Physics Constrains, History Constructs: Why Higher-Level Sciences Are Necessary Even If Everything Is Quantum Fields

Recent foundational debates have polarised between austere physicalism - the view that everything ultimately reduces to fundamental physics (currently, quantum fields) - and experience-first responses claiming that consciousness must be more fundamental. Both positions are confused. Austere physicalism is ontologically correct but mistakes the universality of substrate laws for sufficiency of explanation. Substrate laws define a combinatorially vast space of possible configurations of matter; the configurations actually realised at each emergent level are selected by historically contingent trajectories, and that history is not compressible into the substrate laws. The missing explanatory ingredient is therefore not consciousness or any non-physical entity, but historically accumulated configuration information. This view preserves physicalism, rejects downward causation, and explains why the layered structure of the sciences - chemistry, biology, psychology, economics - is a structural necessity rather than a temporary epistemic limitation. It also yields a non-arbitrary criterion for distinguishing effective-theory emergence (derivable in principle from substrate laws) from configurational emergence (the historically realised structure that defines the actual world).