WOW -- you do say a lot in a few pages, and the way you do your "idea flow charts" is brilliant. Your essay strikes deeply into the current metaphysical doldrums we have in modern physics and maths. Basically there is no room for the "beyond physics" since science (with maths) claims "everything" as its vantage point with no room for anything else even the "mind" (just about almost). And yes it is all about how B and C are handled -- are we free to "see" what is there or are we "slaves" to our "evolved cognition". Are there really only a prior "self evident truths" just sitting in our "minds" just waiting to be discovered in the way we relate to the "world out there" as in D. And why is falsification of inductive observations the key for us to understand nature. And then why do we feel deduction is "better" than "induction" since it is induction that gets us the "ideas" to do maths and science in the first place. There is something very odd about how we do things and your flowcharts, which assumes a temporal sequence of deductive inferences can be thought of as a "whole story" -- seems to have only inductive inferences supporting D. Maybe I'm looking at it too literally. A,B,C,D then we do some analysis and we get odd inference patterns in A*,B,C*,*-D where * means "nature" made us change our ideas and the minus sign means "our logic made us take it away" -- is that it! Can we take that step away --- what fills the void. Yes QM just might be "beyond" our cognitive skills and we will always have a "quantum of "this makes no sense"" in our science, since it is that "quantum" that makes us US. Maybe is what you are saying using other words (my take on your work at least). Why do we need to interrogate nature for our answers, is it because we think "nature" is totally free of the "mind" or the "inductive" so an inductive hypothesis can be turned into a deductive subject all based on axioms and maths reasoning. It is hard to know how to answer the child who says "How do we know that nature is honest in the first place when we ask it questions about its behaviour" there could be censorship from pillar to post, self-imposed by the mind's evolved cognition systems.
One thing that doesn't change is B our "cognition" but that is supposedly a result of an evolving process which we are still part of, (you kind of assume a fixed reference nexus for B static) in the changing landscape of "what is fundamental". One definition for fundamental is "that which doesn't change", our minds' eye in the flow chart, does change over time, maybe a feedback loop for B, might make point that point clearer -- why B doesn't change.
Is the mind hypothesis based on "induction" or "deduction" inferences. Are the world's fundamental concepts -- a set of inductions or a set of deductions -- very interesting essay. If it was 9 pages long my mind would be too full with ideas.
I have marked you highly (extra credit for being a philosopher we need more in science now to shake it up a bit LOL). Well done on showing us all how to do a short but very powerful essay. Cheers Harri. If you have time I have an essay in the competition as well. What is fundamental is the area of the imaginary unit" where I do a bit of exploring of new outlandish ideas and see how I can put them into one story. The story is what is the "fundamental quanta" which I guess is "the area of the imaginary unit", it is very speculative in scope and reach (maybe too far in places) but it's fun to write an "almost" story sometimes for this competition. Mr H.