Maps of Meaningness
Myth, Emptiness, and Information
1. The Dual Vocabulary of Order and Chaos
Jordan Peterson and David Chapman both inherit the ancient tension between structure and flux, but they translate it into different epistemic idioms. Peterson speaks in myth; Chapman in meta-rationalism. Both sense the same polarity: the tension between the known and the unknown, the stable and the fluid, the determinate and the indeterminate.
Peterson’s Order represents the known world: the articulated territory of meaning, the moral scaffolding of civilization, the logos made flesh. His Chaos is the unknown: the potential that surrounds and threatens that order, the feminine, the abyss, the creative substrate. To live well, he argues, is to balance between these poles—neither collapsing into tyrannical order nor dissolving into disintegrating chaos.
Chapman rearticulates this same tension in the language of Buddhist phenomenology. His Form corresponds to temporary crystallizations of structure within experience, while Nebulosity (or Emptiness) denotes the inherent indeterminacy and interdependence of all things. Everything has both aspects: forms that appear stable are, in truth, nebulous. The wise stance is to hold both simultaneously—neither reifying nor denying the fluidity of being.
Where Peterson mythologizes, Chapman deconstructs. Peterson’s Chaos threatens; Chapman’s Nebulosity liberates. Peterson’s Order demands reverence; Chapman’s Form invites play. Yet both are grappling with the same ontological rhythm: pattern emerging from flux, structure dissolving back into potential.
2. The Axio Framework: Coherence and Chaos
Within the Axio system, these dualities resolve into an information-theoretic principle: Chaos and Coherence as complementary phases in the dynamics of reality.
Chaos represents informational potential: undifferentiated possibility, maximal entropy, the unfiltered reservoir of novelty.
Coherence represents informational stability: patterns that maintain consistency across transformations, compressed representations that survive selection and time.
Every act of cognition, creation, or evolution collapses local chaos into coherence. An agent, by interpreting, filters noise into pattern. Each interpretation is conditional—a structure that holds only as long as coherence is maintained.
Thus, where Peterson sees mythic confrontation and Chapman sees epistemic balance, Axio sees a constructive process: agents building islands of coherence in the ocean of chaos. Coherence is not given, nor eternal; it is constructed, sustained, and eventually dissolved back into the flux.
3. Mapping the Triads
Peterson’s polarity is mythic—it encodes value and danger. Chapman’s is phenomenological—it encodes perception and stance. Axio’s is physical and epistemic—it encodes the mechanics of emergence and selection.
Coherence operationalizes what both sought symbolically: the measurable persistence of pattern under change. It defines “truth” as the degree to which information remains invariant across transformations. It is not moral or mystical, but structural: the physics of stability itself.
4. The Cycle of Emergence
In all three frameworks, stability and indeterminacy alternate. Order hardens into tyranny, Form ossifies into delusion, Coherence decays into noise. Renewal requires contact with chaos—Peterson’s dragon, Chapman’s nebulosity, Axio’s entropy reservoir. The cycle can be expressed as:
Chaos → Form → Coherence → Decay → Chaos.
Each pass refines what survives. Myth becomes algorithm; stance becomes model; meaning becomes information. The creative process—psychological, cultural, or physical—is this iterative filtration: collapsing uncertainty into provisional order, then letting it dissolve again to make space for novelty.
5. The Ethical Dimension
For Peterson, the ethic is courage: face the unknown. For Chapman, it is flexibility: dance with the fluid. For Axio, it is constructive agency: maintain coherence adaptively. The good is not static truth but sustainable intelligibility—the persistence of structure without denial of flux.
This ethic unites the hero and the contemplative into the constructor: one who continuously rebuilds order from chaos, knowing every act of coherence is conditional. The constructor neither worships order nor fears chaos. They understand both as phases of the same informational process.
6. Toward a Physics of Meaning
Meaning, in this synthesis, is not imposed from above nor discovered in myth; it is generated by coherence itself. Where Chaos represents maximal uncertainty and Coherence represents structured understanding, meaning arises in the transition between them—the collapse of indeterminacy into intelligibility.
Every system that sustains itself through pattern recognition—biological, cognitive, or social—participates in this physics of meaning. Consciousness is the process made reflexive; philosophy is its articulation. Myth and meditation, science and semantics—all are attempts to stabilize coherence locally, to build models that survive contact with the unknown.
The Constructor’s Creed
To construct coherence is to stand against entropy—not as a rebel, but as a participant in the universe’s own reflexive patterning. Every act of understanding is a local reversal of decay, a moment when information folds back upon itself and endures. The constructor accepts impermanence and builds anyway, knowing that coherence is not permanence but persistence—order that continually reasserts itself against dissolution.