Hello Phil,
Can't open a dialog with you without expressing gratitude for the service you've given the community via vixra. Many heartfelt thanks.
First pass thru your essay was overwhelming in both breadth and depth. Can't hope to address it all, or even significant fraction. Where relevant and possibly helpful will outline connections between ideas in your essay and the geometric Clifford algebra vacuum wavefunction model Michaele and I have been working with.
Like that you explicitly state "My aim is to provoke your mind with ideas...", this shift of focus from the fundamental to ideas. You sure trotted out a bunchload, often with keywords very effectively highlighted in bold. In the next paragraph we have emboldened - emergent, stable vacuum, fundamental, broad landscape, hypothesis, unnaturally fine-tuned, and what is?
Where to start?
emergent - that which is not fundamental. Two bold birds with one stone there, emergent and fundamental :-)
stable vacuum - here we go back to fundamental geometric objects of geometric interpretation of Clifford algebra ala Hestenes et.al - point, line, plane, and volume elements, all orientable. The eight component Pauli algebra of 3D space. Claim this as vacuum wavefunction model. No issues yet with stability. It is just geometry without fields.
landscape hypothesis - probably safe to ignore this, let it die a quiet death. Two more bold birds with one stone here :-)
unnaturally fine tuned - tuning comes from topologically appropriate quantized fields assigned to vacuum wavefunction, to elements of the Pauli algebra. Simplest is to start with just EM quantized fields - electric charge, magnetic flux quantum, Bohr magneton,... To assign field quanta to the eight elements requires five fundamental constants input by hand - charge quantum, permittivity of free space, Planck's constant, speed of light, and electron mass (to set the scale of space via Compton wavelength). Whatever fine tuning exists in such a geometric wavefunction model is done at this point. There are no free parameters. It remains to be seen how natural or unnatural such a model is. We claim it is naturally finite, confined, and gauge invariant.
what is? - the enigmatic unobservable wavefunction and wavefunction interactions driving the proliferation of quantum interpretations.
next paragraph asserts that neither time nor space is fundamental, with geometry emerging from something more fundamental. Not unreasonable to suggest this 'something more fundamental' is comprised of the scalar point, vector line, pseudovector plane, and pseudoscalar volume elements of the Pauli vacuum wavefunction. Time then emerges from wavefunction interactions as modelled by the grade/dimension-changing geometric product, yielding a 4D Dirac algebra of flat Minkowski spacetime, the particle physicist's S-matrix. Time (relative phase) emerges from the interactions. In this view space is more fundamental than time, time is emergent.
then the story jumps to Feynman and the path integral. What is being integrated is the evolution of quantum phase. What governs that evolution are the quantized interaction impedance networks of electromagnetic geometric wavefunction interactions. That's what impedances do - they govern amplitude and phase of the flow of energy.
Like that essay pauses at this point, timing is perfect, to dance around a definition of the fundamental, then starts again with a different question, introducing the story analogy, and hot button word 'information'.
Similarly, seems like a good place for this comment to pause.
Again, many thanks for the gift of vixra.
Best regards,
Pete