I'll ignore your analogy with a CPU, which I don't think is apposite.
Whether there's a 'system clock', a sort of reference clock that can tell you how fast time is passing, so you can calibrate other clocks against it, seems to be the same category error. As far as I can see, either time is all there, all at once; or one second lasts exactly one second. (I've perpetrated the same category error there, because a second doesn't 'last' for some period of time; it just is).
[Edit] That's not very clear. I mean: if you are measuring a distance, you use a calibrated ruler. If you doubt the calibration of your ruler, you might recalibrate for precision. But you don't have a clear idea of what one foot is, it doesn't make any sense to ask whether your one-foot ruler has grown or shrunk; how would you tell if the purported 'fact' is true or false?
And if some fact about the Universe means that it has grown or shrunk, how would you tell? If you can't in principle tell whether a 'fact' is true or false, it follows that the 'fact' isn't a fact, because it has no effect on anything.
You're certainly welcome to completely ignore the question at hand, it's just surprising that you'd use so many characters to do so.
The question is if there's a different sort of thing beyond our idea of time. We have our concept of N caesium oscillations is the base reference for everything, and the duration of all action is derived from it. Could there be more depth to the rate at which things occur than that, especially on cosmic scales? Could other processes, which operate at different base clock levels, be interacting with the universe we observe in ways we don't yet understand? Could those processes have clock levels that vary over history with respect to our caesium definition?
You can claim not, that's its precisely that shallow. But neither of us can provide evidence either way, and your belief is simply much less interesting to me.
> You're certainly welcome to completely ignore the question at hand
What I ignored was an analogy. Not an argument from analogy; and not a question. Just a rhetorical device, which I considered irrelevant, and didn't feel like arguing about.
> the base reference for everything
Caesium oscillations are a proxy for the passage of time. I can imagine a universe in which the rate of Caesium oscillations might vary, or be influenced, making atomic clocks unreliable. I don't know how one might measure the passage of time directly; I suspect it's impossible, and can only be done with proxies.
I don't see why you couldn't have more than one timescale operating and interacting. It's an interesting speculation. But William of Ockham advised against multiplying hypotheses; and I can't see what multiple interacting timescales might explain, that can't be explained without them.
Could those processes, for instance, have configured the initial state of the entire universe in 6 of their days, but 13.8B-6,000 of our call years? I see no reason why not.
This talk about the "rate of time" doesn't make any sense to me. A second takes one second, and always has.
Isn't this like asking whether the length of a metre might have changed over time? Or the mass of a kilogramme? It looks to me like a category error.