Can order and chaos coexist harmonically or rather do they even need to?

I like order, I like rules, I like knowing the limits and how much one can bend them, I like knowing my place and purpose in this universe, I like being able to retain knowledge that is stable and true.

However.

I also believe chaos is a necessary or rather a crucial part of maintaining order. How? Well chaos is like a great reset, like an electric impulse that animates life itself.

But can chaos truly be chaos if it's contained? As in order through chaos, or chaos within order, whichever sounds funkier to you personally.

I think complete order leads to stagnation and that leads to death. But on the other hand complete chaos leads to destruction which obviously also leads to death. Yet when both are combined or rather coexist either periodically or cyclic then we have the main ingredients of life... change. Life is motion and not in the obvious animalistic matter but quite bluntly put it's all about change. If there is no motion, no change and no progress then life is extinguished. I guess we can expand this to physics and reality that is also part of life, as in a universe where life cannot emerge is essentially a dead one. It may not be biological or even chemical based life, it can be pure energy or whole galaxy consciousnesses but if a universe cannot sustain any form of motion or change it should be considered dead in most senses of the term.

So then what do you think?

Just to add something although I believe this is pretty much unnecessary to our discussion but yes I am christian and yes I do realise this concept is far more extensively explored in certain eastern myths, religions and philosophies, just because I have a different faith and worldview doesn't negate the values of any wisdom or truth in other views or aspect of life and reality, same goes for science and the more academic views. Everyone should try and find their way in life be it spiritual, philosophical, scientific or even an intriguing mixture of all of them.
 
Definitely order through chaos.

Living as a human in within this society that we've created, order is a must. We need order to function. In that case, it's easy to assume that everything else needs it too.
The concept of order is our own creation though, and the rest of the universe doesn't know or care about what we think.
The fact that we're even here at all is a result of chaos. The universe didn't put earth where it is on purpose, with the intent of giving humanity a place to come into being.

This goes against what most religions say, of course, where there's a rhyme and reason for everything. Keep in mind, though, every religion was founded by a person, and people need order, so I think religions are a bit biased in that regard.

In short, chaos made us, and we made order, so chaos made order.
 

Nep Nep

Forbidden Boi Kunt
Administrator
They feel almost cyclical.

Chaos begets order, then that order when corrupted begets chaos.

I suppose they technically coexist at all times with only one dominant at any given time, depending on what you're thinking about.

In the universe, they sleep in the same bed. In nature, they do the same.

In society? It cycles.

The more I ponder, the more they seem inseparable. We've never seen perfect order or perfect chaos untouched by one another. The loss of one results in the other.

In some utopia, maybe order could theoretically exist without chaos, and in an apocalypse that collapses order, chaos could exist freely, kind of like the Fallout world, though even that contains people trying to reclaim order.

I wonder if there is a theoretical opposite to a utopia that contains no order? Dystopia often has extreme order enforced by a power imbalance. It's not purely chaotic.

I guess our only real example is the universe? But we don't fully understand it. Maybe it's more ordered than we think.

I don't know, from a short little think, I conclude that a theoretical order could possibly exist without chaos, but chaos may not have a similar pure form, theoretical or otherwise.

In practice neither are ever separate. Not even without beings to act on them. Nature has rules and things that break the rules.

Actually, does chaos even exist or is just the name we give to something we don't understand? If we knew all the rules, would chaos make sense and become orderly? Order is inherently something tangible and defined. Chaos is just some vague opposite, which lends credence to the possibility that chaos isn't anything at all, but the thing that occurs when we don't try to categorize and organize everything according to our strange needs. It's a name for something unknown or something that isn't the order we know.
 
Actually, does chaos even exist or is just the name we give to something we don't understand? If we knew all the rules, would chaos make sense and become orderly? Order is inherently something tangible and defined. Chaos is just some vague opposite, which lends credence to the possibility that chaos isn't anything at all, but the thing that occurs when we don't try to categorize and organize everything according to our strange needs. It's a name for something unknown or something that isn't the order we know.
Much like darkness which is the absence of light, chaos is the absence of order. Orders comes from within chaos but ultimately leads to it in some degree because pure order means death.
 

Nep Nep

Forbidden Boi Kunt
Administrator
Much like darkness which is the absence of light, chaos is the absence of order. Orders comes from within chaos but ultimately leads to it in some degree because pure order means death.

It is indeed the absence of order but when you try to apply it to the universe, one wonders if chaos actually applies.

Due to our incomplete knowledge on the things around us can we truly rule out that there is not order in everything?

Order is also often defined by transient beings such as ourselves in which case, does it actually exist or is it just something we define by whatever suits us at the moment?

Is a storm chaos? Or is it nature's order? Or again, is order simply how we define it with our incomplete knowledge?
 
It is indeed the absence of order but when you try to apply it to the universe, one wonders if chaos actually applies.

Due to our incomplete knowledge on the things around us can we truly rule out that there is not order in everything?

Order is also often defined by transient beings such as ourselves in which case, does it actually exist or is it just something we define by whatever suits us at the moment?

Is a storm chaos? Or is it nature's order? Or again, is order simply how we define it with our incomplete knowledge?
Entropy.
 
It is indeed the absence of order but when you try to apply it to the universe, one wonders if chaos actually applies.

Due to our incomplete knowledge on the things around us can we truly rule out that there is not order in everything?

Order is also often defined by transient beings such as ourselves in which case, does it actually exist or is it just something we define by whatever suits us at the moment?

Is a storm chaos? Or is it nature's order? Or again, is order simply how we define it with our incomplete knowledge?
can order be misinterpreted as chaotic??
 

jane

queen of the losers.
V.I.P. Member
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order and chaos exist as an attempt of ours to try and classify the observable universe, as opposed to being tangible forces that exist naturally. they are vague enough to be applicable in any circumstance on both a micro and macro scale, and also vague enough for those applications to vary depending on what person/people they are originating from

but in the case of viewing them as fundamentally as possible, their definitions are codependent as most people in this thread have already said, since they can't exist on a conceptual level without using the other as a reference point.

personally i think the closest we get to observing a natural state of order are forces of nature but this also depends on the assumption that our understanding of these forces will continue to hold true in the future, or that our understanding of it up until this point in time is objective truth. while it's pretty unlikely that gravity will abruptly stop behaving the way it always has, there is no concrete proof that it won't

basically my answer is who fucking knows but also yeah probably
 

Abolish the 19th Amendment

‣ ↻
Administrator
@Planidium
do you mind if i move this thread to the general section?
i gotta nuke this one for the section overhaul, sorry. gonna be tagging other OPs to move the others from other sections that barely have any activity so we can get started on restructuring

if there's activity requirements met, we can always readd a philosophy section in the future. (might include some free resources too, maybe in the future we can also add tags like anime/manga for philosophizing, TV analysis, etc) but rn alot of these sections just make OLF look dead and there's no incentive for people to pick up the pace, especially when some sections are better as prefixes
 
@Planidium
do you mind if i move this thread to the general section?
i gotta nuke this one for the section overhaul, sorry. gonna be tagging other OPs to move the others from other sections that barely have any activity so we can get started on restructuring

if there's activity requirements met, we can always readd a philosophy section in the future. (might include some free resources too, maybe in the future we can also add tags like anime/manga for philosophizing, TV analysis, etc) but rn alot of these sections just make OLF look dead and there's no incentive for people to pick up the pace, especially when some sections are better as prefixes
No.

Nuke it.

NUKE US ALL I CAN'T STAND LIFE AS A NAKED APE RAT ANYMORE
 
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