This is why I've never liked mereology and would rather look at it from a linguistic perspective. Staring too hard at the metaphysics of identity leads one to counter-intuitive or unhelpful conclusions. Fundamentally, I believe I agree with you to a degree, but the language of identity is needed for us to operate in the world. In this case you could say there is only one "thing" the universe, though as it changes its energy is conserved. However, what do you think of natural numbers and their identity? Does the number one remain the same over time, or do we all have a slightly different concept (maybe not a concept, maybe a phenomenological impression) of the number one, two, three, etc.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Also, Stephen King'sFrom a Buick 8 which is about a magical car that poops out cabbage-smelling aliens.

I'd be interested to explore this from a more developmental science angle. I wonder if the person would even be able to learn once they connected with the senses. There has been evidence, although cases are rare and experiments are unethical, that children deprived of human contact and human language become developmentally damaged and are not able to learn normally afterward. Not being able to use any of the senses is a more extreme case, and I wonder if the person would find themselves in a permanent state of being bombarded with unintelligible phenomena, such as supposedly a newborn child, or if there is some mental structure even after the developmental years are passed that would allow for some sense-making in the world.

So we agree on some things but disagree on others?

I thought you might be going for something like that, just figuring out what the argument was for

a living human brain having the property of being conscious despite its atoms and molecules not having it, but this might not count for you under your ideas of mind you mentioned.

My understanding is that yes, overall, in aggregate, large bundles of matter in the universe are moving away from each other. But the largest bundles are galaxy clusters, which are made up of galaxies held together by mutual gravitation, so there is some force countering general expansion in that region. While overall, space is expanding and things are moving away from each other, it does not necessarily mean that each individual galaxy is moving away from every other one as a rule. I'm not sure as to why they are on a collision course, but it is perfectly consistent with expansion. You're free to look it up (as you might have, its been a month) but this is my off the cuff understanding.

Can a statement be un/likely? I'm just going to start with that, because I'm not sure in this case what that means. Do you mean that: "This statement is unlikely to be true?" Sentences or statements can be true or false, or provable or not, but I'm not sure about "un/likely", other that its "un/likely to be true/false". So in this case, is the sentence unlikely to be true or unlikely to be false? Because that might change the resulting statement. (The other option of "un/likeliness" I thought of was "this statement is unlikely to be in existence" and I'm not sure what to do about that, or if its nonsense)

As for: if "it is false that "this statement is unlikely (to be true?)"" resulting in "it is not unlikely(to be true?) that this statement is unlikely(to be true?), I'm not sure they are equivalent. One seems to be a statement about another, self-referencing statement, and the other is a related but different self-referencing statement. That may result in some confusion. Also, in this case, its not clear that the two "unlikely's" mean the same thing: again, you'll have to clarify. Is it "unlikely to be true" that this statement is" unlikely" or "unlikely to be true"? Or is it unlikely to be false that this statement is unlikely to be false? (or any other combination)

Whether it is a contradiction or not depends on what you mean by "unlikely". If a self-referential sentence is attributed a truth value, it must reference its own true value to be able to lead to a contradiction. "This sentence is green" can equal true or false without resulting in a contradiction.

The final "its is unlikely(to be true) that this sentence is unlikely(to be true)--(I'm just going to assume you mean this) does seem to pose some sort of problem, but I'm not sure, as you are, that it leads to a contradiction, because the "unlikeliness" has some sort of "degrees of true and falseness" that aren't as black and white as traditional truth values. So you don't exactly have A and not A, but more of a probability that there is a probability of A.

It seems like you are dealing with some form of fuzzy logic, but I'm not well versed in that topic, though I've read a little. I'd love to tackle the logic of this further, but currently in that I am a novice. Hope this helps some.

Do you mean there can be no emergent properties out of a given system? I'm sorry if I've misunderstood, but its rather vague

Everything is in flux, we just choose to call certain, I suppose, "significant coagulations that are seemingly persistent in time" ---> "things" (However, do ideas count as "things" in your scope of the word?)

What sort of nature would allow A to divide the odds more fairly? Just curious as to what you have in mind. You're describing inductive reasoning, and my guess is taking "absence as evidence" would work in a scenario where evidence was fairly sought out, rather than assumed not to exist because the person in question didn't come across any because they failed to seek properly. But I'll have to revisit that thought, this is just off the cuff.

What do you mean by "reverse time" in quantum time? Are you referring to the electron/positron relationship?

Could be false attribution mixed with confirmation bias.