So what exactly do we mean by chaos anyway?

But what if I call myself chaotic and don't behave like the other chaos proponents do? I'm defying chaos so does that make me more ordered or more chaotic?

And I agree I've never been talking about good and evil here....

 

Chaos is already opposed by Order. The farther you follow that chain, the more it seems like a game of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I think the idea that Order came first, though, is easier to write into lore because it's more consistent with real-world corollaries. Anyway, we don't really know. We need more story.

As for Chaos being just like Order, well, that depends how you view it. I'm quite certain the role players who subscribe to either belief system wouldn't agree. From the outside looking in, though, it will depend how the players play. Maybe you'll see lots of differences between the devotees to each cause, or maybe you'll end up seeing not many at all.

Again, lower case means idea, upper case means cause / group. If you oppose order (lower case o), you're basically an anarchist. If you oppose chaos (again lower case), you're essentially all for control.

With the upper case uses, if you oppose Order, it can mean anything. Maybe you actually are an anarchist and just don't want anything to do with the idea of order. More likely you have some kind of problem with the way people who self-identify as Order do things. Opposing Order doesn't mean you oppose order. It means you oppose a group of people who claim to be trying to bring order to the world. Same thing with Chaos. Opposing Chaos doesn't mean you oppose chaos. Instead, it just means you don't agree with that group of people.

See what I mean?

 

Chaotic behavior doesn't mean rabblerousing and such. Think DnD style "lawful" vs. "chaotic," while karma is more like the "good" vs. "evil" side of things.

 

Toby with the awesome vid on the first post - way to go....

 

The presence of one defines the other. Chaos cannot exist without the perception of order and vice versa.



Take Rene Magritte's famous artwork "The Treachery of Images"
On the one hand, our ordered mind is telling us that it has all the qualities of a pipe. One could make an argument that it is a pipe because certain attributes associated with the image convince you that it is a pipe. Then the artist makes the statement below it saying "This is not a pipe." which gives you a perfectly legitimate reason not to believe it is a pipe.
In doing so he is destroying your perception of the pipe as what you might judge as a real object and bringing your attention to something outside that reality.

So in my very simplistic view:
Order is the structure which tells you how the world is, how it should be etc. That which gives form to the world around us.
Chaos is the intangible, unpredictable force that brings our attention to something other than what we perceive in our ordered minds.

The question is, should this be turned into a game element? or just be a set of general rules laid down by LB and Darkstarr that allow for people to interpret for themselves. Rewards being handed out as they see fit.

 

This reminds me of the tension between Confucianism and Taoism in ancient China. The former places great emphasis on Order, it's said that the founder - Confucius - would not sit if anything in the room was not in it's proper place. Tao emphasizes living in the moment and doing what the moment requires. To Confucians, Taoists were unpredictable but I think they (Taoists) recognized what a dynamic force Chaos was in regular life. Instead of trying to bind everything in tradition like the Confucians did to try to make everything predictable the Taoists lived creatively with the inherent unpredictability of life.

 

thanks


the way i always saw chaos in the order versus chaos idea is like that scene i posted from babylon 5. basically through conflict and struggle and war a lot of positive can come out of it. people develop stronger armor, stronger weapons and better technology among other things. often times these inventions are useful in a lot of things other than the war. for example in war a lot is learned about medicine and surgery from treating the soldier's injuries.

a gps system designed to send a guided missile into a building also lets me see my exact location on earth with my cell phone.

you kick over the ant pile and they rebuild it stronger. an earthquake causes the city to burn down and it's rebuilt much stronger and much more fire and earthquake resistant.

but of course you don't want chaos all the time so periods of order is important as well.

 

Here's my thinking on the subject so far. Poke holes if you can! Maybe I'm just imposing my own order on the issue and need a chaos person to womp me!

The physical universe is total order. Everything happens according to natural laws of cause and effect. The things we describe as chaotic in the natural world are really only the things that are too complex for us yet, in that we don't really understand the cause and effect behind it. But there is always cause and effect in the natural world.

Enter human beings. They can choose outside the laws of cause and effect. (Some would argue this point, but if you do it only makes what I'm about to say more valid). But by making a choice, they are establishing order in their lives. Even someone who thinks they are fighting against something they feel to be too tightly ordered is just creating a different order. The only way for human beings not to create order is to not choose, and then things revert back to the physical order of the universe.

The only truly chaotic thing would be to break out of the laws of cause and effect in the physical world. People think they can do this by the choices they make. E.g., move a tree out of a dry spot and water it, so that it now lives instead of dies. But this is just ordering things within a new set of laws of cause and effect created by a human being. The living tree is in a new order established by you, but still very ordered. You can extend this to show that really all human beings do in any choice is to establish an order. Chaos, as the video shows (they want to let evolution take it's course! how ordered!) is usually just people who want to follow a different ideology of how things should be ordered.

To break the laws of cause and effect in the physical world, you would need something to trigger something truly random. It could not be "caused" by casting a spell, or that would be orderly. Things would just have to appear and disappear or move and change in no pattern with no boundaries. So even chaos magic is not truly chaotic because we know how to trigger it. And chaos magic in-game will even be less chaotic because it will not have truly random effects. Effects will be limited to a specific set of possible outcomes. It will not wipe the servers, or take the moon out of the sky, or do nothing. It will have parameters, and thus be just a less direct type of order.
In summary, I don't buy that human beings are chaotic. They argue about how to order the world in different ways but it is not true chaos. It only bears the name chaos because that's the name people choose to identify themselves by. (which is not chaotic either) They should call themselves green one day and soup the next if they want to be less orderly, but they still can't escape establishing an order.

Also, I don't buy that chaos magic is really chaotic. If chaos is triggered by magic, it has a cause, which carries with it an ordering.

I don't think there is anything that is really, truly chaotic when you get right down to it.

Or to put it succinctly: Chaos is Order in denial.

 

"It is Ego of the One That Rules Order and the Acceptance of Everyone That Rules Chaos"

I do believe there is a deeper issue here that deals in terminology of something that we have been trained into believing as fact, when it's not.

If Good vs Evil is the same as Chaotic vs the Ordered, then the more proper representations of these words become something the computer can realize and change our "Tag of Swag";
In UO (our trained way of thinking) Chaos and Order were factions and only names that meant nothing other than a Red PK could only join Chaos.
Why should we take names of alignment out of being a true alignment. Many wore the Chaos or Order tag... as only a "Tag of Swag", yet were far different in their true alignment.
Within D&D, we saw where the DM had that judgment call as well as many situations that would test that alignment. "That is, if we are looking into the entire D&D depths of DM'ing within D&D.

A faction war has nothing to do with such issues of being called Chaos or Order, it's just a PvP War using different stones.
If a player of SotA begins many quests at once, this is a chaotic player. If they change guilds often, they are a chaotic player. If a player sticks to a quest and finishes it, that's an ordered player. If a player has been in one guild a very long time, that's an ordered player. Only online gaming took away their meanings, which is a part of the subject of the post to search for new ideas and this idea (far from being my own) is what D&D noted them as being.
Thus one can be a Chaotic Good or Evil as well as an Order Good or Evil.

It's entirely a D&D thing though it may not be "my thing" or what I would wish to see here.
It involves something "New Britannia" wise and clearing out of old online gaming taught of Tag Swag, without walking the walk of it, or talking the talk of it.
The Time Lord is a Very Chaotic Good, and I won't mention them by name, but I've been banned from a few guilds here just for speaking my mind in a very nice way, about very nice and good subjects

It's ego of the one that rules true order and the acceptance of everyone that rules true chaos...
~Time Lord~

 

Go back and read my first post again. You're mixing external and internal perspectives. That's fine for you and the way you want to view the world, but you won't ever understand these ideas in the context of the ways people interact with them if you stick to your own perspective. The ideas of order and chaos can, in the way you describe, have a lot to do with perspective, and perspectives differ. What you're describing is essentially the idea of fatalism vs. determinism, and you're missing the point. Not many people would deny that causes have effects, but the same cause repeated over and over again will not have exactly the same effect each time. Even so, people tend to see the world around them through the lens of individuality; self before else, as it were. The ideas of chaos and order in this sense have very little do to with the arrangement of the cosmos or the dots that connect to form an individual life. Rather, they have more to do with the ideas of agency and the common good. Whether there is or isn't a natural order to the world has nothing to do with social order as imposed by men. Also, whether there is or isn't social order in the world has nothing to do with how much people value that reality.

 

How fun!

I asked Darkstarr to make up a motto, and he answered "No Bounds, No Judgment, No Cause."
Make of that what you will.

 

"A True Chaotic has Spoken!"
That's a Great Description!
And That's Why Darkstarr Rules Chaos, For a Reason!
~Time Lord~ <---<<< Devout follower

 

On the subject of Art:
Thomas Paine's, book "Age of Reasoning" would be a form of Chaos that started freethinking.

Picasso's, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", might be considered a form of Chaos that resulted in change.


Could Chaos represent change, or could change be viewed as Chaos to someone following a strong Order?

Both examples were followed with a major movement.

Maybe I'm-- trying to form order out of Chaos?

 

Pass that pipe bro.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/farming.10645/
That's on another thread right now High Baron O`Sullivan
~Time Lord~

 

I really like the cursory idea presented that Chaos is the necessary counterculture to the gigantic Empire of Order.

In the same way that I said Chaos requires a concrete definition, it simply wouldn't do the idea justice to say it is the antithesis to Order and leave it at that; or say it IS what it IS NOT blah blah semantics. As an entity, however, like a V for Vendetta esque notion of rebellion, it becomes quite attractive.

 

Tricky but not so fast.

No bounds, except judgment is outside the bounds - so there is a boundary?

No judgment except the judgment that there should be no bounds? And what about the judgment that virtue is not valuable?

No cause except that you want to live without judgments and boundaries, which is in essence making it into a cause?

How can someone live without making a judgment? If I choose to do something it's because of a judgment that doing that is better than something else. Or does judgment mean a more narrow sense of the term.

Again, these may be certain sentiments that people want to try to live by, but in reality, they don't seem to mean what they indicate.

 

We must go deeper.

 

I said in my post I was inviting challenge in the first line.

Not if you're going to get to a definition that means something to people who have to make a choice about whether they want to follow it or not. If it's just my own perspective than I could run a militaristic fascist empire and call it "Chaos rules!" since it's just my perspective. It's about trying to establish something we can all recognize as the thing we're trying to describe.

That's not what I was describing at all. I was saying that human beings are origination of choices that are not pre-determined. I even indicated that even if you believed in determinism it only makes my argument stronger.

That is only true if you don't analyze physical laws down to the level where you can see that the exact same conditions will produce the exact same results. Things in the physical world only seem to have different effects (take rolling a die for example) because we don't have all the factors that go into cause and effect (like the hand position, hardness of the table, hardness of the material of the dice, temperature, etc.) But if you did know all the factors and there may be oodles of them, and you reproduced them, you would get the same effect. That's science.

The "ideas of agency and the common good" have everything to do with the cosmos and individual lives. I don't see the separation. Besides, you're basically agreeing with me that if it's about common good, then order and chaos are just ideologies about what is the best order to achieve the common good.

I fully admit that I may not be able to convey the complexity of the subject with clarity, but I don't think I need to change any of my points in the previous post based on what you said. But I encourage you to keep trying....