Dear Richard,
The scope of your essay is certainly very ambitious, and you present some intriguing ideas. In the spirit of constructive criticism, allow me to mention an issue that I have noticed.
In reference to your initial void, you say "It has no consequences or effects, and cannot be named, referenced, or pointed to", then you introduce as "The first and smallest possible step away from Nothing" NotNothing and say that "in discussing emergence of space and time, we will need only this most-basic primitive--Difference--in order to begin the emergence of both space and time below."
I believe that there is a logical problem here, and showing this involves treating two cases.
First, suppose NotNothing is to be parsed as (neg)Nothing where (neg) is the negation operator. But that would mean that the negation operator has a referent, it refers to Nothing, or the Void. But above you said that the Void"cannot be referenced, or pointed to".
That rules out the possibility that NotNothing is (neg)nothing and brings us to the only other possible alternative, which is the second case: That NotNothing is "something" considered as a whole. But if "Notnothing" is considered as "something" as a whole, it is not definable in terms of anything more basic (in particular, not definable in terms of (neg)Nothing because that has already been ruled out). But then that means Notnothing is a primitive by the definition of what a primitive is, namely, something undefinable in terms of something more basic. But this contradicts your claim that the most basic primitive is the difference between NotNothing and Nothing.
Incidentally, the difference in and of itself is problematic because it has two referents, Notnothing and Nothing, and this conflicts again with your claim that Nothing is not a referent. I don't think it is possible to claim that the difference does not have referents because if that were the case, then the difference would lose its meaning. Consider that generally the meaning of a difference is such that the difference between two appropriately comparable objects is another comparable object. In your case of distances, the difference between two distances is another distance. So it seems that the difference without the referents of which it is meant to be the difference would simply fail to mean that. It is possible that you might have meant something like a difference operator, but then I think you should state that more clearly.
In fact, reframing your introduction in terms of a difference operator might possibly save your work from the apparent inconsistency above.
Again, I think you present some intriguing ideas, my criticism was given with the best possible intention, that we learn from each other. I hope you found it useful.
Best wishes,
Armin