Tom,
I do have a reasonably workable understanding of what spacetime is describing, in that there is no absolute sequencing or universal rate of change, ie. time. So it creates a workaround by correlating these differing effects to the spatial conditions, such as gravity fields, acceleration, velocity, etc. which affect otherwise stable processes, such as the vibrations of a cesium atom, in order to explain the narrative sequencing of events.
I am not "mistaking the ordered sequence of real integers -- a mathematical convention -- for phenomenological reality," because I'm not the one subscribing to time as anything more than emergent phenomena. I am saying that the measuring device and those conscious beings constructing it and reading it, are the "phenomenological reality." I am saying the vibrations being measured are the manifestation of "the ordered sequence of real integers." The atom is emitting them, the measuring device is registering their peak and then they fade away, to be followed by the next. In other words, these vibrations, representing units of time, are first potential, then actual, then residual information in the measuring device. The device and the people attending to it are not traveling some dimension from one vibration to the next. The vibrations are being created and replaced.
This is not time reversal, because the very concept of time reversal requires that fourth dimension on which it is assumed one might travel either direction. In this understanding, past and future have no other reality than as sequential configurations of the same energy manifesting the current configuration.
Nor is there any universal time, as the effect of time emerges from this process and if you were to change the circumstances of the atom at the heart of the measuring device, such as accelerating it, putting it in a gravity field, etc. it would have some corresponding proportional effect on the rate of vibration.
The possibility of simultaneity cannot be, as you say, "locally determined," but that is due to the fact that any coordinate points we may use and processes of measurement will vary according to circumstance. Also the very fact that time emerges from the process, rather than is a geometric basis for it, means we cannot specify a dimensionless point in time, without freezing the very process creating it.
I realize we have been over these points many times, but it is evident you have been viewing my arguments through some filter of your own, in which it has been conflated with time reversal. So I do feel it necessary to keep repeating them until such time as you at least understand what I'm saying. If you then can accurately deconstruct it and effectively describe what errors I may be making, so be it, but knocking down your own strawmen hasn't managed to affect my views.
