Steven,
Great essay. Sorry I came to it so late (I failed the readathon!).
I struggled with your; " measurement need not involve a particular observer; rather it is any interaction that determines the property of a system to a description that it is acceptable to be used in another interaction."
Yet; "...Anything that computes makes measurements."
I can't fully resolve this logically (it is QM after all!) If two brains or instruments detect a signal, must they both find precisely the same, even if in different places (as they must be) or states of motion?
Your analysis of the Bell Inequalities was excellent, so good that I would beg a moment of your time to consider an entirely new approach with a 'non-local' (in Bells terms) variable seeming to support von Neumann's assertion for consistent QM not relying on causality at Alice and Bob.
The model predicted an orbital asymmetry should be found in time resolved or single particle experiments. Searching Aspects papers I eventually found just this in his French thesis. Did you know he discarded ~99.9% of his results as the anomaly couldn't be explained at the time?. Statistical methods are 'blind' to it.
Please ignore my dense abstract which puts many off, the paper is very readable, with comments including; "groundbreaking", "significant", "astonishing", "fantastic", "wonderful", "remarkable!", "superb", etc. I hope that makes you at least curious, and perhaps none may be better qualified to comment.
Very well done for yours. Top Marks. Perhaps it's lower rated as your sentence/para structure was a bit too much like my abstract! But no problem for me.
Very best wishes, and greatly look forward to your comments and advice (after the contest would be fine). The Intelligent Bit.
Peter