Hello, venerable! Thanks for the essay and encouraging reflection on such a famous and powerful discourse.
It seems that the main purpose of this essay is to highlight the importance of rebirth here, rather than just analysing external things in this life such as physics or interconnectedness and so on which tend to de-emphasize the focus on the arising and ceasing of the rebirth process.
I think that is certainly important and deserves emphasizing. But I have some thoughts on the process and phrasing you took to make that point. I will try and go over the points in a way that is clear and thorough, so please accept my apologies in advance if the comment is tedious or lengthy!
First, I’d like to make it clear that I acknowledge the definitions and explanations of loka which define it as the senses and cognizing person. But I think we need to consider the practical implications of these statements to make sense of them.
The lines at SN 12.15 say that someone can gain right view by seeing the arising and ceasing of the world. Let’s take a strict stance and assume that ‘loka’ means “the body and mind, not the experience[s] of body-mind.” If that were the case, someone would have to literally see a body/senses cease from a third-person perspective or something, which I do not think is correct.
As someone else mentioned, in deep sleep the eyes and ears and so forth may not be working. Or if someone were to no longer experience sights-sounds-smells-etc. in some meditative state, that would also not be sufficient to count as the cessation of the senses or apparatus through which one cognizes the world literally. It would just be a temporary cessation of the experiences the arise through them.
This, to me, is too strict. While I don’t think sense experiences temporarily not arising like the above cases are what is meant, I also think that the Buddha cannot have meant that the time of death is when someone understands the cessation of the being/senses/world. Wouldn’t you agree?
I would also add that even there, in order to see the end of a being, we would have to have a new set of senses to witness the event! So we wouldn’t actually be seeing the end of our current senses, just past senses! We cannot see our own eye directly with itself. Right?
Let’s say we define the internal senses slightly differently as you tend to do in your translations, which I find reasonable. Here, ‘cakkhu’ is “vision” or “sense of sight,” etc. So it is a faculty, as in a capability or power, of sensing. But in this case, again, I really don’t see how you can separate “vision” from “the experience of sights.” How can you call something “vision” if there are no visions or sights to sense! How can we say we have the “sense of hearing” if we aren’t hearing anything? Here too, the only way to know that the ‘senses’ cease is if their corresponded sense experiences end. For a basic example, the only way we know we lost our vision is when we don’t see anything! Even if the eye organ is still in tact. That’s the only way to know.
At this point, we may have to narrow down the verb ‘see’ in the “if you see the arising/cessation …” passage. We could infer it to mean “understand” rather than directly experience. So in this reading, it would be something like understanding how the senses are reborn and how they are not reborn. This seems to match fairly well with the focus you give later on, where you say:
So, based off of your arguments presented here, I would conclude that your essay makes an argument for the following view:
- One cannot directly experience the arising or ceasing of the senses/being, because we are already reborn and already have them.
- The goal is to understand the four noble truths and how craving will produce more senses in a future life.
- Therefore, the arising of right view has nothing to do with the cessation of sensory experiences, consciousness, contact, or perception; it has to do with the cessation of craving in relation to our senses, which remain intact, and then inferring or understanding that without craving, the senses would not be produced in a future life.
To understand better, is this your view? If it is, then I think the case made in the essay seems relatively consistent. But if it isn’t your view, then I think some wording and so on needs adjusted.
For some additional comments:
As I mentioned before, I don’t think we can “know” our senses are present without sense experiences and sense consciousness present. How would we know that we have vision if vision is not operating? And if we had no sense experience, how could we even reflect on the senses being present or not?
Empirically speaking, the internal senses depend on external sense experiences. But external sense experiences depend on the internal senses. And then we can add the third factor, sense consciousness, as also applying to this mutually dependent relationship. So we can’t speak of a “fathom-long body with perception and mind” in isolation. We can only speak of, designate, or know it if there are corresponding sense experiences to measure against, and vice versa.
To me, this seems to be part of why “the world” is said to be empty of a self. The Buddha doesn’t just say the internal senses are empty of a self. He also includes sights, sounds, and so on. If “sights” truly existed independently as things in-and-of themselves, that seems like some kind of “self” to me. Just an external one. This is the argument that e.g. Nāgārjuna seems to make to my mind. Believing in the inherent existence of external things is just as much believing in a self and the consequences of that belief (i.e. eternalism or annihilationism). Because if ‘sights’ exist in-and-of themselves, their existence either persists forever (eternalism) or is destroyed (annihilation).
If ‘sights’ are just a phenomenal process that arise in dependent relationship to other dependent processes and are designated based on the sense of sight, eye-consciousness, perception, etc., then we are speaking not of a “thing” or “self”, but of dependent appearance and disappearance.
To clarify, if someone takes their experience of sights as existing in-and-of-themselves, or the senses existing in-and-of-themselves, then the person must by definition be an annihilationist or eternalist. Because the “self” would either be equal to those independently-existing senses, which if they cease, would logically entail annihilation. Or, the self would be assumed to be separate from the independently-existing senses or sense experiences, in which case it may be eternal and beyond them. In either case, the person could be either annihilationist or eternalist, and they might not define themselves as such. Like modern physicalist annihilationists. This is because they would simply be not seeing the dependently arisen nature of contact which is not independent or possessing a self, so they would be automatically assuming a self in some sense.
This is precisely the opposite of speculation about the metaphysics of the outside world. It simply sets aside that question to focus on the experience of beings, at which point we can look and see if there really is any “being” (i.e. a self or existence in-and-of-itself) to the senses, consciousness, or sense experiences. That is, to “the world.”
At this point, I’ll briefly comment on a tangential issue:
I don’t think annihilationism is limited to a single life. I won’t make the case for it based on suttas here. But even based off of plain logic or reasoning, it’s perfectly possible for someone to believe in rebirth and also be an annihilationist. I think it’s possible the bodhisatta was an annihilationist himself under his former meditation teachers. For him, seeing the empty or self-less nature of ‘the world’ via dependent origination may have been a major stepping stone for his path away from a former annihilationist approach. But this is too much to discuss here for the moment.
Back to the world in relation to sense experience:
The Buddha in other discourses also talks about right view in terms of knowing the cessation of contact or the arising/ceasing of contact. Not necessarily in this kind of specific wording, but there are places where knowing the arising/ceasing of contact is said to constitute right view as in MN 9. So I don’t think there’s a problem or contradiction with “loka” meaning or entailing sense contact. It would be consistent with many teachings elsewhere, and it would be more coherent as isolating only the senses doesn’t make much sense nor does it fit all explanations of ‘loka.’ Otherwise, there would be many kinds of ‘right view’ which don’t actually include and encompass one another! And that would be problematic to my mind. 
I think the main point you want to make (and I could be wrong! Hence my question before), is that “arising” and “ceasing” in SN 12.15 should be taken to be about craving → rebirth. And that the Buddha’s emphasis is that “contact” can only cease if the conditions for its re-arising are removed. In this case, the actual conditions for the re-arising would be craving, because even if the senses in one life end, the Buddha teaches that craving will ‘weave together’ the arising of more contact in a future life. This is a solid case and important for understanding the Buddha’s common focus on rebirth.
To me, the problem is that in making this argument you seem to mix in a polemic against emphasizing sense contact, and instead you focus on some isolated “being” or “senses” which can’t actually be directly and independently known. Thank goodness, because if they could be, they would exist in-and-of themselves, and that would make them an attā!
I think these are two separate arguments that shouldn’t be conflated. To my mind, “loka” should include or focus on sense experience. In the sense of our ‘life’ or ‘world’ is a world of sense experiences. This isn’t saying that’s all there is. Just that this is what our experience entails and what we can know. So this is the scope of our samsāric problem. This also has to do with other things, such as the undeclared points. The Buddha says these wrong views ultimately stem from and depend upon contact. Views like “the world is infinite/finite/eternal/non-eternal” are included in this. To me, the Buddha’s use of the word 'loka’in this sense is part of the dialogue with his culture, where he is showing that metaphysical views are extrapolated from sense experience without actual grounding. Likewise, ideas of an external God or metaphysical Soul are due to going beyond sense experience. This is not random philosophy, but rather is one of the fetters that binds beings to rebirth. But this would be a whole other topic. Just pointing out another aspect of this.
Then we could say that “the arising of the world” focuses on the arising of sense experience on the more definite level of samsāra, not just momentary from one instant to another. So the arising of a new set of ‘senses’ to experience more sense contact in a new ‘world’ of sense experience.
We could lay out a possible definition to show this as follows:
- Loka [the phenomenal world, or the senses as they are ‘felt/experienced,’ which has an empty and ephemeral nature]
- Lokasamudaya [The perpetuation of the phenomenal world due to craving in samsāra]
- Lokanirodha [The ending of craving cuts the thread that ties together the being and its experience of the phenomenal world from life to life.]
Does that distinction make sense? (Oh, a pun!)
And if so, what are your thoughts? 
I think I could probably say some more, but I’ll leave it at that and hope it’s enough for dialogue. Thanks again, venerable!
since the following is said in Acelakassapasutta SN 12.17:
What exact distinction are you referring to? But perhaps it’s clear what I think from the rest of my reply.