Do you think that there are more than 3-4 dimensions? If so, what do you think they are like?

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Considering more dimensions is one of my favorite ways to think theologically. Let’s conduct a thought experiment. You’re playing a video game. The game world has two dimensions. In order to move, how many buttons do you need? Four, you might say, one for each direction. Okay, but you also need to shoot your gun. And you might need to change your armor. Presumably, each of these actions you’re taking is something your character does spatially somehow. Each button gives you a degree of freedom.

The potential number of degrees of freedom in a two-dimensional world is infinite. Despite this, there’s a far greater infinity of possible degrees of freedom in a three dimensional world. And a still greater number in a four dimensional one.

Extra degrees of freedom do not dimensions make. An extra dimension is weirder than that. It can be argued that even modern three dimensional games are really two dimensional with added degrees of freedom, not truly three dimensional.

One can project in either direction, two dimensional objects in three dimensional space and vice versa. When you project many dimensions into fewer, you can take advantage of degrees of freedom to convey more information, for example you could use color to indicate height, or density, of three dimensional objects on a two-dimensional map. Indeed, three dimensional games are played on a two-dimensional surface, your television screen.

Going back to the controller analogy, it’s rather easy to imagine that we are playing ourselves in a video game. It’s just that the controller is our awareness, our agency. We’re presented with a bunch of situations, one after another, and we have to choose how to respond.

Our minds are 4 dimensional objects projecting into three dimensional space. The things they come up with, thoughts, are themselves four dimensional. They need to project out into the rest of our bodies in order to find expression in the real world.

Time is not a dimension but rather a degree of freedom. Think about 2.5 dimensions in the video game sense. The game gives an illusion, through careful clipping and movement, of height. But it’s not a real third dimension, hence the .5. But I wouldn’t even really call it 2.5, more like 2.1, that’s how different it is from a full third dimension.

Thought, on the other hand, can contemplate and represent anything imaginable, in a far denser form than 3 dimensional matter. Sure, we can’t use spatial processing to work with these things that way. Instead we use conceptual reasoning in order to reduce the complexity down to something we can reason about. Conceptual reasoning is limitless by spatial standards.