I don’t see how it’s different from the position I’m attacking. If emergentism were the way the universe worked, emergence would be a fundamental rule of the universe. So either the statement is meaningless like “it is what it is” or the statement is making a claim that, by definition. must rest on empirical observations and be falsifiable. Your formulation is unfalsifiable. But the article doesn’t take up your position. It takes this position:

For our physical reality, that means we ought to start with the particles of the Standard Model and the interactions that govern them — as well as whatever dark matter and dark energy are; hitherto their nature is unknown — and to build every phenomenon and complex entity known out of them.

This is the reductionism that I challenge. This is exclusionary reductionism. It assumes its conclusion in its axioms. It does not allow from the discovery of new fundamental laws of the universe.

Given that we have four fundamental forces in the Universe, including:
short-range nuclear forces that come in two types, a strong version and a weak version,
a long-range electromagnetic force, where “like” charged particles repel and “unlike” charged particles attract,
and a long-range gravitational force, where the only force between them is always attractive,
we should fully expect that structures will emerge on small, intermediate, and large scales.

Here we see it pretty clearly. The author takes as given, that is axiomatically, that there are 4 fundamental forces in the universe. This is unscientific. What’s true is that we have gathered evidence that supports a model of the universe that includes these 4 forces. What is given is that we could be wrong in the modeling, we could discover new forces, we could unify these forces, we could subdivide these forces. All of these outcomes are dependent on gathering evidence.

So when people say “we have found evidence of emergentism”, it is unscientific, dare I say dogmatic, to say that emergentism is impossible because the only laws that actually exist are the ones we’ve already discovered. Evidence of emergentism would challenge the current standard model and would require the model to be modified. Modifying the standard model is antithetical to the author’s position because the author’s position assumes the standard model axiomatically.

The fact that “There exists this phenomenon that lies beyond my ability to make robust predictions about” is never to be construed as evidence in favor of “This phenomenon requires additional laws, rules, substances, or interactions beyond what’s presently known.”

Again, entirely unscientific. That is exactly one of the potential outcomes of considering this particular evidence. It is possible that the fact that you cannot make robust predictions about it could indicate that new components of our model are required. The evidence is stronger when we find phenomena that contradict our model, but that we have not yet explained something is certainly an opportunity to conduct experiments that may find new components for the model.

In other words, what appears to be emergent to us today, with our present limitations of what its within our power to compute, may someday in the future be describable in purely reductionist terms.

This is only really a reasonable position if reductionist is defined expansively, that is to say, it incorporates all possible expansions of knowledge based on empirical evidence. At this point, it ceases to be useful to distinguish this from any other position. Talk about a strawman, I don’t think anyone argues that the universe does not operate according to laws, except people who posit the existence of an omnipotent god that somehow exists outside of the universe, which itself is a nonsensical position. The argument against reductionism is what I said it was - reductionists claim to take up an empirical position but start from the assumption that what’s been discovered so far is the null hypothesis.

And, to be clear, the “null hypothesis” is that the Universe is 100% reductionist. […] And that everything that we regard as “higher functioning,” including the workings of our various cells, organs, and even our brains, doesn’t require anything beyond the known physical constituents and laws of nature to explain.

This is exactly what reductionism means “everything […] doesn’t require anything beyond the known […]”. It is the height of arrogance to assume that everything that will be known about the fundamental laws of the universe is already known. People can attempt to save reductionism by saying that this isn’t really what reductionism is, that reductionism is just empirical science, but it’s not. Reductionism is a cognitive move that privileges the current understanding over potential future understandings. Empirical science does not do this. Empirical science leaves the gap exactly where it is. Reductionism closes the gap by filling it in with the axiomatic acceptance of the status quo as true. And it’s attempts at defending itself are 100% circular reasoning and always have been, whether in philosophy or in whatever this article thinks it is (which is not science).

Yes, we can’t rule out non-reductionism, but wherever we’ve been able to make robust predictions for what the fundamental laws of nature do imply for large-scale, complex structures, they’ve been in agreement with what we’ve been able to observe and measure

Except where the exact opposite was the case. This is almost Fukuyama-esque.

The combination of the known particles that make up the Universe and the four fundamental forces through which they interact has been sufficient to explain, from atomic to stellar scales and beyond, everything we’ve ever encountered in this Universe.

But we’ve had to modify these hypotheses dozens of times. They have never been sufficient to explain everything we’ve encountered and they still are insufficient to explain what we continue to encounter. There are plenty of phenomena that are currently in contention with the current formulation of the standard model. To claim that everything we haven’t explained yet is due to “complexity” is hand waving.

But it is true that resorting to non-reductionism — or the notion that completely novel properties will emerge within a complex system that cannot be derived from the interactions of its constituent parts

Again, that’s not what non-reductionism is. There is no such thing as non-reductionism. There are reductionists and there are those who argue against reductionism and they fall into many camps. I fall into the camp that says reductionists are high on their own supply if they don’t think they’re reasoning in circles. As I think I’ve demonstrated here, the reductionist position is not defined by the denial of spooky emergence but actually defined by the assumption that the null hypothesis is the status quo and argue for their position by assuming reductionism is correct.

What a fool’s errand it is to assert, “Maybe we need more than our current best model to describe reality” when […] and where these are the regimes most likely — if you insert something magical, divine, or non-physical — where science is very likely, in the very near future, to show that such an intervention is wholly unnecessary.

For those who do insert these things, it is certainly not an attempt to say the standard model needs to include the divine feminine. That’s a strawman. Those who do insert these things insert them precisely because the gaps in our scientific knowledge extending from fundamental physics are insufficient to navigate the world as a subject. I cannot use what science has produced thus far as a way of navigating my world and therefore I must use empirical processes to identify other systems of decision-making that result in the best outcomes for me and my relations.

But to argue that “science” will, in the very near future, show that such an intervention is wholly unnecessary is faith without support. How long have we gone as a species without science actually being able to explain that which is most salient - subjective experience. It has been a very, very, very long time and there is no evidence that science will, the very near future, provide the interventions people need to actually navigate the world.

This article, as far as I’m concerned, is exactly the type of reductionist religious text that I have spent years arguing against in philosophy. At least the philosophers managed to hide their axiomatic adherence to their conclusions well enough that it took a while to expose the circularity. This author just comes out and says “Given: the universe is reducible to the standard model we have thus far produced, I conclude that the universe is reducible to the standard model we have thus far produced.”