Hi Alex, good points, but they are 'explained' albeit a
tad too superficially for some. More space would be the
answer... ;-)
Re Q1, self-augmentation! Bootstrapping seems to be the
simple solution and in 1973 I gave a paper on this that
introduced the concept of elegant-auticity starting the
thinking along those lines. Elegant-auticity was coined
to avoid the direct computer bootstrap analogy; wherein
with ordinary (computer) bootstrapping there's an agent
to start the process: to initiate a bootstrap loader. I
wanted to avoid the higher process: sentient bootstraps
as it were. The natural process had to begin by a lower
process; thus, elgant-auticity initiated by statistical
inevitability... The term self-augmentation can be used
to encompass both the TFS and emerging universe. With a
near thirty year hiatus, Stephen Wolfram employed those
ideas in his "A New Kind of Science" published c2002...
Re Q2, the zero-diemsional entities that accumulate and
whose relational complexity leads to emergent structure
cascade from the TFS as energy-time hosts: that is, the
zero-demensional entities can be spatial or temporal or
hybrid in transition. Annihilation is never an issue as
it's simplistically the relational symmetries formed by
zero-dimentional entities (eths) that matter. To change
the 'phase' relationships changes the symmetries, which
doesn't annihilate any spatial locations, it merely has
the effect of breaking some symmetry as the information
represented by the physical curvature dictates. The 2nd
law is predicted by the CEPS, as described in the essay
in just sufficient detail to see how it fits in...