James,
Sometimes it is good to pick a particular problem and hone in on it and work it to death. Not all of our ideas are good but a few good ideas are valuable. I've read your essays and your comments for years and am familiar with your thinking. My remarks about Smolin were to encourage you that some very decent physicists share, to some extent, your unhappiness with mass as it is often defined. It's also worth quoting Yau, of Calabi-Yau fame:
"In general relativity mass can only be defined globally. ...as measured from far, far away (from infinity actually). In the case of local mass [...] there is no clear definition yet. [And] mass density is a similarly ill-defined concept in general relativity."
This is a rather remarkable statement!
Also, the idea that the Higgs 'gives' mass to particles I find absurd. It is an artifact of a theory based on charge. And even then the Higgs only accounts for certain masses.
So you have chosen a very good bone to gnaw on. And I find your intuitive redefinition of mass as inverse acceleration to be extremely interesting. I played with it some more since my earlier comments -- still interesting.
Takes my old brain a while to absorb new ideas, but I'm not in a hurry. I plan to keep thinking about your idea. I probably won't spend too much time on entropy or charge, but I hope to give your idea about mass a fair shake.
Best,
Edwin Eugene Klingman