Marc,
Yours was easily the most enjoyable essay I've read in this contest!
It is lucid, learned, well-stated, well-ordered, and covers the topic in an interesting and engaging way. It as also spot-on for the question that FQXi asked, and your sly and often self-deprecating sense of humor had me chuckling multiple times.
In short, your essay was entertaining, illuminating, and fun.
Perhaps more importantly, however, was its impact: You actually persuaded a rather hard-nosed scientific type like me to take your arguments and points to heart, though I'll also admit that the "hard-nosed" part is a bit of a fraud. These issues have always fascinated me, even when I was very young. Alas, in exploring such issues later in life, what I discovered was that as a general rule, the greater the size and of the words and the frequency with which they were used, the less was the actual knowledge that someone was attempting to convey to me. For that reason it was a mercy that you held off using "epistemology" and "ontology" until page 7. It was your determined use of well-chosen ordinary words and analogies in the pages before that persuaded me to read and enjoy the essay as a whole.
I'll mention just two points: qualia, and your definition of what is fundamental.
Qualia are a topic I pondered for decades before encountering the word for it. You state on page 7 that "qualia...are truly...independently fundamental." As someone who worked for years in topics involving both human and machine cognition, allow me to state a position that I did not come to trivially: Computers, even computers that exactly mimic human behaviors and emotions, have no qualia. That is because they need for qualia, and in fact have no any room in their fully deterministic designs by which qualia might somehow "slip in" and affect the behavior of such devices.
To help explain that, here is an assertion about qualia that you likely have never heard before, and that many might consider to be heretical: Qualia do not just define our very existence, they are incredibly useful. Qualia, including emotions, somehow help our limited suite of human neurons to connect and sort through information faster. When you look at an apple tree with green-red color blindness, you see only leaves. When you look at the same tree with full color vision, you see bright red edible fruit and exactly where it is located. It is the qualia that within the mind convert ordinary data from the eye into a single coherent map, an interplay of red and green that helps your body get to the food faster and more safely.
We do not know what qualia are. The simple truth is, we simply do not want to know what qualia are. Humans want reliability, so human designers make their machines as deterministic as possible to help shield against such ill-defined forms of information processing. In fear, we purge the scourge of qualia before we even get a glimpse of what they look like. In their place we use blinding digital speed, a safe way to emulate but not access the incredible speed, smoothness, efficiency, and diversity (emotions, colors, space, sounds, tastes, senses) of qualia.
Is it offensive to say that the same quantities that define our very existence, that create meaning and enable empathy, and that categorically distinguish us from literally mindless, full deterministic computers, are also useful?
Perhaps it would be if qualia are nothing more than local chemical reactions with no more profundity than the foam that arises when you pour vinegar on baking soda. But what if qualia are so remarkably powerful at processing information precisely because they are not just simple local phenomena, but something more akin to shared access to some pool or network of resources of an unknown type? For those who already suspect that qualia are a quantum mechanical effect, this would not even be much of leap. These days you can buy off-the-shelf communication encryption devices that spookily entangle particles of light that are many kilometers apart, so it is no stretch at all to say that the quantum world is broader and stranger than our local-only classical perspective.
I like to think that qualia are either simpler or more complicated than the quantum world. When we finally get around to figuring out whether your mental image of green and my mental image of green are the same, or that what I call green is what you call red, I suspect we will whack our foreheads with the backs of our hands and say "why didn't we see that before?"
If qualia are not just local effects -- if they somehow represent limited peeks into a much larger world in which the colors of human rainbows are nothing more than a starting point (which some birds and butterflies already know) -- then your own point about what is fundamental becomes more immediate and personal:
"Something is truly fundamental if it could not have been otherwise."
And so you have persuaded me to a broader perspective. Without qualia we are nothing but more machinery, striving to remain alive and acting out the part, but with no more awareness of that life than has the glowing image of a great actor on a television screen. It is only our access to qualia that puts meaning into the bodies that are our images of life projected into this chaotic universe. That makes qualia far more than just helpers in our striving to survive. It makes the something that could not have been otherwise, for otherwise no one reading these words would even care.
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
P.S. -- You forgot to add in the chiral particle counts in Table 1. Chirality doubles the number of most of the fermions, except for the odd and fascinating case of neutrinos. If you are interested in seeing more and more precise info on this issue, please try out the online Elementary Particle Explorer by Garrett Lisi, Troy Gardner, and Greg Little.