The return of British Emergentism?

British Emergentism has long been discredited ... when the examples used to demonstrate the existence of the elementary causality of emergence appeared to be disproved during the rise of quantum physics, this "strong" form of emergence went by the wayside ... only "pragmatic" emergence remained viable to the scientific mind (feedback/downward causality, multiple realizability, etc.).

But I just finished an essay by a Nobel-prize-winning physicist ... in it, he and a colleague describe some recent findings in the quantum realm ... something called "quantum protectorates" ... a new understanding of superconductors, and such ... these are emergent processes - and not simply in the pragmatic sense ... they are not simply feedback/downward causation, nor are they simply multiply realizable processes ... at low energy states, these "quantum protectorates" are completely independent of their microscopic constituents - their causality is elementary ... the authors also postulate that such "protectorates" are not limited to the quantum realm - that there are "classical protectorates" as well ... if these guys are right, does that put British Emergentism back on the table?

The essay: http://www.pha.jhu.edu/courses/171_405/ThofEverything.pdf

The website: ICAM - I2CAM Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter Home

... it's interesting to consider what the implications of these views might be:

• do "protectorates" (and by implication, processes) become ontologically real due to their elementary causality?
  

• LaPlace's Demon becomes significantly busier ... the macro world cannot be derived from the micro world "Theory of Everything" alone - one must factor in the higher-level contributions of the "protectorates".
  

• in some ways, "protectorates" are like crystals ... the low energy state is the "pure" form of protectorates, but you can add "impurities" by adding energy ... as you add quanta of energy, a protectorate is no longer in its pure form and the micro world creeps into the equations ... this is because the micro world is discrete - if it were instead continuous, adding energy would not disrupt the "pure" form of the protectorate ... thus quantum mechanics is an important (the only?) source of contingency in the macro world
  

• ???