I am reading a book by Robert Laughlin who is the winner of the Nobel prize
in physics (1998) for developing the mathematical model which describes the
fractional Quantum hall effect.
In his opinion the laws of nature are really the result of the collective
behavior of the building blocks of realty. Therefore the laws of nature are
emergent. This perhaps might explain why the description of reality seems to
come in layers. He writes
"From the Reductionist standpoint, physical law is the motivating impulse of
the Universe. It does not come from anywhere and implies everything. From the
emergentist perspective, physical law is a rule of collective behavior, it
is a consequence of more primitive rules of behavior underneath and it gives
predictive power over a limited range of circumstances. Outside this range it
becomes irrelevant, supplanted by other rules that are either it's children
or its parents in a hierarchy of decent. Neither of these viewpoints can gain
ascendency over the other by means of facts, for both are fact-based and
true in the traditional scientific sense of the term. The issue is more subtle-
a matter of institutional judgment. To paraphrase George Orwell, all facts
are equal, but some facts are more equal."
Godel theorem tells us that mathematical structure is layered. Given any non
trivial mathematical structure a true statement may not be provable without
enlarging the structure causing new un-proveable statements to emerge.
Physical reality may likewise be structured in layers. What we think of as
"fundamental laws" may really be the result of the collective behavior of a lower
strata of reality. Perhaps the bedrock layer of Quantum theories are the vacuum
state , the so called virtual processes. Or perhaps there is no bedrock and
it's turtles all the way down. Linked is a paper I think is relevant to the
question of the layering of
our description of reality.