Special Relativity. Lifetime.

[John 6IX Breezy]

You can always take the position that time as Das Ding an sich is never accessible directly, and I cannot argue with that. What I can say is that all physical processes are affected by dilation the same way, and it therefore is in any meaningful sense a dilation of time. It would be a mistake to just view it as a "malfunctioning" of a clock bc all processes, even the most fundamental ones we know such as particle decay, are affected by it the same. Same goes for curvature of spacetime which is directly observable as gravitational redahift. It is a slowing of time itself in any sense if all temporal processes we know adhere to it.

Right, I agree it is not an isolated malfunctioning of the clock, and that what is happening to it is also happening in its vicinity. But what appears to be happening is a slowing down of localized motion, or a slowing down of localized change, not a slowing down of time. I don't think its possible to observe a universal slowing down of time, for example, because we would slow down with it, and everything we observe would appear constant. The only way to observe a clock ticking slower, or particles decaying slower, is if they are in fact ticking and decaying slower while time remains constant.

Perhaps relativity already takes this into account, and trades a universal notion of time, for a more localized view of time, I'm not sure. My proposition would be that time is neither universal nor localized, but psychological; and we perceive a localized slowing down of motion as a slowing down of time. I think red-shifting and other doppler effects are more to my point; we perceive the siren of an ambulance as slowing down because the soundwaves are being stretched out as it moves away from us, not because time is slowing down.

I haven't heard of gravitational redshift before, so I'll have to look that up later.