Dear Peter,
Your essay presents an interesting way of looking at things, but I can't really evaluate if there are any "holes" in it. You seem to be saying that if we first assume that a 3D Higgs condensate/ ether underlies everything, then a lot of physics including gravity could be explained via the vortices and pressure densities etc caused by movements in the ether, if something first moves to start the system moving. Does this movement in the ether dampen and dissipate, continually requiring new movements, e.g. new flappings of butterfly wings, to "top-up" the system?
Re "The critical first step is to rigorously distinguish strictly PHYSICAL entities from the META-PHYSIAL; concepts, abstractions, attributes & thoughts, which INCLUDES symbols and numbers":
What about law of nature relationships? They are not exactly physical (measurable) entities; they represent the behaviour of the physical entities, and they can only be represented via symbols and numbers. For that matter, people can never avoid using symbols if they want to communicate with other people: written and spoken words are symbols; also you need to use symbols and numbers to represent vortices and pressure densities.
Re "The law of the excluded middle":
"Hair", as opposed to "a flower", is true or false; "blonde" or "brunette" is not so much true or false; but if you somehow measure the colour and assign a number to it, then the colour equating to that number is true or false.
Regards,
Lorraine