The lawfulness of higher order forms is either strictly deducible from the lawfulness of lower order ones or it is not. If it is, then it either requires translation principles or it does not. If it does not, the we have eliminative materialism. If it does, then the higher forms are either subjective, something we read into lower order, or they are not. If they are subjective, then once again we have eliminative materialism. If the higher order is real but the causality is one way (bottom up) then the higher order is epiphenomenal. If there is top down causality, then we have either hylemorphism or something else like it. And of course, that top down causality may be either determined or not. If it is determined, its behavior would be lawful, but that lawfulness would not, strictly speaking, be a more complex version of the lower level lawfulness.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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