Well,
@wolly.green two things:
- First, I think I was thinking you're saying emergent phenomena don't really exist, since they have no independent reality and are just "aspects" of the fundamental one -- an interpretive device. So for instance, if we discover Newtonian physics is emergent and quantum is underlying, I thought you'd say the entitles predicted by quantum exist but not macroscopic bodies.
If you did hold to this, then every time we find fundamental physical reality is made of something else, more fundamental than before, we'd actually be replacing, not just complementing, our theories.
- However, maybe you don't hold to that, which is fine -- STILL, I'd say that our science does seem to progress and actually show that our understanding was actually
wrong not just needing complements. Like, for instance, many thought our empirical world is deterministic for the longest time based on their best guess on Newtonian physics. Quantum showed otherwise -- even if you hold to MWI/thus a global determinism, locally to our world, revisions had to be made to our predictive theories. Similarly, many seemed to think of time basically being the same everywhere. Relativity proposed revisions.
Last, we may discover the fundamental particles constituting reality aren't what we thought/there are strings or whatever underlying all. Perhaps this doesn't bother you if you don't feel bothered by realizing what we're now describing are emergent phenomena, though if you're not bothered by that, I imagine maybe neutral-proponents would say our current physics describes emergent phenomena with the real underlying reality something else.
- I think what's going on is that our ontology may be out of whack while our progress in gaining knowledge may still be a whole lot better off than if we were just doing pure nonsense. At the very minimum, the mathematics seems to work (so there's probably SOMETHING out there having the kinds of properties we're talking of in current science...in some sense to be determined) -- and so even if we need to revise our knowledge as to the implications of that math working, that doesn't mean our state of progress is quite the same as if we didn't have math that we're able to make work. Even if what we think underlies the math is quite surprising, it may be at the coarser levels we're currently describing, the apparent reality could be exactly as we observe.
I guess in all this all I'm saying is I probably sympathize with the motivation for the neutral folk, even if I'm not at all sure it's the right way to go.