Dear Jonathan Dickau,
I was about to comment on your essay when I realized that I was not reading your essay, I was reading another of your papers, "Gravitation by condensation." I've now read the essay and have a few remarks.
You explore a large conceptual realm, and most of what you discuss cannot be proved or disproved, a point you make up front. In this regard you observe that
"Things requiring proof or explanation by one person may be intuitively obvious to another..."
I meet somewhat regularly with a physicist who is adept at proof and seems to have no intuition. It seems those who have weak intuition do not value it much. I find your Mandelbrot map an excellent metaphor for math. One can infinitely branch in any direction, but without intuition, it's just turning the crank - only intuition can drive the boat - mere calculation is endless (turning computers loose to calculate endlessly as in Mandelbrot is quite interesting, and hopefully enlightening.) You've certainly become good at making analogies and you seem to have honed your intuition in this regard. Once the data has been generated, our pattern recognition can reduce the dimensionality and discern features and regularities. For example your remark on the interplay of local symmetry and global asymmetry in M is possible only after one has produced the map. One would probably find it difficult to predict from the generating equations, but after seeing it in the data, one can probably identify relevant aspects of the equations. Also quite interesting is structure with pre-period 3 (the delay before repeating) then it repeats every time.
As we have discussed, I believe that focus on convergence and condensation is potentially extremely valuable.
You note that "the main difficulty theoretical physicists face in crafting a unifying theory of physics is that in relativity time is flexible, while in QM it is absolute." My essay will deal with this, and I think you might find it interesting.
I'm encouraged that Foundations of Physics published three papers in November 2019 analyzing the mismatch between relativity and intuition, so the topic is not dead.
And like you and Rick Lockyer, I suspect 0HCR is telling us something important, but I'm not sure what.
Best regards and good luck,
Edwin Eugene Klingman