Jonathan,
I have to say we have some very similar ideas, but yours are more professionally presented, so how did I get an 8 rating in the public voting and you get a 2? Life ain't fair.
Most of these essays tie my brain up in knots, so it is nice to read one which does present a coherent overview and not tightly wound around a particular observation.
You do make a few observations to which I might offer some additional thoughts.
For one thing, the problem with the dialectic view of fundamental dichotomies is the idea there exists a coherent synthesis, somewhere in the middle and this overlooks the extent to which opposing views are themselves wholistic opposites. Consider taking pictures of a car. The view from the right and left side are subjectively whole, while a picture of the interior wouldn't be a synthesis of those opposing views. Same with top down, vs bottom up considerations. There is no happy medium. The perspective from the bottom can be all the way to the top, as the view from the top can be all the way to the bottom and yet they are entirely different views of the same reality.
Now consider your point about everything being energy. This is true, but energy expands! What is the balance? Mass contracts. Energy is analog, while mass is digital. Consider light. It expands out as a field effect, waves, if you prefer, but when we measure it in relation to a physical detector, it has collapsed to a definable unit, a photon.
You might say energy is bottom up, radiating out as energy. While mass is top down, collapsing as digital units. So all of reality can be viewed from both directions: All expanding out versus gravity collapsing everything to point. This gets to cosmology and the fact we view the entire universe as expanding, yet this expansion is balanced by gravity as observably flat space, but we still have this model of expansion. To use an analogy, it would be like looking across a Merry-go-round and seeing that while the near and far sides go in opposite directions and seem balanced in their actions, since the near side appears larger to us, there must be greater motion in the direction it is going. I think we will eventually discard the entire Big Bang cosmology and view the universe as a correlation between expanding energy and collapsing mass. There are a number of essays which touch on this in various ways, Constantinos Ragazas, , Israel Perez, as well as some comments and footnotes from Dan Benedict come to mind. Mine attacks it directly, but this is a bit of a Hail Mary, as there is a small probability cosmologists will discover galaxies older then the presumed age of the universe, by the time this contest is finished. The current record holder is 13.2 billion lightyears away and it takes quite a bit of imagination to think a galaxy large enough to be seen at that distance could have coalesced out of the Inflationary field in 500 million years. Given that Inflation presumably expanded space to the degree it appears flat, than any gravitational sources would have to be equally stretched out, since gravity is half the equation of balance between expansion and contraction. Since it takes 225 million years for our galaxy to make one rotation, this would be like saying the time between the invention of the wheel and the production of the Model T is equivalent to driving around NYC 2 and a half times.
As for time, I've been making an argument somewhat similar to the idea that while the right brain exists in the now, the left brain registers the digital function of past, present future.
While there is only the physical present, the activity within it is constantly changing form, as it flows around and thus the process of time is the future becoming the past, as opposed to the present moving from past to future. This is actually the more fundamental process, even if the serial events are the basis of our rational thought processes. Much like we perceive the sun moving across the sky from east to west, the fundamental process is of the earth rotating west to east.
The point here is that time is an effect of motion, not the basis for it and as such it is similar to temperature. One is the scalar level of activity, while the other is the serial change caused by that activity. As such they reflect the two sides of the brain. The rational side is a clock, as it measures cause and effect, while the emotional, intuitive side is a thermostat that registers and reacts to scalar levels of energy and quantities of information carried by that energy.
In the top down, vs bottom up view, there are various juxtapositions going on here. Energy does go from past to future, as it leaves old forms and radiates into new forms. Thus it is bottom up, much as life and politics, etc. are constantly shedding old orders and organisms and moving on to new life and subsequent forms. Meanwhile the forms move from future to past, as they coalesce out of energy and continue to accumulate more, until reaching a peak and radiating it away again. Whether it is an individual life being born, growing up and then old and dying, or a day dawning, warming up as the sun passes over head, then cooling down and fading away, as the sun moves on to the next day.
The point here is that everything is ultimately composed of energy and so it is the constant. That which is present. Any perceptible change is the configurations and they go future to past. Even though we view past events as cause for future ones, this is based on examination of prior events. The physical reality is that total input into any event cannot be known prior to its occurrence, since input does travel from opposite directions at the speed of light. Thus total cause for any event is in the future, until it occurs, then the effect, the event, recedes into the past.
Since time is an effect of motion, there cannot be a dimensionless point in time, as that would freeze the motion creating the effect of time. Basically like taking a picture with the shutter speed set at zero. Without that concept of a dimensionless point in time, any object, whether subatomic particle or automobile, cannot be logically separated from its context, as it has no absolute position.
This goes a long way towards solving many quantum issues. If time is an effect of collapsing future probabilities into past circumstances, not a fundamental dimension or flow from past to future, there is no need for multiworlds to explain the relationship between deterministic principles and fundamental probabilities.
I don't know how resistant those judging this contest will be to ideas which question current models, but if enough of us "start protesting," maybe they might take notice.
