I am curious and would be grateful for you indulging my curiosity.
Choose one of the four statements below that best represents yourself, life, and the Universe. In your comment at the bottom explain why you chose it, and then please explain why not the other three statements as your choice.
- I am a cog in a Clock.
- I am a Clock among Clocks.
- I am my clock Winder & Minder.
- I am the Time Guardian.
Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Listen Close – Learn Always

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I’m a human being.
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BWAAAA! 😆 Now Nan, 🤨 that was NOT one of the choices! 😉
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I know.
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5. I am a clock amongst other clocks.
(Sorry if that buggers your survey)
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Ohhhh, sorry, that’s actually an option!!! My bad.
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Not TOO bad. Care to share WHY you didn’t choose the other 3 choices… or in your case FOUR choices where two are identical? 😉 😜
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It seemed the most reasonable and reflective.
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I can infer and deduce what you mean by “most reasonable and reflective,” John. However, not all that read and/or follow my blog could do that with as much plausible accuracy as I can… given I’ve known you and your fine ‘reasoning’ and intelligence for several years. 😉 Yes?
Hence, it would greatly benefit any who are visitors and unknown to you or them to you to expound in more detail on WHY you did not choose the other 3-4 options, yes? 😁 hehe
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Simple: they didn’t match reality as well. We are heat machines (call it a clock) living amongst/with other heat machines… some animate, others (seemingly|) not.
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You meant #2, right? 😄
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I am a cog in the clock…as in an extremely small part in a vast universe.
But if you mean on a more personal level, I (or consciousness or ego)am the winder and minder of the clock.
And a clock among clocks works too, as in a person among people, a galaxy among billions of other galaxies and perhaps a universe among an infinite number of universes.
The time one…I got nothing..
So now you have to tell us the point….
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No# 1 suits me best
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If I may Mary, I’d like to answer your final question once most everyone contributes their choice and explanations. I hope you don’t mind. 😊
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I am . . . none of the above. I am a broken clock who is right twice a day!
Regarding the premature action potentials experiments. There were some experimental issues in the initial ones and I do not know whether they have been taken care of. Even so, I tend to argue that most of our body movements are controlled by our subconscious minds, not our conscious minds (that is not what our CMs are for). So, it seems perfectly plausible that our subconscious minds do the cogitations (they use the same brain regions as our conscious minds for the same purposes) and our conscious minds are a few ticks later getting the memo.
As an example, I am a “hunt-and-pecker” typist. But the vast majority of letters that get typed are not chosen consciously. Were that process to be entirely consciously driven just typing this comment would be exhausting.
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Ahh, I see you’ve likely read/watched and followed some of the same neuroscience, physics, astrophysics, Quantum physics, etc, journals, books, documentary series, that I’ve enjoyed, read, and watched. 🙂
Steve, I take it you refer (“twice a day“) to your/our Circadian clocks? But regarding your fine subconscious & conscious behaviors and actions, you are in the correct ballpark of where I am on this subject.
The other day I had a friend tell me a popular phrase one often hears from stellar success stories of entrepreneurs, Olympic or pro athletes, politicians, self-made (supposedly) billionaires, etc, etc, ad nauseum, and she said, rather pompously too, that “You create your own happy successful world, life, and experiences.” 🤨😠
However, due to the earliness of this post and comments, that’s all I want to say about Clockwork for the moment. 😉
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I have no idea! Perhaps it is the lateness of the hour and my own exhaustion, but I cannot figure out which one most nearly matches me nor why. All I know is that my intentions typically far outweigh my actions.
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Hah! Jill, I can totally relate and sympathize with your last sentence. 😄 I often say to others after a “success” or epic catastrophe: “I am just learning how to fail better each time. It’s up to you how much risk or reward you want to be near me the next go round.” 🤪
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It’s that ‘human’ thing … we can never quite live up to our own standards for we are fallible, we are human. But at least we try, which is more than some people can say!
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But if you feel up to it I would very much like your particular choice, with an explanation (short if you like) of why you didn’t like the other 3 choices, Ma’am. 🙂
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I suppose, still not fully understanding the meaning of the options, that we are all, from time to time, any one of them. Mostly, I think option #2, a ‘clock among clocks’ most nearly defines me, although at times, given a variety of circumstances, I may be any of the other options. Rarely if ever am I option #4, the ‘Time Guardian’, for that would indicate a person of power and seems almost an arrogant statement. But sometimes I am #1, a cog in the clock, for I don’t understand a situation well enough, or else do not care enough to step out of the cog’s role and into a more aggressive one. And sometimes, when I am passionate about something, I am #3, a ‘Clock Winder & Minder’.
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Depends on my mood. All this talk about clocks, cogs, & clock masters makes me want to listen to “Clockwork Angels”.
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Oh DEAR ME OH MY, be still my thumping heart! 💓 Polly, are you refering to my all-time boyhood, adult, and now elderly favorite Canadian trio band!? 😲😁 And if so, don’t EVEN get me started on The Lord of the Skins, The Phenom of Percussion, the one, the only… Almighty Neil Peart!!! 🙇♂️🙏
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Sadly No1, would like to be No3 but alas I can but dream!
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BWAAAA! Brian, is “No.1” Lord Brian (inside his own clockwork)? A cog (ala Pinocchio) wishing, dreaming to be Geppetto? 😉
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Just my outlook on life after living on the bottom rung of the ladder for more years than I like to admit! Nothing wrong in that mind, you can probably get away with more than the bigger cogs or even the clocks!
I think some aspire to be a 2 and the real dreamers to 3 as for 4…. You have to be well off your head!
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I believe we have much in common Brian. 😉
“I think some aspire to be a 2 and the real dreamers to 3 as for 4…. You have to be well off your head!”
I felt for the sake of multitudes of well-known Alpha-males (esp in American politics) and some well-known Alpha-females too, I really had to write-in #4 despite knowing myself—and many disciplines of science proving & showing high plausibility—that convincing one’s self you are in complete control of life around you, you have to indeed be delusionally off your rocker! Anyone who thinks they’re a #4 clearly represents the escaped asylum bunch of our population:
And many of our bunch verifies and confirms von Goethe’s accurate 18th & 19th-century assessment! Hell, it STILL applies today, especially in specific American demographics, huh? 😉
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OK, PT, I’m going to stick my neck out on this one. After reading some of the comments, I think I know what you’re after … but if I’m correct, I would say that to choose only one is too limiting.
At first blush, there are a couple of them that seem more descriptive than the other two for me. However, if push comes to shove, I tend to think all of them would come into play, depending on the circumstances.
P.S. Is this how you’re spending your “free” time? Coming up with brain games? 😛
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😄 You seem to be asking me to come out from behind my curtain, my tick-tock workshop and be embarrassingly transparent… or drawing up from the depths The Antikythera Mechanism?
Lady Nan, I shall wait a bit longer before giving up my thoughtful “game.” 😉
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We breathlessly await “The Reveal”! 😄
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🤭
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Rereading this again and paid more attention to A, B, and C to get what you are asking. I’ve seen studies on this before. It’s not surprising.
I think you must be eluding to free will or the subconscious mind.
#1 If a snake is ready to bite me something (cog?) starts an intent in my subconscious mind ( the clock) to act and the the intent materializes in the conscious mind (still the clock) into action of hitting the snake with a big stick.
#2 there are many brains around with various degrees of conscious and subconscious minds ( clocks) with the same process as above. And #4 is simply a cog with only a subconscious mind. (So not much of a clock). A cog is like instinct and is subconscious.
#3 to me, the minder and winder ( the cogs; plural in this case) of the brain (clock), is both the subconscious and conscious mind.
Now you have me really confused!
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So I’m a combination of 1,2, and 3
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😆 Has your cog, or clock, or Winder/Minder gone from functioning to a bad sounding cuckoo clock that has sprung springs, burst cogs and the hands?
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Yes absolutely
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I’m a ball of methane gas caught in the large intestine of the elephant that is our reality. Wait!!! That’s not an option you gave! Sorry. It’s soooo stinky in these damned intestine, I often lose my way. 🙂
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🤦♂️
Then we’d better warn all the trailing elephants with their trunks wrapped around your elephant’s tail (that is raised high), to RELEASE and disperse… fast, or else we will have a blinded mess of wild beasts roaring & running awry stampeding, trampling everything in all directions! THEN where would we all be Jeff with clockworks all bonkers and untimely!? 😉
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I am my clock Winder & Minder. The captain of my own ship. The master of my own fate. Eh… assuming free will. Which may… or may not be a thing. But you know, happy in my constructed reality.
Nice post.
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Haha! 😆 “…happy in my constructed reality.” I love it. Excellent stuff Jo pointing out that it is “my” or YOUR reality. Now…
how that aligns with ACTUAL real-world Homo-sapiens, the laws of Earth-sciences, the real Universe of its physics, thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, gravity, time-space, etc, etc, is the bigger question, huh? 😉
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Thermodynamics, gravity… just ‘axioms’ the programmers coded into the simulation to make us believe there is order amongst the chaos and keep us sane.
Throw off the yoke of… eh… natural laws.
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I used to be a cog in a workplace clock, but since I retired that is no longer true. I used to be a clock among clocks, but now I live alone; winter and Covid-19 keep me indoors. I don’t know if I have ever been a clock winder and minder; that sounds a lot like being a mover and shaker. That just leaves the Time Guardian. Hmmm. That could be me but I’d have to think about it some more.
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😆 You too, huh Anne? 😉
I’d love for you to return here when you’ve thought about it more and have an update.
It seems I have at least caused some introspection AS WELL AS extrospection haven’t I? I’m pleased about that. I firmly believe we humans always need to do that—think hard about what is outside of us and effects us directly as well as indirectly over a period of time—and not just inside us or what our imperfect bodies cause us to do and/or not do. And then there are our parents, or mother at birth, and what we MUST have (to survive) for the first what(?), 3-yrs, 7-yrs, 14-yrs?
And THEN we must consider what we MUST HAVE around us when we reach our final 7-yrs, or 3-yrs, or 1-yr and cannot stop all those multiple declines physically, mentally, or emotionally… right? 😁
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2. I’m a unique person among unique people.
1. A cog in a clock is invisible, dull.
3+4 are too full of themselves.
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Arnold, been meaning to return to your response here, but life has kept me on my toes lately. My actual, uninterrupted free-time isn’t what it used to be for WordPress. My apologies for the delay.
Not even “identical twins” are fully identical, are they? However, on a genetic level, all human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup. I guess that means be proud of that 0.01%. 😄
I guess if no one bothered to look inside another, metaphorically and psychologically speaking, then yeah… I can see what you mean by “invisible and dull.” 😉
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I hear ya Prof, I’m visiting Maine from Florida for 10 days. 🥴 Brutal!
I have little mechanical or scientific interest. 😉 I give, and take people at face value and then maybe they’ll open up to me.
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👍🏼
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