Integrating Meaningness
A Dual-Aspect Model of Meaning, Value, and Viable Futures
The modern crisis of value begins with a blunt realization: there is no cosmic scoreboard. The universe does not tell us what matters. There is no hidden ledger of right and wrong. For most people this triggers an immediate recoil—either toward nihilism (nothing means anything), or toward eternalism (meaning must be fixed, objective, and universal). Both responses are evasions.
Two contemporary frameworks—Meaningness and Axio—offer a way out. They agree on the basics: no metaphysical moral facts, no cosmic purpose, no inherent meaning written into the fabric of reality. Yet they seem, on first contact, to pull in different directions. Meaningness emphasizes participation, the fluid attunement to unfolding patterns. Axio emphasizes agency, the structured dynamics by which a mind preserves coherence and projects itself through time. It is tempting to see these as competing theories of value.
They are not. They are two views of the same underlying process.
Meaningness begins with the phenomenology of experience. We act, perceive, and respond within a world that continually exceeds our concepts. Meaning arises in this interaction—not in the world alone, not in the self alone, but in the interface. Chapman’s central claim is that meaning is enacted. It is neither discovered nor invented, but brought forth through participation. Attempts to freeze it into eternal categories generate confusion. Attempts to deny its reality generate despair. Meaning is not a substance; it is a relation.
Axio begins elsewhere. In the framework we call Axio—the structural account developed throughout this publication—the central primitive is the agent: an entity that maintains itself by modeling, choosing, and acting across time. An agent must preserve coherence to survive its own future. It must avoid involuntary constraints that collapse its range of viable moves. It must navigate a branching universe by selecting among counterfactual futures. Value, on this view, is not cosmic and not arbitrary; it is anchored in the functional requirements of agency. The reduction of viable futures is harm. The credible threat of such reduction is coercion. Intentional reduction is evil. These definitions follow not from morality but from system dynamics.
If we stop here, the two frameworks look distinct: one phenomenological, one structural; one fluid, one architectural. But this contrast dissolves the moment we examine how either process functions.
Agency requires participation. An agent cannot form predictions without sensory coupling. It cannot update beliefs without feedback from the world. It cannot maintain a stable identity without a continuous stream of interaction. Agency is not a sealed monad choosing from the inside; it is a self-organizing pattern that depends on what it encounters. Agency is, at root, endogenous participation.
Participation requires agency. The moment we describe attunement, responsiveness, or improvisation, we have already presupposed selective attention, intentional arcs, and pattern-sensitivity. Participation is not passive absorption. It is not dissolution into the flux. It is a way of acting. Participation is, in turn, exogenous agency.
Seen properly, the supposed divide collapses. The mind is a single dynamical loop viewed from two angles. From the inside, it appears as choosing, intending, and maintaining coherence—agency. From the outside, it appears as attunement, responsiveness, and co-creation—participation. These are not rival explanations but dual aspects of one continuous process.
Meaningness excels at describing the phenomenology of this loop. It reveals how meaning surfaces as we engage with patterns beyond our control. It dismantles the seductive falsehood that meaning must be either fixed or nonexistent. It shows how stance errors—eternalism, nihilism, and the rest—distort our experience. It offers clarity about how confusion arises.
Axio attempts to describe the mechanics of this loop. It reveals the structural requirements that make agency possible at all. It explains why coherence matters, why suffering has the shape it does, why coercion is destructive, and why flourishing expands viable futures. It provides a physics of valuation without appealing to metaphysical facts.
Neither framework is complete alone. To understand the unity, consider a jazz improviser. She listens to subtle cues from the ensemble—shifts in harmony, microtiming variations, dynamic changes. This is participation: attunement to patterns she does not control. Simultaneously, she selects motifs, shapes musical arcs, and maintains a coherent identity across the unfolding piece. This is agency: projecting viable futures and choosing among them. The music emerges only because these two operations—attunement and projection—form a single continuous loop.
Meaningness offers the how without the why. Axio offers the why without the how. Together they form a coherent whole: a phenomenology and a mechanics of mind grounded in the same underlying dynamic.
What emerges is a unified picture: Meaning is the participatory dynamic through which agents cohere; value is the structural dynamic through which coherence propagates. The universe contains no moral scoreboard. But minds, as coherence-seeking processes, cannot help but evaluate. They enact meaning through participation and propagate value through agency. These two operations, far from being incompatible, require each other.
What Meaningness reveals in lived experience, Axio secures in system dynamics. Together they describe the only kind of mind the universe allows: participatory in how it feels, agentic in how it functions. To understand either, you must understand both.