[deleted]
George,
You wrote in reply to Edwin & Ben: "The key issue you are both raising might be that in coarse graining physics one also needs a coarse graining of time to get the effective higher level laws. This certainly needs thinking about and I am not aware of much work on this."
I know Edwin eschews multiple dimensions; however, mathematical expressions of higher level laws, even in higher dimensions, do not forbid nonlocal causality in a finite space. That is, a closed logical judgment (mathematics) is 1 to 1 correspondent with a local physical result in the experimenter's measure space.
This dichotomy -- between the local measure space of infinite range and the nonlocal domain of finite range -- led me to realize that Joy Christian's proposal using dichotomous variables eliminates the local-global distinction. That makes it fully relativistic ("all physics is local") and angle preserving in its application of topological orientability.
Point is, that the general relativity interpretation of a universe finite in time and unbounded in space suffers no loss of generality as a universe finite in space and unbounded in time. This latter interpretation, though, fully embraces Minkowski space-time dynamics without ever having to refer to time as a physical phenomenon. Top-down causation is therefore continuous and locally real; continuous measurement functions are constrained by space-time topology (generalized geometry). I think this is consistent with your evolving block universe of spacetime evolution with no preferred surfaces.
Best,
Tom