An interesting philosophical thought crossed my mind last night. What if you pictured your life as a cog in a clockwork mechanism. Every decision you make and every experience you have works to move that cog forward. But in order for a cog to work as its intended, it must move other cogs, or other lives, the ones you influence in your life. Everything you do in life influences how the cogs move. But we don’t even have to think of a person as being the only cogs that exist. Larger cogs can be perceived such as governments and organizations, in fact all of these cogs can also move a cog that could represent the world or a universe or even the whole of reality itself.
What if in combination with the cog that is our reality, there are also cogs that represent realities that parallel our own. Ones with slight changes, different experiences, and even mirror opposite realities. All of these realities work in unison to slowly move the machine that is the whole of creation forward. Cogs that get infinitely big and small, past the scope of our realization or comprehension, must exist and that creates something we can’t wholly understand or define and then with things going off to infinity, paradoxes are formed. Every time we reach a paradox, we can go no further, be it the laws of physics breaking down or dividing by zero. These situations simply can’t exist, or can they?
Up until this point, I’ve explained my cog theory as mostly a two-dimensional model, not unlike a graph with x and y planes. Say we’re only accustomed to seeing these two dimensions and we simply cannot perceive anything greater, but a 3rd dimension is added into the mix. What would a third dimension look like to somebody who can only perceive two dimensions? I believe that where this third dimension intersects with our two dimensional perspective, paradoxes are formed. Situations that cannot exist, but do for the sake of the machine. So, in this clockwork theory, there’s multiple dimensions of cogs at work, but we can only see the cogworks that run through our dimensions.
Now, placing ourselves in a system such as this defines us in two ways which are at odds with one another. The first thing this with us being in a system such as this, it sets up up to say that our actions are predetermined, since we’re moving the machine around which comes at odds with our idea of free will. However, because this cog machine exists in all dimensions, any action you can take is taken into account in the cog machine so while you make the decision of your own free-will, the machine has taken your actions into account by accepting all possibilities. The second definition is that in a life, everything happens for a reason. This is a theory I’ve firmly believed all my life, but I can apply it here too. The problem is that saying everything happens for a reason dictates that the action was foretold or premeditated, but in the cog theory, your action just moves the machine along. It was supposed to happen because that’s what makes the machine move. You can still dictate the action and change it, but in the end it will move your life and everything forward.
I realize that this concept is at war with itself to an extent. It creates a paradox in which you have free will, but everything you do is for the good of the system, which is an endless loop. For me as I’ve said before, when I see a paradox, I merely think it’s an intersection point into another dimension that I cannot perceive. I think that in the end, all of this clockwork connects to a central point and that point is God. He exists in a dimension we cannot perceive, despite our attempts, but everything that I’ve seen has always seemed so one-dimensional for an almighty being. I don’t believe he is just somebody that sits on a throne watching down on us as I’ve always been told in church. He is something far greater and any attempt at describing how almighty and glorious he is does not do him justice. God is the center cog and keeps the machine working. He guides us on our journeys and ultimately shows us the path that we can choose to live our life.
