Come what may and test what will, I always find peace in some form of writing. Be it famous, hidden, or simply my own, it is and forever will be a sanctuary.
During a rather peaceful day in the Canterlot Gardens, Princess Celestia begins to wonder about the nature of Chaos. Naturally, the best way to understand something so complicated is to speak to an expert in the field.
It is only too fortunate that Discord loves to talk about his favorite past-time.
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Not sure if I may just be wrong but do you mean "The princess needn't worry." Either way this was fun to read. I really like how you're setting up the conversation that is going to ensue. It's got me wondering how Discord is going to explain chaos to Celestia.
What is chaos? A miserable pile of jumbled creatures? But enough talk, HAVE AT YOU!
Sorry, couldn't resist making that reference
This is good, but one thing I would like to point out is that you are mixing up chaos and disharmony.
In the show they've never made the distinction clear, so it's an easy mistake to make. But Discord represents both Chaos and Disharmony, which are actually different principles though highly complementary to each other.
Chaos, like Order, is an objectively definable state. You can say that something is ordered, or disordered, whether there is anyone there to look at it or not. But Disharmony, like Harmony, requires the presence of someone else. You don't need to have someone around for there to be Chaos, but you do for there to be Disharmony.
Disharmony represents both conflict (argument, strife, someone being deliberately annoying) and "out of balance/not appropriate/unnatural." Things that don't go together are disharmonious. For pink elephants sunbathing on floating clouds of cupcakes to be disharmonious, there needs to be someone there who sees it and recognizes that the world isn't supposed to be like that. Chaos is disorder, unpredictability, a lack of obvious connection between cause and effect. Things that violate natural law or categories that we expect are chaotic, but they are chaotic whether or not there is someone there to observe them.
As an example of how they are different, Pinkie Pie represents chaos as employed by harmony -- chaos (unpredictability, lack of cause and effect) used for the purpose of bringing ponies and other beings closer together, bonding them and making them happier and more peaceful and willing to work together. King Sombra represents order as employed by disharmony -- ponies suffering in misery, performing tasks that may be wholly unsuited for them and might even kill them, hating the one who forces them to do so, but compelled to do as they are told in a rigid, highly regimented social order. Discord seems to choose to focus on the lighter side of his disharmony now that he is reformed -- he is annoying and stirs up minor arguments, rather than being terrifying and stirring up wars, for instance -- but in his introduction, we saw him inflict pure disharmony on the Mane 6, whereas what he inflicted on Ponyville was more about chaos. The Mane 6's behavior became predictably the opposite of what it had been, so it lacked some of the randomness of real chaos, but Big Mac thought he was a dog, Granny Smith was dancing, and Berry Punch sneezed and knocked down buildings. Those things were random, unpredictable, and not all of them contributed to disharmony (the Apple family looked pleased as punch to be a dog and a dancing pony). Whereas the Mane 6 became, essentially, rotten ponies no one would want to be friends with, so they generated disharmony.
You want an explanation of Chaos? Chaos cannot be explained. It can be either caused or observed, but never explained.
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Actually, no. Chaos, the concept, can be explained, otherwise none of us would know what it is. However, a chaotic event is difficult or impossible to explain, because chaos is the state in which things are unpredictable and normalcy and rationality do not necessarily apply. So it is hard to explain why chaos happened, but it is easy to explain what chaos is.
There was a video I saw that talked about chaos (by veritasium, I think). It described chaos as pure information: random, unintelligible, but full of meaning. Order, in contrast, was the opposite: patterns that can be reduced down to simple rules, and which carry no meaning in and of themselves.
A string of 1's is pure order, while a file compressed as far as it can go is pure chaos; both are unintelligible. By adding chaos to the 1's, you can create meaning, while uncompressing the file (adding order through rules), you make information understandable.
(And by mathematical induction, we realize that Discord is the meaning of life~
)
Question: if chaos follows a rule, does that make it not chaos anymore? If that is the case, the how can chaos be chaos if it is predictably random? Would that not add order to its chaotic nature?
And would this mean that chaos must be occasionally orderly, so as to truly be unpredictable?
And given the nature of chaos, it is a single thing, or multiple things, or some form of concept that defies numbers, or all of the above, that we apply the same name to simply due to our lack of comprehension?
Is chaos everything and nothing at once? is chaos even real? Because reality would be predictable. But so would nonreality. Could chaos be the bridge between reality and fantasy? (On a side note, if that were true, it might explain Discord's virtually limitless power.)
Do we even know what true chaos is? Is the nature of chaos static? Because that would be predictable. But so would it also be if the nature of chaos was constantly fluid.
is chaos a concept? A state of mind? A state of physical being? A physical object, like a cookie? Can it be any of these things without denying its true nature? And can it even have a true nature, by definition of what it is?
All of this bounces around in my head. And then I hear Discord's voice whisper to me:
"Stop overthinking it. Just shut up and enjoy the ride."
Which leaves me with one last question:
Does every question need to be answered?
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To all questions, possibly.
Well... this was weird. No more, no less. Harmony gains 10 points, btw.
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1: No. Chaos is never orderly. It may have the appearance of orderliness at points, but it is not orderly. A random sequence of 10 binary numbers could be 1010101010, and it's just as probable as 1110100101 - they're just two specific sequences. That does not mean that the former follows a pattern - the next ten digits are just as likely to be 1010101010 as 1111111111.
2 Just because Chaos is predictably random doesn't mean that it follows any rules. 'Randomness' in this case is a descriptor - there's nothing directing chaos, and no rules; thus, it is unpredictable - another descriptor.
3: Chaos is just a name. A label. We use it to describe something - in this case, randomness and unpredictability - but chaos is just a word. There's nothing chaotic about words, unless you count the utterly improbable route they must have taken to become words, as of the big bang. You could use it to describe whatever you wanted. I know a guy (not in rea life, but...) who decided to call "kilowatts per hour" as "Pirate - Ninjas".
4: How do you know that reality and nonreality are predictable? Edit: stupid question, just see 3.
5: see 3
6: Ditto, though I posit that everything is indeed harmonic the deeper you go, everything is just action/reaction, and all we percieve as chaos is just a harmony that we don't or can't understand. The ocean, in its wildness, still acts predictably if you, hypothetically, knew enough about it, and the moon, and the laws of physics.
7: We'd best damn well try. Because if we alway just accepted shit instead of asking questions and trying yo answer them, we'd never know that Gravity existed.