I guess this is kind of upg? But it is heavily informed by my readings on discordianism and chaos magic, and also draws from prior math/science/philosophy knowledge. So I don’t think any of this is too left-field and there’s a good chance it’s not new at all.
1. χάος. I prefer to write this type of chaos in greek because it is the furthest from the colloquial understanding of chaos, and a very important concept in my practice, so it is handy to distinguish it visually.
χάος is what Principia Discordia calls “pure chaos,” the fabric of reality independent of human perception, “a level deeper than is the level of distinction making”. It should not be interpreted as disorderly! Rather, it transcends ideas of order and disorder, because χάος is not directly perceivable by humans at all. Liber Null describes it as “the ‘thing’ responsible for the origin and continued action of events” and chaosmatrix.org calls it “the field that underlies all things which exist.” If you are familiar with philosophy, you could consider χάος to be analogous to Kant’s “noumenal reality” (separate from perceivable “phenomenal reality”) or Plato’s “realm of ideas” (separate from the “intelligible realm” that we perceive).
My favorite way to describe χάος is “the kind of chaos too chaotic to be noticed and named”, which comes from a Vi Hart video.
2. Mathematic chaos, or unpredictability. This is the chaos of chaos theory and the “butterfly effect”, where a tiny difference at the beginning (whether or not a butterfly flaps its wings) can cause a huge difference in the final results (the path of a hurricane).
Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.
It is important to note that this kind of chaos isn’t random at all. In fact in scientific circles it’s often called “deterministic chaos” because the chaotic system is still totally shaped by physical laws. There are just too many sensitive variables for us to predict exactly what will happen, even if we understand every single force that causes them to happen. The unpredictability comes from complexity, not randomness.
An interesting thing about deterministic chaos is that when you “zoom out,” so to speak, structure and order will appear on large scales, even though there seems to be none at small scales. It’s easy to predict the course of a stream but impossible to predict the exact path of a single water molecule within that stream. That’s mathematic chaos.
Mathematic chaos is different from χάος because we can directly observe and measure it. It’s a physical phenomenon, even if it is so complicated that it is impossible to grasp the entire system at once.
A good way to sum it up is “when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”, which comes from Wikipedia’s chaos theory page.
3. Colloquial chaos, i.e. randomness and disorder. I prefer not to call this chaos at all, at least when I am speaking technically. But generally when people describe a situation as “chaotic” this is what they mean.
According to discordianism, both order and disorder are man-made concepts. They don’t directly describe reality, they reflect our perception of reality. The exact same situation could be decribed as “orderly” or “disorderly” depending on the viewpoint of who is doing the describing.
An important tenet of discordianism is that neither order nor disorder is more strong, true, or desirable than the other.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it.
[…]
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered. Reality is the original Rorschach.
–Principia Discordia (note: when this quote refers to “chaos,” it is the kind of chaos I would call χάος)
Are there more kinds of chaos? Maybe! I personally think this does a pretty good job at distinguishing all the basic concepts that people refer to as “chaos,” but I’m open to suggestions and in some ways these are just my initial thoughts, not the final word even for myself.