Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - The Metaphysics of Skeleanor · 9:23pm Aug 31st, 2018
A few months ago, I wrote an essay about consciousness, free will, and sapience in relation to the Mean Six. It prompted a pretty great discussion from everypony here.
Today I want to do a different spin on that topic and talk about everypony’s favorite NPC, Skeleanor. Seriously, she may just be a giant cardboard cut out, but who can deny that her longing comes from a genuine soul - that her desire to love and be loved in return is as real as yours or mine?
I won’t waste time picking apart definitions of consciousness like I did in the previous essay because a world where Skeleanor has no soul is, quite frankly, too bleak to contemplate.
Her sapience, like her awesomeness, is self-evident. Rather than ask these sorts of questions, I want to examine the logical implications of Skeleanor’s consciousness.
She appeared before Spike and Big Mac entirely because of an O&O scenario created by Discord. One cannot help but wonder: Can Discord create life?
It seems unlikely. Life, in its own way, is the creation of order out of chaos. We are all made of incredibly complex systems, which are made out of incredibly complex organs, which are made of complex tissues, and cells, and so on and so forth. Even our chemical building blocks are significantly more sophisticated than compounds found in inanimate matter.
All of this biology stuff serves one function – to stave off entropy. A living thing is a cluster of matter attempting to impose order upon itself - a being engaged in constant warfare with chaos on a personal level, a cellular level, and even a chemical level.
Now Skeleanor is, of course, a card, and therefore, does not have the same biological advantages or constraints, but her consciousness is still a life form – a sophisticated system of consciousness, which a being of Chaos (like Discord) could not possibly have created.
So where did she come from?
Logically, one can only conclude that Skeleanor is a being from another dimension - that she was summoned by Discord, not created by him. (His magic has always been characterized as interdimensional after all). However, her existence as a playing card begs another question: Does she come from a two dimensional flatland? Or is that card merely a screen for the projection of her consciousness?
If the latter is the case, does that mean that there is a three-dimensional Skeleanor somewhere out there, splitting her consciousness across two realms, having sudden visions of the flesh world?
One can speculate for hours about such things, but there is one singular point that I’m building up to here. Skeletonia is real. We must find out where this skeleton homeland is, and figure out how to visit all of the cool pony skeletons. We need to make friends with them.
Ponies like Skeleanor need to know that they are loved.
Discuss.
-Sprocket
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"a sophisticated system of consciousness, which a being of Chaos (like Discord) could not possibly have created"
Hm, I am skeptical there. From theory, it seems that he might dislike being limited like that, and he would also be aware that a little order now can lead to even more chaos later. From example, isn't a cotton-candy cloud raining chocolate milk significantly more complex than a water cloud raining water? What of a landscape with a checkerboard pattern; is not the regular repetition of the shape more orderly than the uncheckered landscape he started with? Hm, and, actually, the O&O setup might itself count, as well...
...Though I do gather that this may be one of your less entirely serious blogs. :)
And the idea you propose is an interesting one! I wonder, she doesn't seem surprised, so did Discord travel there and make an agreement ahead of time with the inhabitants?
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Personally, I think that his magic works by messing with the space time continuum. In an infinite universe (or multiverse), anything that is even remotely possible, is inevitable.
If Discord wants to create a cupcake, he doesn't will atoms to come together to form a cupcake. He tears a cupcake-shaped hole in the spacetime continuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. A cupcake from some dimension somewhere will fill it. The question is: what flavor cupcake? Can it talk? Does it breathe fire? What's its favorite opera?
Water seeks its own level, and while Discord may not be true entropy, there is chaos to what he does. As for checkered patterns, it is an ordered system, but I don't think he draws out the blue prints in his mind, so to speak. He creates the vacuum, and summons a pattern. There is order to it, but there is still chaos to it as well because the pattern is something that "doesn't belong."
I do think it would be more apt to call him a trickster than a being of pure chaos. That notwithstanding, chaos is intrinsic to everything he does, so I still believe that creating life, in a true sense of the word, is outside of his bounds.
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Hah! Quite an interesting conception of it! :D
Thanks for the explanation/elaboration.