Dear Joseph,
I found your essay to be quite illuminating and inspiring! In particular, it seems to give a much more hopeful view for experimental physics than seems common today, what with the concerns that practical energy considerations may severely limit discoveries beyond the Standard model. I have a few questions.
1. You mentioned the cosmological constant as an extreme example of "more," and I wonder if you view "dark matter" in this way as well. Obviously, dark matter involves scales much smaller than the dark energy/cosmological constant, but still much larger than the ordinary gravitational effects we are accustomed to on the stellar scale. Alternatively, could the light gauge bosons you suggest be dark matter?
2. I am wondering what you would say explicitly about top-down causation at the classical level versus the quantum level. I am sure you have noticed that the subject of top-down causation is rather popular in this contest, but most of the discussion is not very precise. For example, the causal structure in special relativity is given by the light cones, and the "future" of a subset of Minkowski spacetime is taken to be the union of the future light cones of its constituent events. The strongest form of top-down causation would endow subsets with causal efficacy independent of this picture, and one would essentially be dealing with relations on the power set of Minkowski spacetime rather than on spacetime itself. I find it hard to imagine that anyone really believes this at the classical level, but without this interpretation, it is hard to view classical top-down causation as anything more than a way of talking about aggregate effects of systems on each other, which is still an interesting field of study, but hardly "irreducible" in a strong sense. In the quantum picture, by contrast, I find it very easy (almost inevitable, in fact) to conclude in favor of a form of holism.
3. You remark that your essay becomes increasingly speculative near the end. It seems to me that a contest like this is precisely the proper forum for informed speculation. My own essay is hair-raisingly speculative, but I hope thought-provoking. Yours was certainly thought-provoking for me.
Take care,
Ben Dribus