high-level laws/generalisations. And that, to me, would indicate a stronger role than just some kind of epistemic utility in the non-reductive picture

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica I think indeed the latter is the central question that J. should at least have tried to tackle: are constraints nothing more than ways of capturing at a higher level of abstraction some complex sets of regularities, or something else? The former is compatible with the mainstream picture, while she wants to argue for the latter, but didn't succeed in doing so for now. There are deep metaphysical issues with that view she doesn't go into at all.