Edwin,
So you found it interesting. :-)
I know what you mean. When I decided to focus on a survey of the topic rather than my own research, I knew the references would be many. It's the most foundational topic that FQXi could have fielded, at least that's tractable to scientific method.
The difference between Feynman and me is that I don't worry about what "they" think or do. Oh wait -- that makes us not different at all, doesn't it? Feynman was famous for taking a position orthogonal to his contemporaries, as the Nobel speech reflects. And that's much of the point of the essay, that variable rates of independent actions combine and decohere in a continuous process -- the hub of activity in a complex system is dynamic, shifting. So I regret that you think consciousness is peripheral; in fact, it is integral. Rather than assume that consciousness is a mystical state of "free will," however, I frame consciousness as a process and suggest that process is not differentable from reality. That's not completely off the reservation; look at the essays here on virtual reality, such as Brian Whitworth's which I deemed worthy of citation.
So far as the identity among time, information and gravity -- Jacobson's and Verlinde's research already deems gravity entropic, implying loss of information ('t Hooft's classical determinism in quantum mechanics also implies information loss). If one takes Julian Barbour's view that time is no more than a least action principle, then it's a short step to entropic models of information and gravity at T = 1. Counterintuitive, maybe. Absurd, no.
Edwin, I know we radically differ in our philosophies regarding "physical intuition." I don't think there is such a thing. Most of what we know about the objective world is counterintuitive, a legacy of the Greeks, not the Romans.
Best of luck to you as well.
Tom