[fellowniusmonk]

Here is my take using the city as a metaphor.

All physical things have to be arranged in a linear fashion, this is pauli exclusion principle writ large.

A type of mereological nihilism is true, so hierarchy is real but in a weak emergence sense.

When I am standing on a street corner in a city, I can walk into a building and then navigate into a room inside that building and pick up a piece of paper inside.

Or I can walk down the street and as I pass landmarks, I will pass things in order, this is also a perceived hierarchy, because my starting position and movement are bound by time, I will always have a fixed order of experiences from any x,y coordinate.

So everything bounded by time and space acts as an emergent hierarchy via movement for a specific loci.

The paper can be moved however, and that same piece of paper sitting in the drawer at an attorneys office means something very different than when its sitting in the approved licenses cabinet in an offical government building.

Semantic meaning is first class but its an entirely different dimension than other types of meaning and due to pointers it isn't bound by pauli exclusion.

When people start thinking about the semantics of objects in computer programs they often become confused, because the semantic representation of the object follows semantic ontology laws not physical object ontology.

People can fuck this up in either direction and think physical laws apply to semantic meaning or physical meaning applies to semantics.

[gobdovan]

Yeah, that's part of it. But I'd argue that once you look at a city, you look at constructions administratively designed by men, with their preference for hierarchies. Try to hierarchically describe to someone instructions to pick a random leaf in a dense tree (ironically, we use them as a metaphor for hierarchical organisation) and see how far you could go in the same way you could point them out to pick a paper in the city.

Not in a position to argue about physics, but I could think of quite a few things that are better described as web-like phenomena rather than hierarchical ones, electricity in a complex circuit comes to mind.