How to make Polymorphism make sense?

[xandkar]

What does it mean for different rules to coexist?

Rules are discretizations of the real world - in other words sets of
approximations. Different sets of approximations are possible, but the real
thing exists underneath. Energy? Maybe... The main idea is that there's
something fine-grain that is happening, while there're different, COMPETING
coarse-grainizations of reality that affect the fine-grain reality underneath.

I emphasize competition because the opposite is cooperation, which implies some
synchronization of the model - if we cooperate - we follow at least a sub-set
of the same rules/approximations; overlapping of the coarse-grainization of the
world view. The competition may not be intentional, but the two will
necessarily conflict with each other unless synchronized somehow.

This sounds like both the animal kingdom and the computer - access patterns to
underlying resources overlap and interact in weird ways, creating both
conflicts and symbiotic relationships: race conditions and things that work for
unexpected reasons. An operating system, for instance, exists to
de-conflict/synchronize the competing world-views of different programs - it
creates that overlap of shared resource-model.

So, to make Polymorphism automata make sense, at least two layers are needed:

1. a single fine-grain reality
2. multiple corse-grain representations