Joseph,
A very comprehensive coverage of the topic. I am very much in agreement with your conclusion that reality is a dichotomy of energy and information. I think though that this relationship can be mined more deeply. Energy manifests information, while information defines energy. Since energy is conserved, in order to create new information, old information has to be erased. This produces what we commonly refer to as the "arrow of time."
The problem is that as we view reality from an essentially point perspective, our understanding of it is then filtered though the limitations of this frame. The result is that since we experience this effect of time as a sequence of events, we treat it as a vector from past to future and physics, in all its reductionistic focus, enforces this by treating it as a measure of duration.
The actual physical dynamic is that the changing configuration of this "energy" creates the "flow" of events, but it is not this physical "presence" that moves from past to future, rather those events coalesce and disperse, thus go from future potential to past circumstance.
To wit, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.
Clocks run at different rates for the very practical reason that they are separate processes. The cat's fate doesn't branch out into multiple possibilities, but rather it is the actual occurrence of events which determine the cat's fate, ie. future potential becomes past circumstance.
Duration doesn't transcend the present, but is the dynamic processes occurring between the occurrence of events, so it is not a "blocktime" vector.
The problem this poses for relativity is that time is reduced to an effect of action, similar to temperature. One could say time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude.
This means "spacetime" is not some underlaying metaphysical fabric, but correlations of measures of distance and duration, using the speed of light as mediation. One could do something similar with ideal gas laws and create "temperaturevolume," but temperature is only the basis of our organic processes, not our narrative and logical ones, as sequence is, so we have a more objective perspective of temperature.
This leaves space as background. Physics dismisses it largely as an artifact of measurement, but three dimensions originated as the coordinate system and are how one models space from the point perspective of the individual. Three dimensions are no more foundational to the nature of space than longitude, latitude, and altitude are foundational to the surface of the planet. Yet distance, area and volume are measures of space, while time is a measure of change. Without the time vector, space has no structural properties which can limit, bound, warp it, etc. Not only does this make it infinite, but absolute as well, since it is inert. This can be measured as centrifugal force of a spinning object. Necessarily the effect of centrifugal force is due to the relation between the spin of the object and the inertia of space(call it an infinite frame, if your model requires), not the relation of the object to external references. So filling space is this "energy" cycling between contracting mass and expanding radiation, which express those parameters of infinity and inertia. Radiation expanding out to infinity and mass collapsing into inertia. In this description, background radiation is not residue from some primordial singularity, but the solution to Olber's paradox; the light of ever more distant sources, shifted completely off the visible spectrum. Could go on with all the issues with cosmology, but will stop here.
Regards,
John Merryman
