Hi Caspar
Yup - one of my heroes, Michael Polanyi, was an early explorer of the concepts of complexity and emergence. In a way, it’s simply saying “there are essences after all, built into the way complex things come together in nature”. Whether that has any more explanatory power than the older essentialism, or just expresses it differently, I’m not sure! “There are essences built into the natures of complex things” says more or less the same - one is still left asking “How and why?”, and hopefully wondering at the wisdom of creation!
Of course the same laws of nature apply - but though Aristotle (since we keep reverting to him for some reason) didn’t use the descriptor of “laws”, he never though essences were anything other than natural. And neither did Aquinas, though he was careful to include God in the overall picture - to be natural was to be produced by God through secondary causes, as opposed to some other agency, rather than to be done autonomously of God.
We haven’t fully bottomed out what Jim meant by “contemporary metaphysics” - no doubt it includes complexity theory, but as I think you hint there are those who regard that as stuff and nonsense - life resolves to chemistry. That, of course, has a particular bearing on information as an “emergence” concept, in biology with respect to DNA.
In human affairs, clearly semantic information like our posts is fully compliant with physical laws, but though it could be described as “an emergent phenomenon of complex systems in disequilibrium”, we understand more by saying “it’s a product of mind.”