what i think it all has to do with discordianism is: THINK FOR YOURSELF SCHMUCK
all this philosophizing about religion and worldview and ways out of the BIP are, when you get down to it, all about
1) thinking for yourself
2) getting others to think for themselves
3) how to think for yourself (no matter how paradoxical it sounds to discuss this with others, there is merit in that as well)
the thing is, discordia, as outlined in the PD has quite a few pointers on these subject. for example, operation mindfuck is an example of 2, while some of the weirder koan-like stuff and the law of fives are about 3, etc.
maybe the better question is, what does all this still have to do with Chaos?
which is, on this board, quite a neglected bit from discordianism.
mostly because it has to do with chaos mahdqick, i guess
and because it invokes lol23fnordism in people
and perhaps because randomly invoking chaos everywhere maybe isn't really considered a good idea by most on this board?
In reference to http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=11608.0
Quote from: triple zero on February 13, 2007, 08:56:47 PM
maybe the better question is, what does all this still have to do with Chaos?
which is, on this board, quite a neglected bit from discordianism.
mostly because it has to do with chaos mahdqick, i guess
and because it invokes lol23fnordism in people
and perhaps because randomly invoking chaos everywhere maybe isn't really considered a good idea by most on this board?
I think this deserves a new thread. Mind if I split?
Quote from: Cain on February 13, 2007, 09:00:11 PM
Quote from: triple zero on February 13, 2007, 08:56:47 PM
maybe the better question is, what does all this still have to do with Chaos?
which is, on this board, quite a neglected bit from discordianism.
mostly because it has to do with chaos mahdqick, i guess
and because it invokes lol23fnordism in people
and perhaps because randomly invoking chaos everywhere maybe isn't really considered a good idea by most on this board?
I think this deserves a new thread.  Mind if I split?
go for it.
as for the chaos question...
mang's potted summary of PD.
please forgive the simplification but i thought the basic idea behind the LOL23PINEAL stuff was that:
many people view the world in a manner that holds order as good and chaos as bad.
the PD said that there were more options: creative/destructive order and creative/destructive dis-order.
from what i gather, the intent was to say that 'creative disorder' is sorely lacking in this world and thus it's combatted by...uh....saying 'fnord' and uh...stuff.
i think BIP was more along the lines of fleshing out the 'reality grid' notion. i don't think anyone here is opposed to chaos, only opposed to chaos that is now incredibly cliched & staged. there really is nothing chaotic about PD cliches.
my feeling is that people are not against chaos per se.
yea it's like that qabalah book i'm reading now (same as i been ploughing through it for months now) anyway what it says is there is no good or bad, only energies/forces being applied at the wrong place or wrong time, pulling things out of balance.
that's the thing with chaos vs order
there's a time and place for everything.
the world can use some chaos at certain places and levels, but on the large scale it already has enough, and on the smaller scale of your personal life, i think most of us also already have enough, and it's the in between scale where we want more of it maybe.
but then again, maybe this is another of those balance thingies, it could very well be that those scale/levels stacking upon eachother are supposed to be alternating towers of positives and negatives (leaving aside for now which of chaos and order is positive or negative).
maybe because we are chaotic of ourselves, the structures that encompass us will seem more orderly (eristic principle), and maybe because those structures seem orderly, the larger scale world structures are currently chaos (aneristic principle, definitely)
ok, so maybe this chaos/order stuff has some things to be investigated after all :)
Quotemostly because it has to do with chaos mahdqick, i guess
and because it invokes lol23fnordism in people
and perhaps because randomly invoking chaos everywhere maybe isn't really considered a good idea by most on this board?
As far as I'm concerned, Chaos has nothing to do with magic or the occult. Or at least, nothing more than anything else.
It can do....sometimes. I'm pretty sure we can have a rational conversation of chaos, but I admit I have been soured by the "chaos is about cute little animals and just wants us to be friends and all get along in the happy anarchy" crap which is about as misinformed as most of the New Age movement.
Probably not, but it happens anyway.
Quote from: Cain on February 13, 2007, 09:48:08 PMbut I admit I have been soured by the "chaos is about cute little animals and just wants us to be friends and all get along in the happy anarchy" crap
i'm pretty sure most of the people currently debating on the board are beyond that :)
it's kind of like how "think for yourself" has evolved from "i can do whatever i want and it's all freedom maaan" to what we're discussing about the bip now.
the "cute happy anarchy" is probably a bit more ripe for the picking as well :)
OK, this is how I see it relating.
Everyone has an idea, series of ideas or concepts that try and explain how the world works, in order to manipulate it better, as well as represent reality. This is nothing new, we know this.
However, these ideas are often incomplete and many social/cultural reasons can affect which we decide to accept or reject.
Because of this, we have many, often unconnected and misunderstood ideas floating around and causing conflict and disorder. Disparity exists between the world as it actually is, the world as we think it is (or wish it to be) and the interaction of opposing agents holding hostile concepts.
Chaos exists because of the BIP.
> Chaos exists because of the BIP.
that would be the bad Chaos, right?
see this is why we need some different words, like order disorder and chaos.
now we need another one, maybe.
cause there is also "good" chaos
the kind of stuff that causes creativity. can't have creativity without chaotic processes. (this is not randomness, this is chaotic feedback -- different, more spicy randomnes)
creativity in stuff like brainstorming, but also evolution etc, well you get the idea.
i think this creative chaos is definitely not caused by the BIP
(or maybe out of necessity?)
> Everyone has an idea, series of ideas or concepts that try and explain how the
> world works, in order to manipulate it better, as well as represent reality. This is
> nothing new, we know this.
also, i like what, i think mang/rwhn/silly said in the other thread, a lot of people who claim not to have beliefs, in fact do have beliefs, but they turn out to be very unwell thought-out crap and loosely collected garbage that happened to fly in their faces.
I don't differentiate. Chaos is chaos, whatever subjective moral terms you want to label it with. You get something wrong, but you come up with a great new idea for a novel or play doing it. Sometimes, you get it wrong and an entire country is rounded up and put in concentration camps. One is good and the other bad, but both are the results of living in a chaotic world where the truth is uncertain.
with that definition, i would say the BIP causes only SOME chaos.
otherwise you could as well argue the BIP causes everything
(which you can do, but in that case i will have to mention we are all One, and you might as well have not split the thread, for they too, are all One :fnord: )
also, what is the (sort of, general) definition of chaos you're using then that encompassess all these things?
cause there still are different kinds of chaos.
there's the mathematical one that means no more than "small difference in initial conditions shall have large difference in conditions over time (growing exponentially over time in fact)"
which may be applied to "living in a chaotic world"
but i don't quite see how that fits to "an entire country rounded up" type chaos?
or more like, anything could happen chaos?
I think the Black Iron Prison project was designed to make us resentful towards law and order and the impending police state (particularly laws that are themselves criminal and unjust). Of course chaos sometimes only exacerbates the law rather than breaking it down. If you want to beat Grayface, you have to beat him at his own game. Some Discordians act like they want to do away with all laws, but they're retarded.
There is order within chaos but that order only exists within the context of chaos, within a greater chaos if you will. Often it amuses the primate to create little pockets of order or rearrange said to suit primates whim or ambition. This is good. This is creativity. One doesn't create - one merely rearranges the particles. Whether those particles be matter or thought or sound or any other expression of energy. Primate organises particles. Primate is pleased with it's work. Otherwise primate reconfigures or abandons it's configuration.
Meanwhile all else is chaos. On a broader scale even the interactions of primates with each other's configurations, and the interactions of the configurations with each other and with each others primates, is, essentially, chaotic in nature.
Working metaphysical overview ...
... for now ...
Quotethere's the mathematical one that means no more than "small difference in initial conditions shall have large difference in conditions over time (growing exponentially over time in fact)"
which may be applied to "living in a chaotic world"
but i don't quite see how that fits to "an entire country rounded up" type chaos?
Because it works from a small misinterpretation of how the world works, added on another, added on another etc etc until it builds up a momentum all of its own and could likely never be stopped without a major change in history as we know it.
And good stuff from Silly too. Of course, some scientists have actually sat down and figured out this sort of stuff and while what he (Silly) says may look depressing, there is still area for much creativity, especially in artistic fields.
I look at Chaos as a a slight step down from the Universe. There's the stuff we can understand, ordered chaos, the stuff we can't seem to understand or are trying to understand, disordered chaos, and then the stuff we don't even see, infra chaos. But this is somewhat arbitrary labeling based on our human concepts and our penchant for categorizing stuff. But I see chaos being to the universe as dark matter is to outer space. does that make sense?
So what does the BIP have to do with chaos? I think it begins to recognize chaos but also begins to recognize that there is so much that we don't recognize and just can't comprehend, at least, not yet. But, that we try to better understand what we do see and never stop wanting to see more of it.
chaos generally reminds me of yin
BIP suggests to me that you need to learn to live with it and factor it in to how you approach life rather than trying to ignore its presence because you can temporarily convince yourself that it isnt there
no matter how 'good' technology gets, there are some things that will never be able to be controlled/predicted
I think BIP is only tangentially associated with Chaos.
In the PD, "Chaos" (as Mang alluded to) was a way of freeing the uptight, straightlaced people from the belief that Order was Good, and Disorder was Bad. It looked at the rigid rules and reglations of society and government, and saw that it led to human misery, and not too much fun. It seemed to be all about adding fun and humor to life, and not to be freaked out when weird shit went down.
BIP is about (for me), recognizing that there is more weird shit going on in the Universe that we can notice, but we can change the way we notice things, with the end result (hopefully) making us happier.
So, PD Chaos = getting people to loosen up.
BIP = getting people to loosen up.
so the general idea is that Chaos is, either way, just a sideways related thing?
and that the things-are-fucked-up (and ought to be less fucked up) view is the important part?
i dunno, i really have the idea we're not been giving the concept of chaos its due attention lately .. unless you really think it's not that important.
the thing i see currently with Chaos, that we need to get out of the way a bit, is that i really think we're now all talking about different definitions of Chaos.
the only Chaos i can talk with some certainty about is mathematical chaos. but that interpretation of chaos is rather new, somewhere since the end 50s, begin 60s i think. this is why i had such a hard time fooling myself to believe Asimov's Foundation saga, the psychohistory stuff he writes about, used to be a SciFi concept when he wrote it, but ever since they invented chaos-theory, it has more and more been redirected to the realm of Fantasy. but i digress.
then there's chaos as "your room is in chaos!" which is a whole different thing. probably a similar but smaller thing than "this land is in chaos!"
then there's the sort of chaos that "loosens people up", which may be related to the other types of chaos, but is really not the same. because a land in chaos doesn't necessarily loosen people up.
then there's the traditional chaos = order + disorder view, which, while accurate to reason with, people keep confusing disorder and chaos in this context, no matter how hard you smack them on the head.
then, i think there should also be room for some kind of archetypical Chaos, god(dess) of Chaos, etc. Chaos as a force of Nature/Reality. that kind of stuff.
also, indeed good stuff from Silly, but as i said before, i disagree with the notion of only small pockets of seeming order can exist within the big reality of Chaos.
imo, it's alternating order/disorder when you rise or descend in scale. we humans can create a small pocket of order, but when we zoom out, it's all chaos anyway, but i'm pretty sure when you zoom even further out it becomes order (though not really order we humans could understand), and further there's chaos, etc etc.
it would make sense and mathematical models seem to confirm this:
fractals and chaos (http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~ldb/seminar/logdiffeqn.html)
the image on this site you need to interpret one-dimensionally, meaning, the 'zooming' i spoke about happens only on the x-axis. as you can see there's regions with chaos, but if you look closer, these regions are in fact ordered in some way, in a whole weird tangled up sort of fashion.
ok so the fact that this happens in a lot (but not all) mathematical chaotic models, is of course no reason to assume this is the case for Reality as well.
oh i can advise people to click around a bit on that site, it contains beauties like
"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."
– Henry Adams
heh
Well, what does the Law of Fives, or Starbuck's Pebbles have to do with chaos?
I think the BIP is just part of a new PD.
We can easily start writing about Chaos, what it is, why it's important, etc.
Maybe we should.
i think we should indeed.
or at least, it's good to realize that the BIP is only a part of discordianism.
and then to look which other parts are worth considering still in 2007.
Do we think that even if we can come to some loose consensus of what chaos is that we can then impart that consensus on the larger populous, or at least portions of it. I think 000 illustrated nicely a few posts ago at how different people think of "chaos", I think the example he gave of "your room is chaos" is a good one. Of course this has a lot to do with how lazy society has become with language and words. It seems like precision in language has been lost over time, or is it just me?
well, "chaos" is just a word, do not forget that.
and arguing about the meaning of a word is not really fruitful, except for agreeing on a few definitions for future arguments. which might be handy for us. but only for us.
unless you want to accompany your pamphlet with some kind of glossary (do people have the patience for that?)
but we can just discuss chaos and it's uses and what not and don't even have to mention the word "chaos" in the pamphlets, as long as we get the ideas across.
if we can only write down "chaos" and be ambiguous about it, then better just skip the word and use something less ambiguous.
really it's just a word, and we're not here to teach people words. we want to give them ideas.
Over in another forum, I tried to spell out the difference between the Mathematical word "chaos" and the Discordian word "chaos". It didn't go well.
I'll x-post it here, to kick start things.
This makes sense.  So perhaps we should fire up the word filter again and throw chaos into it.  figuratively speaking of course
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 14, 2007, 02:17:09 PM
Do we think that even if we can come to some loose consensus of what chaos is that we can then impart that consensus on the larger populous, or at least portions of it. I think 000 illustrated nicely a few posts ago at how different people think of "chaos", I think the example he gave of "your room is chaos" is a good one. Of course this has a lot to do with how lazy society has become with language and words. It seems like precision in language has been lost over time, or is it just me?
Language is constantly and chaotically :wink: evolving. Memes run rife. Not a problem as long as you introduce your word. Define it for the time being in the context of your essay - "Chaos is...." And don't get too hung up on the fact that it'll mean something different tomorrow. Only the meanings stay the same. The words are just fridge magnets.
Quote from: SillyCybin on February 14, 2007, 02:41:08 PM
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 14, 2007, 02:17:09 PM
Do we think that even if we can come to some loose consensus of what chaos is that we can then impart that consensus on the larger populous, or at least portions of it.  I think 000 illustrated nicely a few posts ago at how different people think of "chaos", I think the example he gave of "your room is chaos" is a good one.  Of course this has a lot to do with how lazy society has become with language and words.  It seems like precision in language has been lost over time, or is it just me?
Language is constantly and chaotically :wink: evolving. Memes run rife. Not a problem as long as you introduce your word. Define it for the time being in the context of your essay - "Chaos is...." And don't get too hung up on the fact that it'll mean something different tomorrow. Only the meanings stay the same. The words are just fridge magnets.
Nice metaphore.