Mike Holland said:
However, simply changing one's position on the time stream of one coordinate system can! There are things which exist today that did not exist yesterday.
If you use "exist" in the sense you're using it, yes. But that's not the only possible sense of "exist".
Mike Holland said:
But you guys seem to have a different understanding of "existence", that if anything exists somewhere on a coordinate system, then it exists period!
In the sense we're using the word "exist", yes, that's true. This is a different sense of the word "exist" than the one you're using.
(Warning: Clintonesque discussion on what the meaning of "is" is follows.

)
You appear to be treating "existence" as a property that something can have. Logically speaking, though, "existence" is a quantifier, not a property. Saying that something exists is not the same, logically, as saying that something is red or is large or has mass m. The two types of statements have a different logical structure.
The statement "this black hole has mass m" is expressed, logically, as Bx = mx, where "Bx" is "x is this black hole", mx is "x has mass m", and "=" means logical equivalence.
The statement "this black hole exists" is expressed, logically, as Ex: Bx, where "Ex" is the existential quantifier. But in order to use a quantifier, you have to decide over what universal set you are going to quantify; different universal sets give different meanings for the quantifier, and therefore for the word "exist".
You are implicitly quantifying over the universal set: all events that lie in some particular spacelike hypersurface, which is labeled "now".
We (DaleSpam, PAllen, and I) are implicitly quantifying over the universal set: all events in the spacetime.
So we aren't really contradicting each other: we're just saying different things, using different logical quantifiers.
Mike Holland said:
Similarly, I cannot accept PeterDonis' idea of "now". He uses the word to cover the whole area between my past light cone and my future light cone. So a guy could live his whole life "now" on a planet 100 LY from me. He is born now, he is dead now. He is conceived now. This doesn't make sense to me.
Of course it doesn't. But that doesn't make my definition of "now" logically contradictory, or even physically useless. It just means your intuition doesn't like it. Once again, this is just a third possible universal set over which to quantify when making statements about what is happening "now". For some purposes, such as figuring out what events I can and cannot be causally connected to, it is quite useful.
Mike Holland said:
I would choose a simple method of drawing a line vertical to my world line in my space-time diagram, and say that defines my "now", while my past light cone defines an effective "now" because that is what I see now. A blind person might have a different view based on the speed of sound, but would agree with my geometric method.
If he had the same purpose in mind for using the definition, sure. This definition works fine for many purposes. But it's still a definition, and not the only possible one. Saying you don't like the others is not sufficient for maintaining that they are "wrong".
Mike Holland said:
How would these clock differences occur if time dilation is just a coordinate thing?
"Time dilation" as it is usually defined is coordinate-dependent. But the differences in clock readings you are referring to are not. They occur because the length of a worldline in a curved spacetime is path-dependent: two worldlines between the same pair of events, but taking different paths, can have different lengths ("length" for a worldline meaning "proper time elapsed"). It's simple geometry.
Mike Holland said:
You lot seem so lost in your abstract theories that you forget there is a real world where things come into existence (like the flowers in my garden - it is Spring in Sydney) and then disappear, and where scientists actually measure time dilation and find that the facts agree with the theory.
Your claim about what the "real world" is "really like" is not justified by the evidence you are citing. Once again, if you *choose* to describe the world that way, the description works, at least over a wide domain. But that does not show that your description is the only possible one, or even the only one that gives correct answers in that domain.
Nobody is disputing that there is a "real world", and that we can't change its nature just by changing the way we think about it. But accepting that is not sufficient to show that the real world *must* be described in terms of things coming into existence and then disappearing.