Jonathan,
I'm glad you made it! And I agree with much of your essay. We both start off looking for an explanation of a unified reality, that is, Nature is a unified whole.
Having been closely associated with Zeilinger, it is not surprising that you are focused on the non-locality currently implied by 'entanglement'. Since you remarked that you've been very busy, I would like to make you aware of Joy Christian's approach to Bell's inequality.
My selfish purpose is to note that locality may not be dead yet, and I have a local model that I believe is otherwise compatible with your approach.
I also have mentioned Jill Bolte Taylor's exceptional book in other forums, as I view it as a major contribution to the literature of consciousness. In particular, I see her report as supporting the position that consciousness does not emerge from matter. If you take her seriously, and I do, it is hard to find a Darwinian 'survival'-based reason for the development of such universal awareness. In fact, this awareness, whether that of a new-born, a stroke victim, or an LSD trip, is probably 'anti-survival' as the awareness of the absolute unity of it all suppresses the separation into parts that is necessary to pay attention to the tiger creeping up on you. I express this as 'topological' awareness as opposed to the 'metric' awareness whereby we separate and map distances, so that we can pick the apple from the tree, but not waste the afternoon trying to pick the moon from the sky.
There seems little appreciation in fqxi discussions of consciousness just how radically different these two modes of awareness are. The 'metric' mode has survival value and as we develop this mode of awareness in the first year or so of life, the 'experience of being one with the universe' is suppressed, until, finally, the best metric thinkers don't even believe in it's reality, although Abraham Maslow, in 'The Peak Experience' found that this awareness was not at all that uncommon among 'ordinary' people (non-physicists and non-mathematicians?)
Anyway, I'm happy to see you treating these issues as relevant to physics.
As you point out, "The act of observation is itself founded on the possibility of separation" although without the unified awareness this tends to lead to naive reductionism.
I hope you can effect a 'willing suspension of disbelief' in non-locality long enough to read my essay with an open mind. I think we are very close in our goals.
Best of luck in this contest,
Edwin Eugene Klingman