Hi Ronald,
I enjoyed a lot reading your short essay about time and objectivity or better non-objectivity. There are lots of pictures I like and a lot I disagree. I disagree because it questions the canonical way one looks at time in physics. But since it is well argued, it is on me to justify my view.
But let me first pick some if your statements I like lot. For instance pointing out that we cannot verify past. I am so used to see the past as factual and objective, that I take it as given, that the past (or its memory) is verifiable.
I also like your description of the strong link between the past and the future.
I principally like the aim of your essay, where the past or memory of the past can change (are memories of the past and the actual past the same?). I argue in my essay, that what Wheeler's delayed choice experiments tells us is: what happens in the past is underdetermined until the context is set - maybe in some future.
One minor critic is, that in special relativity, observers at different location in comoving frames can agree on the now. There is a way to synchronise the clocks. It is observers that move at different velocities, that have different notions simultaneity for events in different locations.
One critic I would like to share is connected to the point of view I take in my essay. I belief that the in your essay you take the subjective view of the observers too seriously and ignore the objective lawful conditions that must be fulfilled in order to make the subjective experience possible at all. I would say the subjective observation of what is around us is already a mental construction. However a mental construction, that reproduces the invariant, lawful relations between our body the environment. This lawful relations are contingent, depending on the environment and the mesoscopic scales of our body. However they are objective and real in some sense.
Good luck in the contest,
Luca
