"I said nothing about being in a gravity field."
And that was your first mistake.
"I said that if one is simply manufactured to tick faster, it uses energy faster."
A spring powered clock is powered by stored potential energy in the wound spring and by gravity acting on the pendulum.
"The point being that if time were a vector from past to future, much as a spatial dimension goes from point A to B, wouldn't faster clock move from prior events to succeeding events quicker than a slower clock? Just like a faster car gets to point B quicker."
John, unless events are synchronized at the initial condition and stay synchorized for the duration, they are independent of each other. I keep telling you that mushing up things in your mind will not get you anywhere toward understanding science -- you will only see correlations where there are none, and miss understanding causality entirely, even though you use the word without knowing what it means.
"Yet they both still exist in the same reality and arrive at their subsequent meeting together."
Correlation is not causation.
"Now consider that link you sent me to the Feynman paper on least action. The faster clock is like a non optimal trajectory, in that it(s atomic activity) rushes around while getting from point A to B, while the slower clock leaves A and arrives at B at the same time as the faster clock, with less atomic activity."
Only one path is least action. Physics teachers reading this discussion must be sighing with relief that you are not in their class.
"The reality is that faster clock and slower clocks still exist in this state of the present, just that faster clocks burn more energy."
There is no reality in your belief that there are real clocks taking more than one real path.
