Dear James
I read your essay and found it interesting and well structured. It seems that you would like to analyze information from the perspective of consciousness. I'd like to make some comments on your essay.
You: "participatory anthropic principle," meaning we are necessary to bring the universe into being. Such human activity connections were not considered in the classical world of physics.
This reminds me of the ancient Greeks who used to say that things only exist when we look at them. Nowadays,we believe that whether we are aware of things or not they exist. This is the view that there is a world or reality independent of whether there are observers or not. The word "participatory" seems to revive the old view of the Greeks.
You: Accordingly, he said, such entities exist in a probabilistic limbo.. ... classical physics did not see.
By the middle of the 20th Century, important experiential human events... ...so it was no surprise that we should become active agents in a causal role regarding the mechanical workings of nature,
I think that classical physics disregarded the fact that the measurement affects the system under study because the measurement, for practical matters, doesn't perturbs the macroscopic system. When experiments were aimed at studying microscopic systems and other no "ordinary" phenomena (such as the splitting of light spectra) the measurements play an important role. And physicists realized that the mechanical picture of the world was not enough. This led to the development of GR and QM, which promote the understanding of the world only in mathematical language. However, very recently new classical experiments are shedding light on the behaviour of the microscopic world, I believe things are gonna change in the following years. The work of McHarris is an example of this. I think that physics not only has a mathematical description but also an intuitive explanation. Please take a look at my essay, and leave some comments.
With respect to consciousness. Many people think that there are questions that can be answered and others that cannot be answered. I deep thought of the problem of consciousness suggest that this is one of the difficult questions, (just as the question of what is time?). So I think that science is not yet well equipped to give an answer to how consciousness emerges, I think we are very far away from that answer.
You also mention about the inflaton field, as far as I know, the inflation model is being discarded because it has some many problems (http://pirsa.org/displayFlash.php?id=13030079). The Big bang explains several observations but it also still has big problems to solve that has led many physicists (such as Roger Penrose) to claim that the model is totally incorrect.
Best Regards
Israel