Hi Antony,
Sorry for not responding right away. I actually had the reply started, but then my computer began acting up so I restarted it. Then I got sidetracked.
Regarding "collapse scenario": No, I meant gravitational collapse scenario. A standard example is in Hawking and Ellis, where they consider spherical collapse by examining a situation in which one of two observers initially outside, heads in while the other stays put. If you have access to the textbook, it would help. Basically, everything in that description assumes things are happening as Eddington-Finkelstein advanced time passes; i.e., they describe the passage of time according to the description, in the context of an Eddington-Finkelstein foliation of space-time, which is not justified.
This has been the standard way of conceiving of black holes and gravitational collapse since Finkelstein's paper was published. Kip Thorne gives a good description of this in Black Holes and Time Warps. He says Evgeny Lifschitz told him once that the paper was a revelation to everyone at the time, that it was like a fog was lifted (or something to that effect), and that it's what convinced Wheeler, Landau, et al. that black holes exist.
In my opinion, this is an instance where physics took yet another wrong turn, and plunged further down the rabbit hole. Einstein had set everything going in that direction with the relativity of simultaneity; but at least he had understood the consequence of that. Time can't actually "pass" as described by whatever foliation you want to assume. If you assume relativity describes reality as what's described as synchronous in whatever frame you choose to look at, then reality is all of space-time--all of eternity--all at once, and time doesn't pass at all. There can be no dynamical flow of time if you also want to agree with Einstein about the relativity of simultaneity. Ken Wharton's essay makes this point as well, except that he's okay with it.
The thing about me is that I'm not. So to answer your question about the Sun: No--I'm very much a realist, and more than that I believe that physical reality can truly make sense. Ken doesn't care about making any sense, as long as there is objective reality: he thinks he gets off on a technicality any time anyone starts talking about consciousness and things "making sense", because that gets into philosophy of mind rather than physics. I think conscious experience is empirical evidence that can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly, just as much as any other more hard-won bit of evidence, such as the evidence of a 125 GeV particle; and I think a theory that runs completely against conscious experience should be denied just as much as one that might require that a 125 GeV particle absolutely can't exist, because the scientific evidence now indicates that one does exist. Ken thinks it's enough that the world according to his view should "save the appearances", just as the Ptolemaic model was supposed to "save the appearances"; but I think there has to be something wrong with any theory that doesn't explain why we should expect the appearances to be as they are. As I understand it, this is our main point of disagreement.
Now, the way for relativity to make sense is to assume that time truly passes and simultaneity is absolute, regardless of the fact that simultaneous events won't be described as synchronous in just any given reference frame.
But I see that I failed to make this point obvious in my essay. The structure of the essay was as follows. I first of all wanted to take a neutral stance on the relativity of simultaneity, and argue that in no sense does space-time exist; that the dynamical existence of space-time that warps and changes and gets holes punched in it and all of that constitutes five-dimensional physics. That if you want Einstein's version of simultaneity, you end up with Ken's view of reality, which is not dynamical. In this view, nothing can really exist, because the timelike dimension in the description of all the events that are supposed to occur, is supposed to be all real all at once, and time isn't supposed to pass.
Therefore, I argued that in order for anything to actually exist, and for time to really pass, we need to assume an absolute simultaneity-relation amongst the events that occur. And then I showed how that would work relativistically, by looking at a classic thought-experiment. The synchronous events in Henri's frame of reference didn't really occur simultaneously. According to Albert and Henri both, the Sun really exists "now", which is the same thing for each of them; but at any instant, the set of events that occur at the same time as described in Henri's proper coordinate system doesn't coincide with that "now", which is an instant of absolute time--a three-dimensional slice of his description of space-time that extends throughout his "past" and "future". I think I did a really good job of showing this in the thought experiment in my previous essay.
Anyway, the thing regarding black holes is that if you're going to assume that relativity gives the metrical relation between all the events that occur as a three-dimensional universe exists and time passes, then you can't also assume that reality is three-dimensional synchronous space in whatever frame you choose to describe things in, which evolves as time passes. Because if you want to assume that, relativity comes to require the reality of the entire block.
But that is exactly the interpretation that's made in order to justify saying black holes presently exist.
I hope that helps. Please keep asking if you're at all unclear on my position. I really appreciate having the opportunity to explain what that is.
All the best,
Daryl
