Hi Ian, I like your essay very much. I agree that consideration of beables is very important. As you discuss before the end there is lack of clarity about what is meant by 'the universe' or even 'the totality of all that exists'. I think there needs to be separate terms for different versions of the universe or notions of the universe. Clearly the beable universe is not the same as the visible universe. At least as I see it, the beable universe is what exists -Now and the visible universe is what can be generated from receivable, EM signals.You wrote " The universe's existence is independent of our observation of it. We don't simply observe that it exists, it does exist."I.D. But what we observe is not what exists. We observe products of our senses or measurements which are relational, tying back in with the one side of a cow. The beables are the sources of all observations of them.
The beable cow has no difficulty being in a black /brown 'superposition' of states. In one man's view of the universe it is brown and in another's it is black. So the seen universes are not identical to the beable universe. Each man's observation gives a singular, limited, fixed state that is an impoverished version of what exists. If he was to make more observations and the cow was to turn around it might seem that the blackness or brownness of cows is random! (I don't mean that literally but as an illustration of the relational aspect of what something is deemed to be.
Kind regards Georgina