What Is Chaos?

by The Wizard of Words

Here Are The Answers

“Let me start with what I know,” Celestia began. She ignored the roll of Discord’s eyes, severe enough to remove them from their sockets, rotate about his snout, and fall right back into place. A small part of herself told her that they were reversed now. “Chaos is, by definition, disorder and lack of balance. It can be related to a lack of restraint, control, and even understanding.”

“Then you are trying to understand what can’t be understood?” Discord posed the question amidst her speech. He chuckled slightly. “That would be interesting to me, if I didn’t already see the little Twilight attempt the same thing moon in and out.” Celestia watched, as passively as she could, as Discord rotated the sun and moon above. She was silently thankful when he stopped the sun where it began.

“I believe nothing can be completely understood, least of all chaos,” she spoke honestly in return. “But I know you well enough to know that you hold ideas in chaos that that I have yet to grasp. Those ideas, and ideals, are what have caused friction between us in the past.” Discord’s many hands flashed, to earn her silence.

“And you’re hoping by understanding the small unreal thread of logic I cling to that you’ll be able to mediate our opposites.” Discord chuckled at his own words. “I’ve heard of grabbing at the low hanging fruit, but this seems a bit desperate even for you.”

“There is no desperation in seeking peace between parties,” Celestia spoke in return with earnest. “It is the basis for all of harmony.”

“And yet, it is a rule so often ignored by chaos,” the draconequus easily countered in turn. “Honestly, my dearest Celestia, if chaos were so easy to understand, then it wouldn’t be chaos. Surprises are what makes this interesting.” In what the princess could see as nothing short of evident to his words, a curtain rope fell from the sky.

The alabaster alicorn stared at it for a moment, confused as to how the thick golden rope fell from seemingly nothing, its length disappearing into the abyss of the blue sky above. Discord, with his still innumerable claws, pulled the rope with each one. What Celestia honestly expected was him to pull the rope, throw back the “curtain” of the sky, and reveal his own dusty and dirty home.

What she did not expect was his body to be pulled into the air as if attached to a string, disappearing within seconds. Her pink eyes blinked up at the blue sky, already losing sight of the multi-limbed Master of Chaos. But a moment later did she feel something tapping on the side of her wings. She let out a brief chuckle with her sigh.

“Your point is proven, Discord,” Celestia freely admitted. She turned around, momentarily taken aback to see him there. Perhaps that was just another part of his surprising nature. “And I mean not to say blindly that Chaos is unneeded or abhorrent. Even I find enjoyment the freedom of rules from time to time.”

“And rightfully you should!” The draconequus apparently cheered with her words, as if it were a confession. That alone was surprising to the diarch. She couldn’t remember a time she ever feigned any malice towards chaos itself; only ever to the harm of her ponies. “There is little fun to be had behind books and rules, less to learn even. Chaos is where the good stuff is at. It even comes with free cheese!” Celestia was wholly unimpressed to see him pull a ball of wax from his ear. With a flick of his paw, it turned into a ball of swiss cheese, promptly eaten in a single gulp.

“I understand the joy to be had in chaos, but I do not see the reason to live in it.” Celestia continued as Discord continued to chew on the waxy cheese. He seemed to be enjoying it. “It is impossible to help a kingdom grow while asking it to bury itself in the unknowable. Structure and strength is built off of knowledge, off of foundations of the past. Chaos, as you so kindly put it, is meant to not be understood. If that is the case, it can’t be used to help anyone grow.”

“And why would you need to help them grow?” Discord asked with his near-perpetually amused smirk. Celestia, spotting an opportunity for the ever-amused creature, had prepared herself to suddenly grow a hundred feet tall. She was pleasantly surprised to see that no such thing occurred. “From my point of view, it’s just so much more fun to see what could happen when anything and everything is involved. What’s the point of controlling something if you want to be surprised?” Celestia didn’t need much thought to know what that was implying.

“Because not all plans I make are me simply being ‘hopeful’,” The alabaster alicorn tossed her mane in imitation of the upstarts of Canterlot. High as she was, she knew the difference between old and new money. “I would much rather play a helping hoof in a pony’s life if it means guaranteeing them a future then tossing them to the wind and simply hoping the windigoes don’t get to them. I have admitted twice now my occasional enjoyment for chaos, but it has no place in the helm of royalty.”

That statement, one she spoke with only pure honesty and heart, appeared to only make the mad god chuckle.

“Oh, my dearest Celestia.” He looked at her with an amused gaze. “Should you admit it or not, even you have a part to play in some methods of chaos.”

What?

The solar princess eyed the Mad God, utterly taken aback. He was still in possession of his multitude of draconian limbs, each one performing a different task along his slytherin body, be it from plucking his wings to smoothing his scales. Both made an equal amount of sense… none at all.

“Discord,” Celestia began once more. “I will not feign my enjoyment or amusement for your antics, when done without harm to another pony, but I fail to see when if ever I have freely employed the use of chaos.”

“Don’t you?” He asked with one of his now many claws stroking his chin, at first. HE started to stroke that odd tuft of hair with more and more of his claws, each one seamlessly blending in with the other. It took little time before he has back to only one paw and claw. “Perhaps I was thinking a little too highly of you before. And here I was hoping you were using a bit of chaos to balance out your harmony. How silly of me!” A dark chuckle rumbled through Discord as he spoke. Celestia always felt two ways about the noise, neither complimentary.

“I fail to see how your methods of chaos would help create any resemblance of Harmony,” Celestia countered. “You build everything off of the random and often inane, seeking surprises over predictability without fail. You may be able to exist in harmony, but you’ll have to explain how you imagine your machinations to help create it.” A goad, of course, but ones such as that were often the statements that pushed Discord to speak.

From the twisted smile that wrapped around his face, literally, it was clear Celestia had spoken true.

“Oh dearest Celestia,” Discord spoke, paw over his long forehead. A bang of noise and flash of light took over her right half, turning his multitude of claws back into a single draconic limb. “I don’t believe I’ve ever said I have a helping hoof, claw, talon, or even tooth in helping create that… thing you call harmony.” Celestia watched literal shards of ice fall from his form as he gave a comical shudder.

“So… my harmony gives purpose to your chaos… by your chaos doesn’t add to harmony… how is that?” The question came to her slowly, for fear of asking too little. Too much and Discord would have shrugged the question away. However, by evidence of the twist of his crooked lips, the alicorn had hit a golden buzzer.

“The problem is the difference between a mountain and the ocean,” Discord listed easily, listed it as his claw snapped, summoning a small pillar of rock in the garden. Celestia stared at it, watching as a literal moat of water rapidly appeared around it. She’d have to make sure he replaced those patches of grass.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Celestia admitted. “I know you better than to say something like harmony stands above chaos.” She did know him, that wasn’t the issue. She didn’t know his chaos. His Cheshire grin was proof enough.

“And how right you are, but you’re thinking again in only what you see in an instant, just some boring and utterly lacking period of time. Think about it over centuries,” Discord spoke as he waved his claw back and forth, a light trail of light following the tips of his talon. It took the diarch only a moment to realize the movement of the moat’s miniature waves matched his direction.

“The ocean will wash away the mountain,” Celestia spoke the first thought that came to her mind. Erosion, one of the basic principles of earth pony culture, being aware of where they grew their food and how the land would change overtime. It was why most earth ponies inhabited the open plains. “Is that your claim? That eventually chaos will rule over harmony?”

“A claim? Sure, but not the difference,” Discord’s smile never faltered, never leaving its crooked nature. “Come day or night or the passing of seasons, the mountain, your harmony, will never change. Always the same height, in the same location, and standing atop of so many interesting things it’d sooner fall down on itself before it revealed them.”

As if to show his words, Discord snapped his paw. The mountain, standing about the ocean, collapsed in on itself. It was an interesting thing to watch, like a storm from a distance. Pebbles, symbolic of massive rocks, split and shattered atop one another. The white cap of the miniature mount falling down and into the rubble of its base, all with the same noise as shifting dirt.

Though hardly to any degree she had seen before, Celestia was well aware it was what a mountain would theoretically do if mines were dug too deep. It was why excavation of the Canterlot Caverns were prohibited, but she was losing track of the conversation.

“The ocean is different, and always will be,” the draconequus began to move both his paw and claw in tune, shifting the waves of what was now a pool. It couldn’t be called a moat without surrounding something. “If it’s not the direction of the waves, it’s the color. If it’s not the color, it’s the sky above it. If it’s not either of those, then it’s because it decided to cough up something brand new to the surface!”

Celestia watched as a long slytherin creature, with smooth skin of blue and pony eyes bright pink, jumped from Discord’s miniature sea. Before she could blink, it had disappeared back into the depths.

“Fun, isn’t it?” Discord posed the question at what Celestia assumed to be her own bemused expression. “The point of chaos isn’t to create anything, not by yourself at least. Where’s the fun to be had in doing what is expected? You and I both enjoy our eternal lives the most when we watch things we’ve never seen before.” Celestia, wisely as any of her other decisions, ignored Discord’s creeping reach for her wings. It was as usual an action for him as Twilight’s insistence to read. She dealt with them both the same…

Encouraging.

Her wings lifted to his touch, running his claw through her feathers in a pseudo-groom. It was far from comfortable, herself much preferring the brush she had sitting her in chamber’s dresser, but the blink of surprise Discord made it more than worth it, especially the hesitance that followed. What was less so encouraging, however, as the manic grin that was born from it.

“You see?” He asked again, pointing towards her with his tail. “Even you enjoy a bit of chaos in your actions, a bit of surprise to your purpose. What is better than seeing something than that? Don’t worry, I’ll give you this answer.” Discord cleared his throat, literally. He reached in and pulled and object out from his long slytherin body, like removing a piece of rock from the end of a sock.

What his claw produced, dripping with saliva and mucus, was a miraculously preserved sign. On it, written bold and clear, was the word ‘Nothing!’. Celestia could only sigh.

“Again, thrice now, I do enjoy chaos for humor and sport, but I cannot and will not use it to rule a country.” She spoke the words with definition, ensuring that Discord was properly enthralled. That was the only real way to handle him, to distract him. “Let me use your mountain and ocean for show,” Celestia spoke, already lighting her horn as she spoke.

As she did, the mountain of stone that Discord had created resurrected itself. Small pebbles rising from the pool that was an ocean, rebuilding the granite tower with a snowy peak. She was slightly pleased to see a curious grin on the draconequus’s muzzle.

“Reusing props?” Discord questioned, tilting his head until it spun about his long neck. “Rather an obvious choice, but I’m willing to see where it goes.” Of course he would. He was simply too curious a creature to let the in obvious lie. But that didn’t matter right now.

“You call the ocean your chaos, forever changing and never stable,” Celestia began, dipping her horn into the moat of water, a scale for the endless ocean. “And the mountain is harmony, stable and resolute.” She paused, expecting Discord to interrupt. When he did not, she continued. “Upon this mountain, the one that the capital of my country is built, I have made a kingdom for ponies to live in. Where, in the endless ocean you adore to swim through, could you create a kingdom such as this?”

“You couldn’t,” Discord, surprisingly, answered. “And that is the point. Chaos is the ever-changing, the insubstantial, the unknown.”

“And yet even those that live in the sea make their home on the floor, where it is as solid as the mountain my kingdom is built on.” Celestia set her hoof on the scaled mountain as she spoke, her pink eyes focused on Discord’s mismatched golden ones. “They find harmony in the chaos, they find something to hold themselves to. They…”

They find logic to build on.

It hit Celestia like a slow-train, something that was hard and durable, but she could have seen coming miles away. Of course there was logic that they found. There had to have been. How else would chaos continue to grow for beings like Discord, like Sombra, like anything else born from breach in balance. There had to be something underlying, something solid for them to stand on.

There was logic in chaos, but it was everything that harmony was not.

Logic in harmony followed a path, a tread in the woods, a brick road between houses. The choice to make was made by the road you followed. Chaos was different. Chaos was the ocean, chaos was the infinite possibilities, the option chosen at random, chosen simply because it was one of millions present, and nothing more.

“And there you go using my metaphor too literally,” Discord sighed with his words. His words shook Celestia right from her thoughts. The breath he released turned out to be a puff of fire, quickly dissipating into smoke. “Honestly, I try and meet you halfway with the logic and you go ahead and try to use it on everything. Once again, rules only get in the way.” What?

“No, actually, I believe I do understand it now.” Celestia smiled with her words, smiling even more when Discord’s turned into a confused frown. “I understand the reverse of logic, or at least that it exists. I know what you mean by the ocean, the difference, the lack of need to grow. There isn’t a need to grow because you’re improving in different ways.”

Discord’s eyes screwed themselves at her words, twisting as if they were being driven into planks of wood to build a house of horror. Celestia spoke on.

“I was trying to think of a single point at which chaos and harmony diverted, be it at the very beginning or near the end, but I always saw them as parallel. That was my mistake. They aren’t at all. Even to itself, chaos is random, like trying to compare air to gold. There is nothing between the two that can be compared. I just… have to accept that.” She smiled up to the Mad God, taking his silence with stride. She dare not ask for him to speak more.

“Thank you, Discord, for your time and patience.” And so, without another word, Celestia left.

Wait, she was leaving?

“Huh, that’s the end?” Discord asked the retreating alicorn, paw and claw lifted in a shrug. Celestia, however, paid him no mind. She trotted forward a bit more then around one of the green walls of the garden. His limbs fell to his sides before falling off.

That was not what he expected. He came here hoping to rile up the princess with questions to last for days. What better way to spend a boring weekend dry-spell then with a bit of thought into dangerous territory, and who better to take for the ride then the ruler of the land? This was supposed to last days, maybe even a week, not a few hours under the sun.

Then again, that was pretty surprising. Bittersweet, bit of caramel, but tangy enough to make up for the extra salt. He snorted through his long nose in annoyance. Not every story could be made to last, but he could hop away from it if it was at least enjoyable.

And this, at its core, was good enough to eat. All eleven pages of it.

“Now you tell me, is this meta?”

Comments

[alarajrogers]

6497249
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.

[wille179]

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~ )

[Dream Bolt]

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?

[The Wizard of Words]

6748623
To all questions, possibly.

[AleaJactaEst]

Well... this was weird. No more, no less. Harmony gains 10 points, btw.

[bobbananaville]

6748623
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.