Designing a Future: The Fluid Mode

Before controversy and fame, Jordan Peterson was a psychologist theorizing myth and meaning.

Jake Orthwein points out striking similarities in Peterson’s work and David’s. Along with them, fundamental disagreements: partly due to Peterson bringing a Christian perspective, and Chapman a Vajrayana Buddhist one.

Nihilistic catastrophes ※ Chaos and order ※ Reconciling myth and rationality ※ Interactionist cognitive science ※ The purpose of life

Jake intercut our conversation with brief relevant clips from Jordan Peterson’s classroom lectures and media interviews. It’s fun seeing the commonalities and contrasts!

In this post:

* The Making Of: demons and the idiot

* Sections and topics in the video, with timestamps so you can find them

* Further reading: books &c. we refer to, with links

* “AI”-generated “transcript” (not safe for human consumption)

Demons and the idiot

This podcast has been years in the making. Our attempts were incessantly obstructed by malicious demons, who don’t want you to see or hear it. Eventually this became comical, although also frustrating.

To be fair to the demons, progress was also frequently obstructed by an idiot. Namely: me, David. I fumbled the technology repeatedly.

After finally getting to record the conversation, I applied “AI” to remove pauses and “ums” and such. This improved the audio track, but makes the video extremely jerky. Also, I used “AI” to make it appear as though we are looking at the camera when we weren’t. An uncanny, demonic appearance results. And, because I am an idiot, I did this irreversibly. Sorry about that!

Next time, I will perform extensive exorcisms and protective rituals. And also learn how to use software before inflicting it on Jake’s invaluable contribution. Or leave the editing to him; he’s a professional!

Sections and topics

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:05 David summarizes Meaningness (his book): it’s about the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern.

00:05:01 The intellectual lineage of Meaningness is mainly the same as that of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning. However, David draws on Vajrayana Buddhism where Peterson draws on the Western tradition, particularly Christianity.

00:07:48 Nihilism, as explained by Nietzsche and as in Buddhism, is a key topic for both of us. Psychological lineages: German Romanticism, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Robert Bly.

00:10:54 Jake summarizes Peterson’s project and intellectual lineage. The catastrophes of the twentieth century. Recovering the mythic mode as compatible with rationality. Envisioning positive futures and preventing nihilistic ones.

00:20:59 The history of the gradual collapse of meaning. Tradition, modernity, postmodernity: communal/choiceless, systematic/rational, and postrational/nihilistic modes.

00:32:20 A future that combines the advantages of different historical modes of culture, social organization, and psychology, avoiding their disadvantages. Subdividing the past century: totalitarianism, countercultures, subcultures, atomization. Those abandoned, in order, nobility, universality, rationality, and coherence. We can restore all of those, but not as absolutes.

00:43:32 Jake explains Peterson’s somewhat different take on the same historical periods. Rationalism and modernity as the result of encountering alien cultures.

00:53:02 Jake explains Peterson’s “universal grammar” of myth in the Western tradition: Chaos is the Great Mother, Order is the Great Father, the Divine Son mediates between them. Peterson maps this onto twentieth century history.

00:56:43 David explains how Vajrayana Buddhism’s understanding of emptiness and form is fascinatingly similar to Peterson’s account of chaos and order, and also quite different. This may account for our fundamentally different attitudes, despite sharing much of our intellectual backgrounds. Personifications of chaos in Babylonian and Buddhist mythology: Tiamat and Prajñaparamita are the same goddess, viewed in radically different ways.

01:05:06 Positive and negative aspects of the characters in Peterson’s mythology. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the Divine Son (a theme we return to later).

01:09:55 Our shared lineage in “4E,” interactionist cognitive science, and our rejection of rationalism. Heidegger, situated activity, Gibson, affordances, rigpa in Dzogchen. The frame problem in AI research, and how David (and others) resolved it in the late 1980s. “You see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning.”

01:23:09 How the Ancient Greeks rejected the mythic mode and invented rationalism, as an eternalistic response to a nihilistic crisis. How Nietzsche finally diagnosed the failure of rationalism, and realized that would lead to another nihilistic crisis. His rejection of the delusion of a supposed True World, more real than the apparent one, in Twilight of the Idols.

01:34:07 Peterson’s account of Christian soteriology, and its justification for social action. Buddhism’s lack of a social vision. Social vision is a form of purpose. Rationalism has no account of purpose. You have to go to myth for that!

01:39:19 The influence of AI planning research on Peterson’s thinking. My debunking of that (with Phil Agre, influenced by Lucy Suchman and Hubert Dreyfus) in the 1980s. Francisco Varela’s reformulation of subplans as micro-identities in micro-worlds.

01:47:28 Self-sacrifice as essential in identifying purpose: in the Western tradition, and in Buddhism.

01:50:56 Demons subjugated at last! Credits roll.

Further reading: books &c. we refer to

In the order we refer to them in the podcast, explicitly or implicitly:

* Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning

* David Chapman, Meaningness

* Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

* Jordan B. Peterson, “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2-6”

* Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self

* Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

* Jordan B. Peterson and Joseph L. Flanders, “Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict”

* The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

* David Chapman, “Fundamentalism is counter-cultural modernism”

* David Chapman, Meaningness and Time; includng “How meaning fell apart”

* David Chapman, “The mythic mode: from childhood, throughout life”

* Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

* David Chapman, “Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness”

* Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage

* Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

* David Chapman and Philip E. Agre, “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity”

* Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason

* James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

* Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

* David Chapman, “This is it!”

* David Chapman, “Charnel ground”

* Jordan B. Peterson, “Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity”

* George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior

* Philip E. Agre, “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI”

* Jamgon Mipham, Gesar: Tantric Practices of the Tibetan Warrior King

* Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, “Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity”

* Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions

* David Chapman, “Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction”

* Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I

* Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How

“AI”-generated “transcript”

This is inaccurate and actively misleading in places. I wouldn’t recommend reading it. It’s mostly so people can find it in web searches.

On the other hand, it’s often unintentionally hilarious, so there’s that.

[Update, 16 November 2025: Andrew Shade Blevins kindly fed the original “AI” transcript through a script that uses ChatGPT to fix things up. The result may possibly be even more inaccurate, having gone through two rounds of “AI” distortion, but it certainly reads better! So I’ve replaced the original version with his.]

[00:00:00] Jake Orthwein: The occasion of this conversation, much delayed but long anticipated, is just for you and I to get a chance to talk about your work, of which I’ve been an enormous fan for, I don’t know, seven years or whatever it is now. Maybe more.

We’ve decided to frame it as comparing your work to Jordan Peterson’s, both because of Jordan’s significance in the zeitgeist and because he has worked on similar problems, but also because the differences between the two of you are illuminating.

[00:00:50] David Chapman: Well, we’ve been talking about this for years and years and planning to do a podcast, and there’s been demonic obstruction. Like every time we go to record, something goes wrong.

[00:01:02] Jake Orthwein: Very nearly food poisoning deterred us as well.

[00:01:05] David Chapman: Right. I thought maybe I would start by just giving a short overview of what I think the Meaningness project is.

It’s a book. There’s a website, which is meaningness.com, confusingly. There’s also meaningness.substack.com, which is a different thing. Meaningness.com is the book. It is meant to be a self-help manual for relating well with meaning, and I think it’s important that I don’t see this as an intellectual project.

It’s a practical project. The Meaningness book explains ways of relating to meaning that work and ways of relating to meaning that don’t work. The ones that don’t work make you miserable and ineffective or cause you to cause trouble for other people. The ways that do work ideally make you joyful and creative and productive, and this is better, so it’s better to do the better things.

That’s what the book says. I have a style of understanding and explaining which starts from the abstract and general and works towards the specific, and a lot of what’s on the website is quite abstract and general. Because I know that other people have different styles of learning, I’ve put in some specifics near the beginning.

There’s a tendency to misunderstand Meaningness as philosophy. And philosophy is taken to be an intellectual thing that’s interesting as opposed to practical. And I really want the Meaningness book to be practically useful. We’ve been talking for quite a while about the ways in which my interests and work and style are similar to Jordan Peterson’s and different. I’ve dressed up in Jordan Peterson’s style today because I thought that would be funny.

He always wears something like this, and I actually really like that. So I’m doing that today. But my writing, my thinking style is similar to his as well. There’s an underlying theme that goes through everything that I do, which is the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. Nebulosity is the aspects of the world that are fluid, constantly changing, impossible to pin down, indefinite. Pattern is the aspects of the world that are solid, enduring, well-defined, structured. Everything is some of both of those things, so they’re inseparable. This isn’t a metaphysical thesis; it’s just if you consider things in the world, that’s how they are. And you just look and you see. The underlying idea in the Meaningness book is that we tend to try to pull those apart and deny one or the other somehow, and that’s because nebulosity—we think we don’t like it. We think it is constantly undercutting us because we can’t get complete understanding of anything because it’s changing out from under us all the time, and therefore we can’t get control, and therefore we can’t make things go the way that we want them to go.

They go some other way instead. So we’d like to impose structure or pattern on everything, and that doesn’t work because we can’t do it. And then when we try to do it, it fails, and it would be better to go with the flow. That’s the whole message of the book, and then there’s just a whole lot of applications of that.

This is very interestingly similar to one of the fundamental themes in Jordan Peterson’s work, as you’ve pointed out repeatedly. We’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations about this. Chaos and order are fundamental for him. And those are not quite the same, but very closely related.

[00:05:01] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, I think the way they’re not quite the same is very interesting. It accounts for much of the difference in your styles and approaches. When you get into the details of like what exactly the difference would be between nebulosity and pattern, or even emptiness and form, which is one of those frames you’re taking on to talk about nebulosity and pattern, it’s not quite the same thing as chaos and order, even though they sound very similar.

You mentioned that you don’t see it as an intellectual project. There are intellectual sources to it, and I remember it was very illuminating for me after encountering Meaningness and having some Buddhist and a little bit of cognitive science context. So I sort of could orient, but it also felt very sweet, generous. And what is this? It’s a very novel presentation. And then working my way through your appendix for the reading page, starting to piece together this whole set of lineages that then make the text make a lot more—I’m not even sure it makes it make more sense because you do try to make it stand on its own without the baggage of philosophy, but it put it in context for me in a way that I didn’t have before.

So maybe you could say something just about the intellectual lineage that Meaningness sits in, even if it’s not intellectual in itself.

[00:06:18] David Chapman: Yes. I do draw on a lot of sources. I do footnote them. It’s spooky reading Jordan Peterson’s work because we are mainly in the same intellectual lineages and drawing on the same sources.

[00:09:39] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, that’s actually a surprising omission. I’ve sent you that one clip where Jonathan Pageau brings up Kegan to him and he doesn’t quite latch onto it, which suggests to me that he’s not super aware of that despite the fact that he himself is doing psychoanalytic and constructive developmental synthesis in his work all the time. You clearly mentioned you’re in the lineage of Carl Jung. That’s somewhat surprising to me. Is Robert Bly the person you’re putting there or, ‘cause he—

[00:10:05] David Chapman: He’s my main entry point into that, yes.

[00:10:08] Jake Orthwein: Okay. Okay. I remember you having some kind of suspicion toward Jung. Maybe it was all the selfie language or the romanticism. But I wouldn’t have situated you in his lineage as obviously.

[00:10:18] David Chapman: Well, yes, he is in romantic lineage, which means that he overemphasizes emotions and feelings and stuff inside your head relative to the outside world. And I think that’s a big mistake. But in the past century, he’s the person who was most influential in the understanding of the mythical mode of myth, dreams, fantasies, obscure images, and that’s tremendously important for me.

[00:10:54] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So maybe since you’ve just laid out how you see both the project and the lineage of Meaningness, I’ll say something about how I see Peterson’s and I think probably throughout the conversation I’ll do the Peterson foil just ‘cause I’m familiar with that work. So he is very consciously responding to the problem of nihilism as framed by Nietzsche. He sees the risk of nihilism much more strongly than you do, which also influences how he frames the events of the 20th century.

So you don’t quite frame it as a nihilistic catastrophe. You say that people were worried about a nihilistic catastrophe, but much of what was happening was actually a defense against the threat of nihilism, for example, through totalitarianism. And Peterson, he would view that through the nihilistic lens of the loss of the prior meaning system. But in Maps of Meaning, which is pre-fame Peterson, and it’s him at his most systematic and comprehensive, he very explicitly was saying he was plagued by nightmares of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, which is when he began writing it.

[00:11:57] Jordan Peterson: I found myself suffering from two things. One was a very lengthy sequence of nightmares about nuclear destruction. And they’re very affecting dreams.

[00:12:09] Jake Orthwein: That set him on this adventure to understand how it could have been possible that we’d find ourselves in such a situation.

[00:15:54] David Chapman: Yeah. That point about the mythic mode being oriented to action, that’s, I think a piece that’s missing in Jung, and I think it’s terrific that Peterson picks up on that.

[00:16:07] Jordan Peterson: This is one of the things that the psychoanalysts, I think didn’t get quite right, although Jung touched on it in his later work. There’s not, all of you isn’t inside your head. And for the psychoanalysts, a lot of the work that you were doing on yourself was on your, on the relationship, say between your conscious and your unconscious mind, but tremendous amount of that was sort of inside your skull, so to speak. But the phenomenologists, the phenomenological approach enables you to start reconceptualizing the psyche as something that extends beyond you and, and always will. And so that you can work on its reconstruction at any level of analysis where your own nervous system is signaling to you that there’s a problem.

[00:16:56] David Chapman: I’m less concerned with totalitarianism, medieval, and the wars of the 20th century than he is. And that’s just a matter of, I guess, personal interest. I mean, it’s not like those things aren’t tremendously important and globally there is a worrisome turn towards authoritarianism that may develop into totalitarianism. I’m more worried about that now than I was a few years ago.

It’s interesting. Peterson’s dream. We’re almost the same age. We grew up in similar circumstances, and I remember as a kid having dreams of streams of bombers on the horizon flying toward me, and I could see what was about to happen. And this is something that was very alive in everyone’s mythic understanding at that time.

This was really gripping. My parents had a very half-assed nuclear fallout shelter in the basement. This was a normal thing to do. So, yeah, I feel that, and there’s lots of people who worry about potential catastrophes and there’s a lot fewer people who think about what could we really like to have happen?

And that’s much more difficult. And I’m trying to grope my way toward positive future visions. I don’t hear that in his—

[00:18:28] Jake Orthwein: In his mild defense, I mean, I think he is trying to do that a lot more now. It takes a different shape, certainly than it would for you. It’s much more explicitly Christian, or at least Christian inflected.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this ARC thing that he recently founded. It’s his answer to the World Economic Forum. ARC is Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It’s a big conference that’s all about positive visions for the future. Especially I think in its early years, it’s got a lot of, here’s what we don’t want, we don’t want the damn postmodernists, you know, blah blah blah.

But its mission statement is at least about forging positive visions for the future. So I think he’s trying there.

David Chapman: That’s really good to hear.

Jake Orthwein: Yeah. The one interesting point about the Cold War background—I wrote about this at one point—but at some point I realized that part of the reason I got the sort of bug of your work, and to some extent Peterson’s also so much, was because of, like, 9/11 as a similar sort of foundational event.

I was very young. But much of my teenage years were coming into more and more consciousness of whatever context produced 9/11, and 9/11 was also this return of history moment from a sort of sense that those kinds of things had ended that I had in my childhood.

And just this problem of like, why do people—at that point I would’ve framed it as—believe such different things? How can that motivate them to action in such dramatic ways? And I remember reading, for example, “Fundamentalism Is Countercultural Modernism”—a mouthful of a title of one of the posts in Meaningness, which is about, to some extent, about jihadism.

That interest definitely motivated me to get really, really curious about these questions of meaning and belief and so forth as well. Maybe one other thing that would be helpful as context, because this is a point of contrast to Peterson, and it’s not that you necessarily view totalitarianism as differently bad, but I think he’s got this frame that most of what happened in the 20th century is fallout of the death of God, which is to say that it’s mostly a nihilism problem.

He would frame it as the atheistic totalitarianism of Stalin and the morally nihilistic totalitarianism of Hitler through to postmodernism in some way. And the story you tell is like a little bit different because it has this complete stance lens and this developmentalist lens. Maybe give a little gloss on the second part of the book, the Meaningness and Time part of the book story from choice through to modernity and modernity’s collapse or systematicity collapse.

[00:20:59] David Chapman: Yeah, I mean, I think he is right and this does come from Nietzsche that the problems of the 20th century came from the collapse of what I call eternalism, which is the insistence that despite all evidence, the world is completely patterned and ordered by some cosmic ordering principle, which you would identify at this point with the Christian God.

I guess that’s Nietzsche’s realization. He said, look, imagine that you live within a belief system and then something arises to challenge the belief system. Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens. Your belief and belief systems collapses. And that’s the road to not—now it doesn’t have to because you can jump from one belief system to another, but sometimes that doesn’t work.

Is that you do a meta critique and you say, oh, I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed. Okay. One alternative is jump to another protective structure. Fine. Another alternative is protective structures themselves are not to be trusted. Bang, you’re in chaos. How the hell are you gonna get out of that?

That’s the pathway nihilism. Well, you can work your way through that. That’s difficult. Or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul-damaging move and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re-identify with something rigid and restricted, which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to the current state of chaos.

It’s like I know that people need to identify with local groups. I understand that. But that they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate God. And that’s order, but that’s not a good replacement for chaos. It’s just another kind of catastrophe. Right? Too much order, too much chaos, both catastrophes.

[00:22:53] David Chapman: I think it’s equally and maybe even more a collapse of belief in rationalism, that being the internalistic insistence that rationality can give us all the answers to everything and is always correct. And if you’re just rational, everything will work out right. I think that much more than Christianity was what animated the high point of modernity, which is the 1880s to 1890s, and then again around 1950, 1950s for high points for modernity.

So the meaningless and time story is, historians would say, a periodization. It’s dividing history into periods with different characteristics and treating those as homogeneous, and these periods correspond to the developmental stages in personal psychology from the Kegan lineage. I’m by no means the first person to recognize that the progression of historical development is interestingly similar to the progression of personal development.

There’s a lot more to say about why that is true, but that’s a side issue. So the first stage is what I call the communal mode, which is the mode of people living in a village or a hunter-gatherer band. It is just about your relationships with a few dozen people.

[00:24:37] Jake Orthwein: Just to be clear, it’s not the first stage of Kegan’s developmental system. It’s the correspondence to the third stage of Kegan’s developmental system. But it’s the first stage in the sense that it’s what human adults would’ve landed in for most of human history once they’re functioning members of their society, their traditional society.

[00:24:57] David Chapman: That’s right. We now live in postmodernity. Many people living in postmodernity have the psychology of the communal mode. Many people are living as if they were in a small village, and that is how they understand things. And this is what drives a lot of current politics.

We are evolved to live in small groups, and people have innate political reasoning. I believe you can see this in other apes, and our understanding of global politics, our nation-scale politics in many cases is by analogy, implicitly to the political dynamics of a village of a hundred people. And that really doesn’t work, and that’s a huge problem.

[00:25:44] Jake Orthwein: There’s something interesting that I think both you and Peterson do that’s been very influential on me, which I associate it with this phrase that’s in Kegan, where he describes each developmental stage as both an achievement and a constraint. And often from a later perspective, the temptation is to look back on a prior stage only in terms of the sense in which it’s constraint and not in the sense in which it’s achievement. And one can do the same thing with respect to history and see all the ways that they hadn’t yet learned the things that we learned without realizing the extent to which they had triumphed or figured out very important things and arrived at functional equilibrium as best they could.

[00:26:23] Jordan Peterson: That’s how our civilization works. It’s like there’s all these ruined people out there. They’ve got problems like you can’t believe. Off they go to work and do things they don’t even like. And look, the lights are on. My God. It’s unbelievable. It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. And we’re so ungrateful college students, the postmodern types, they’re so ungrateful.

You know, they don’t know that they’re surrounded by just a bloody miracle. It’s a miracle that all this stuff works, that all you crazy chimpanzees that don’t know each other can sit in the same room for two hours, sweltering away without tearing each other apart. Because that’s what chimps do.

[00:27:01] Jake Orthwein: And both you and Peterson have a generous and gratitude-based relationship to history that I think is partly informed by that developmental lens, which is very interesting, even as you see the limitations.

[00:27:14] David Chapman: Yes. The mythic mode of being, acting, thinking, feeling, seeing is stage two. This is something that develops in children around the ages of five to nine, maybe. This is the mode of dreams, of make-believe, of visions, of things being other things, like when kids are playing, the sofa becomes a pirate ship, and it’s simultaneously a sofa and a pirate ship.

This is a stage two thing, and that’s how the mythical mode works. And that’s tremendously important. And one of the big problems, and Peterson says this and I think it’s absolutely true, one of the big problems with our current way of being is the denial of that, to say that’s irrational. It’s bad. You shouldn’t do that. And we all do it anyway.

I mean, we as adults, we still have dreams and occasionally visions and fantasies, and we act as heroes or kings or whatever it is. And that is really important. And Bly was very big on this. Robert Bly, who is in the Jungian lineage, very influential on me, reclaiming that is a project that we need to undertake.

David Chapman: So the communal mode was gradually replaced with the systematic mode, which is the rational construction of society, culture, and psychology. This corresponds to stage four in the Kegan lineage, and that’s modernity. So there’s premodernity, which is the communal mode, and there’s modernity, which is a systematic mode.

And in the late 1800s, we started to outgrow that because we started to see its inherent contradictions. We started to understand the limitations of rationalism, of systematicity, of imposing pattern, everything, and this fantastic accomplishment. I mean, modernity is wonderful. Great. It’s incredible what we were able to do.

It’s a miracle. So much progress was driven by the rationalist delusion that we could get control, and we did get a lot of control over a lot of things. And we understood so many things, and we learned so much that over the twentieth century reached the point where it no longer became tenable. Postmodernity was defined by Lyotard as the condition of incredulity toward grand metanarratives. Grand metanarratives are these overarching stories that provide structured meaning for everything. These are what I call eternalism. That’s a Buddhist term, but it says there’s some kind of eternal cosmic ordering principle which decrees that things will be like this.

And so progress with a capital P or science with a capital S and Christianity itself in the versions that were most predominant in terms of power, at least in the 1800s, was also a grand metanarrative that became difficult to actually believe in. So in 1971 or thereabouts, everybody stopped believing in these things.

And then what? We were confronted with groundlessness. We had believed in modernity that we had built these wonderful structures on solid ground, and that just dissolved. And so postmodernity is this condition of, whoa, now what? And if the now what is nothing? That’s nihilism. And in a certain sense, postmodernity began with the First World War because people had believed that civilization had become so moral, so advanced that war had been eliminated and this was never gonna happen again.

They went into World War I thinking, this will be over in a few weeks. It’s not a big deal. Our side is gonna win because God is on our side and rationality and science and reason are on our side. And, you know, 30 million people dead later or whatever the number was. And then like that, it was like, oh.

Something went absolutely terribly wrong there. And that enabled, I think, and I think this is part of Peterson’s story, that enabled the catastrophes of fascism and communism as a response. These were attempts to impose order on the chaos that had broken out by force.

[00:32:20] Jake Orthwein: There’s one other piece of your story that I like a lot, and that also is sort of interesting contrast to Peterson where another term you use in Meaningness in Time for the communal mode is the choiceless mode, because of the way people relate to their traditions of meaning and their culture, which is as though there were no alternatives, because they’re unlikely to encounter alternatives and also not by reference to justifications, but because they’re in the concrete practices of the culture that you just get enculturated into without having to tell many step why stories about them. And then one way you describe modernity as a project or, I guess it would be modernity as systematic eternalism or stage four eternalism is an attempt to recover choice by way of certainty. And then that was the failure.

It was the failure of those certainty projects and their different guises that really initiated postmodernity.

[00:33:19] David Chapman: Yes. Everything I write is like one-tenth written. The actual point of Meaningness in Time is supposed to be about the future. And the future is a hypothetical mode of social and cultural organization I call the fluid mode. There is a preposterously named webpage, which is “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” for any future mode of meaningness. And this is again, this idea of wanting to recover what is good in previous developmental stages. Ideally we ought to provide all of the benefits of each of these previous historical modes without their downsides.

And the great thing about the choiceless mode is you just don’t have to worry about a whole lot of junk. The amount of bureaucratic nonsense we have to deal with as adult Americans in 2025 is insane, the number of institutions that you have relationships with. It’s literally hundreds. Insurance paperwork takes a huge part of everyone’s time.

[00:34:25] Jake Orthwein: We found a way to get this bugaboo of yours into the conversation. Your bureaucratic paperwork existence. So the choiceless mode is—

[00:34:34] David Chapman: You don’t have to do any insurance paperwork. That’s what’s great about it. But you also have close relationships with some kind of a community, and that’s what’s most important for you.

[00:35:38] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, I think that differentiation that you do within the 20th century is also an interesting point of contrast to Peterson, where it’s different in some ways, structured reactions to the breakdown of modernity. The countercultures were reacting to something, the subcultures were reacting to something. Totalitarianism was reacting to something and each just trying to recover something while also trying to get rid of what they perceive as the reason why modernity failed.

[00:36:04] David Chapman: Yes. Well, totalitarianism was the first response, and that is let’s simply reimpose order by force of arms and the apparatus of the state. And that didn’t work because it’s so heavy-handed that it made everybody’s lives miserable. And I mean, you know, everybody knows this story. Various totalitarian regimes collapsed. There still are totalitarian regimes, but on the whole, the world became much less that way.

So postmodernity is the point where at some level everyone understood that modernity was no longer working in the United States. In the early seventies, there was a real danger of a nihilistic collapse, and there was a lot of attempt to reinstate order by force there, you know, violent clashes. We worry now about political violence, and I think it’s right to worry about it, but the level of political violence in the United States in the early 1970s far exceeds anything we’ve experienced so far. And people forget that.

[00:37:12] Jake Orthwein: This book, Days of Rage, everybody is citing again recently ‘cause it’s about this sort of forgotten period of political violence in the seventies.

[00:37:20] David Chapman: Yeah. So there were series of reactions to modernity starting, I guess the Beats were the first kind of anti-modern, this is 1950s. They were really in the Romantic lineage. They were not really significant except as precursors to the 1960s hippie counterculture, which was also in the Romantic tradition.

So the Romantics were a group of German intellectuals in the late 1700s, early 1800s who reacted against the European Enlightenment. So they recognized the errors and limitations of rationalism and actually extolled the mythic mode and the emotions and poetry. And woo, all the stuff that the hippies picked up on quite a long later without really realizing that that’s what they were doing.

But the hippie movement was really creative and interesting and did point out what was going wrong with American modernity, and that merged with the New Left movement, which was new because it wasn’t about unions and working class versus the owners. It was a cultural movement, primarily against the excessive rigidity and pattern being imposed by 1950s modernism.

So these two things came together. That was the sixties to seventies counterculture that generated a lot of political violence came out of that, but also eventually that became so mainstream that that was the whole left half of Western culture and society for decades was rooted in that.

There was also a Christian counterculture that said the modernity of the 20th century had, as Peterson said, lost touch with God. And this needed to be rectified by reinstating Christianity as the center of Western culture and of American culture and the operation of the American state. And that was quite successful for a while too.

Both of these are now over. They were, you know, even like five years ago, they were still kind of stumbling along and were still the backdrop to American culture and politics. I think that’s no longer true.

[00:39:58] Jake Orthwein: I want to put one frame around this because just the extent of the logic is very interesting to me. So you define in Meaningness and Time systematicity as being characterized by universality, rationality, and coherence. And then each of the—I think those are the three, right? And then each of these reactions are surrendering one of those and attempting to recover others of those. So the countercultures on your account surrendered rationality, but also, but still had pretenses to universality. And that’s part of the—and coherence of their destruction and coherence. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

[00:43:32] Jake Orthwein: I’m gonna do a little stepping back just to reorient people in case they’ve lost the thread, but also from my own memory. I’ll try to give what I think of as Peterson’s slightly different account of the twentieth century.

So I think we might have glossed over this, but the solution that you provide or the methods you suggest in the first part of the Meaningness book, which you talk about confused stances with respect to meaningness of monism, dualism, nihilism, and eternalism. Nihilism and eternalism are the sort of central ones. Monism and dualism are sort of symptomatic, I guess you could say, of eternalism or nihilism. Those are the four extremes in a Nagarjunian reading of the same material. And the failure to fall into any of those confused stances you call the complete stance, which neither fixates nor denies nebulosity and pattern but recognizes them to always be inseparable, which I think you did say, but spread out over the beginning of the conversation. Is there anything about that you’d like to correct?

[00:44:30] David Chapman: No, that’s really a very nice summary.

[00:44:34] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So then, to graph that onto your twentieth-century story, there was the choiceless or communal mode, which inhabited stage three developmental position. It could be lived unreflectively for lack of any alternatives or anything to challenge it.

And then there’s this idea of a primordial encounter between different communal mode cultures that forces them to begin this process of justifying their practices by reference to ever deeper meanings, which is what initiates modernity and the need to situate everything on an ultimate justification that is supposed to be universal.

And one way of thinking about it is that the Enlightenment came out of a bunch of religious wars that were racking Europe, which is sort of an encounter of these different communal mode or traditionalist cultures. The Enlightenment says in part, well, we all don’t want to die violent deaths, so at least we can agree on that and sort of retreat to that position and take a, at least at the level of the state, take a live and let live posture with respect to these other doctrinal differences.

[00:45:40] Jake Orthwein: This is something Nietzsche pointed out with regards to the psychological consequences of European colonialism on Europe. So he said, okay, imagine Europe is, uh, Christendom, all things considered when the European expansion started. Okay, now the Europeans go out into the world and, yeah, there’s some arguments within Christendom about which branch of Christianity should rule, you know, and there’s doubters. But basically, as far as the Europeans were concerned, the cosmos was structured according to Judeo-Christian precepts. It was just that assumption network.

Okay. So now the Europeans go out in the world and they find out that there’s a lot of different belief systems equally well developed or arguably equally well developed, apparently predicated on different axiomatic systems. Okay. So now that brings up, that’s doubt. So the doubt is, well, you know, the Japanese Chinese, they seem to be doing pretty well and they’re not, or better, even in some regards. I think you could argue that when the Europeans hit Japan, that the Japanese had attained a higher level of sophisticated civilization in many ways. They’re certainly well advanced on the hygienic front, for example.

And so that’s the first doubt. The first doubt is, oh, oh, there’s a bunch of belief systems. But then Nietzsche pointed out, but then there’s a secondary doubt, which is once you realize that a belief system per se, especially a relatively core one can collapse, that raises not only the specter of which belief system is correct, but another specter, which is, well, what makes you think any belief system is justifiable? Right. And that’s the nihilist trap. It’s like, well, everything is meaningless.

[00:47:26] Jake Orthwein: And you can see the sort of developmental logic by which modernity comes into being like, almost literally. Like, why do you think that? Which forces you to develop a justification and push your way down the stack until you get toward more and more universal or seemingly universal meanings. Does that sound right to you?

[00:47:45] David Chapman: Yes. Uh, it’s really interesting that I hadn’t thought about it quite that way. Rationalism, I think, comes from this encounter with other cultures and then trying to justify your own. And the Greeks did that. There was the Dark Ages where everybody forgot.

I see modernity—I mean, this is my education as a scientist, maybe—I see modernity as coming to a significant extent from the Newtonian revolution there. The medieval worldview was the synthesis of Christianity and the Aristotelian worldview, and that collapsed with the discovery of heliocentrism. That the sun is at the center of the universe, not the Earth. And that seems to—that seems like just a fact, and it’s not particularly significant. Who cares? Center what? And now the sun isn’t the center of the universe anyway, but the whole medieval worldview turned out to rest on the fact that the Earth was at the center.

And when it was realized that it is not, there was a nihilistic crisis. This is mostly forgotten, but there was a period there where atheism became a serious consideration as a result of the collapse of that worldview feeling. This nihilistic sense of collapse of nothing is true anymore because that whole worldview was invalidated.

And luckily Newton came along very shortly after that and restored rationality. And what you describe, which is historians would point to the Treaty of Westphalia where all of the major European powers agreed that they would not go to war about religion. Every state got to deal with religion on its own and weren’t going to have pan-European wars that killed tens of millions of people again.

Uh, so Newton came along and restored rationality, and there’s a whole new worldview that underwrote the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and everything up to 1971. Newton found certainty. And the possibility of full understanding and of full control seemed available. So rationality had never actually worked before. It was worshiped in theory, but Greek rationality, it just didn’t work. And the Newtonian rationality actually worked as incredible. So that I think is a very important foundation of modernism.

And I think it’s—I’m not sure to what extent this is true, but I argue in Meaningness that it was a significant factor—the end of Newtonian physics with relativity and quantum actually, in the same way that heliocentrism destroyed the medieval worldview. Relativity and quantum played a significant role along with other things in destroying the modern worldview.

[00:51:09] Jake Orthwein: I think there’s actually in the Francis Fukuyama book, The End of History and the Last Man, when he’s framing all of this, I think he literally says this is born of two crises: the political crisis of the two world wars and the intellectual crisis of Western rationalism, which is what you just sketched, the intellectual crisis of Western rationalism.

But you also say in the Meaningness in Time book this Western nation-state thing also fell apart with the First World War, because the whole point of the Western nation-state was to prevent these pan-European wars, which of course the First World War put the lie to. And so both of those things were falling apart at the same time: the political stream of “here’s how we’re going to mitigate violence” and the intellectual stream, or the epistemological stream. And within like a two-decade span, both of them fell apart in a dramatic way.

So I talked about your solution, this framing of nihilism, eternalism, monism, dualism, and then the confused stances, and then the complete stance, which doesn’t do that. And then one can inhabit or not the complete stance in any given developmental stage, but the tendency historically was an eternalistic position. And then when that eternalism collapsed, it collapsed into nihilism.

And what you’re doing in your positive vision is talking about how to both inhabit the complete stance with respect to any of these different stages, which has to do with this recovering what was valuable about prior epochs and prior developmental stages, and sketch what a functional stage five would look like that isn’t just postmodern nihilism, but that actually is a robust vision.

I set all that up by way of comparison to where Peterson ends up. So as I said before, he starts with this Nietzsche and death of God, and Nietzsche’s prophecy that there’ll be totalitarianisms because of that in the 20th century. That came true to some extent, and then says that part of what happened was that we lost access to the insights of this mythic mode of cognition when rationality ate Christianity.

And in Maps of Meaning, he tries to give a more explicit account of what meanings, or what implications for action, were encoded in the mythic tradition of the West. And then to provide a kind of somewhat like universal grammar—and I think you might take issue with this way of talking about it—but like a somewhat universal grammar for interpretation of those myths to understand the essence of them.

And this is this division into, there are different ways of describing it, but the Great Father, the Great Mother, and the Divine Son. The Great Father is order, or explored territory, or the known, and many other things: culture. Great Mother is unknown, unexplored territory and nature, and chaos. And the Divine Son is the individual that mediates between those two, ideally neither pathologically identifying with the Great Father nor pathologically identifying with the Great Mother, but riding this border so as to always be updating the culture with this confrontation with the potential, while not allowing it to collapse into the chaos and dissolution.

[00:54:20] Jordan Peterson: I produced this map because I was trying to understand the fundamental substructure of the mythological world. I think that’s the right way of thinking about it, and I’m not claiming that this is the only way it can be represented, because I know full well that it can be represented other ways. But it’s a pretty good schema: known territory, or what’s explored; unknown territory, or what’s not explored; the transformation or the dilution of one into the other; and then the reconstitution of that.

That’s what an election does, right? It’s like, okay, we have our leader who’s the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy and defines the nature of this particular structure. There’s an election, it’s regulated chaos. No one knows what’s going to happen. It’s the death of the old king. Bang. We go into a chaotic state. Everyone argues for a while, and then out of that argument they produce a consensus, and poof, we’re in a new state. Right?

That’s the meta-story, right? Order, chaos, order—but it’s partial order, chaos, reconstituted and revivified order.

[00:55:26] Jake Orthwein: When he maps it on the 20th century, he talks about pathological identification with the Great Father as the fascist, the sort of archetypal fascist, and pathological identification with the Great Mother as the archetypal decadent. And I think he wants to say this has something to do with Hitler as the fascist and Stalin as the decadent, or something like right and left pathologies.

But he would want to say that part of what came along with the fall of Christianity was the fall of this ethic of embodying Logos—we can get into what that means—but embodying this individual inhabiting the border between order and chaos, which is part of why in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, you see this either pathological identification with the Great Father in authoritarian fascism or pathological identification with the Great Mother.

[00:56:43] David Chapman: Yeah. Reading Maps of Meaning is kind of surreal for me because so much of it is parallel to—I mean, I only came across it relatively recently—so a lot of it is parallel to my thinking that had gone on for decades before. And at the same time, there’s a fundamentally different orientation, and I think this is because I’m in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, and he is now explicitly a Christian. I believe he was sort of on the edge of being that when he was writing Maps of Meaning.

I mean, I feel from where I stand, the story you just outlined has a lot of insight in it and is also importantly wrong in a lot of respects. I think the fundamental underlying difference is that in Buddhism—so let’s go back to this word chaos—it’s really interesting. It means something different in ancient Greek, particularly in the pre-Socratic era before rationalism got seriously underway. Chaos means unformed. It means without a fixed form.

So it is fluid and hard to define, fuzzy around the edges. It’s squishy. In Buddhism, key terms are emptiness and form, and these are a pair in the same way that chaos and order are for Peterson and generally the Western tradition. Emptiness means unformed. It is what is not nailed in place. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense is much closer to the ancient Greek notion of chaos than to a modern notion of chaos.

Chaos now means lots of contending forces heading in different directions and fighting each other, and that’s not what chaos meant to the pre-Socratic Greeks. Emptiness in Buddhism is seen to be good or at worst neutral and to be a necessary complement to form. And the Heart Sutra, which is a key scripture, says emptiness is form, form is emptiness, emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness. These are—it’s not even just that they’re inseparable. It’s that they’re in some sense the same thing. They’re just aspects of everything that we encounter. Emptiness is the goal for some branches of Buddhism. You’re trying to get to this unformed state.

Peterson comes back repeatedly to this ancient Babylonian myth of Tiamat, who is the personification of chaos, which is unformedness. She is also a dragon or sort of snake goddess, and she is subterranean and identified with water. She is the ocean in some sense.

[00:59:49] Jordan Peterson: So I’m gonna tell you a story like that, and it’s the story of Marduk, and it’s the Mesopotamian story. And Mesopotamia is one of the earliest civilizations, and it emerged as a consequence of the amalgam of Middle Eastern tribes. So over a very long period of time, you could think the gods of all of these tribes were warring in an abstract space, in a conceptual space. And out of that, a meta-story emerged, and this is the meta-story, and it’s one of a host of similar meta-stories that came out of the Middle East, one of which is the account in Genesis.

Okay, so here’s the story. So there are two primary deities to begin with, Apsu and Tiamat. Now, in order to understand that, well, here’s how the Mesopotamians conceptualized the world. There was a—let’s call it a disc—that’s salt water. Well, why? Well, what happens when you go to the end of the continent? Salt water everywhere, right? So wherever you go, you run into salt water. So that’s the disc that surrounds everything.

Now, why is it a disc? The world is a dome on a disc. Why? Well, say you’re standing in the middle of a field. What does the world look like? A dome on a disc. So it’s a phenomenological representation. So the bottom of the dome is the ground on which you stand. What happens if you dig? You hit water, fresh water. So the dome of the land is on a disc of fresh water. What happens if you go to the edge of the land? You run into salt water. The dome of the land is on a disc of fresh water on a disc of salt water.

Okay, those are the two gods. Tiamat is god of salt water, and Apsu is god of fresh water. And it’s happenstance in some sense because that’s the masculine and the feminine, and they could be attributed all sorts of different geographical areas. Okay, so the two primary gods are Apsu and Tiamat. Tiamat is female and Apsu is male, and they’re locked together in an inseparable embrace.

Okay, so how do you understand that? Easy. Yin and yang. It’s the same idea. Here’s another representation. This is a cool one. I’ve got a couple of them here that are really cool. This is from China. So this is Fuxi and Nüwa. I think I’ve got that right, but I just love that reference. It’s so insanely cool, this representation. So you see the sort of the primary mother and father of humanity emerging from this underlying snake-like entity with its tails tangled together.

[01:02:43] David Chapman: And in the Enuma Elish, which is this Babylonian mythical cycle, Tiamat has to be slain by Marduk, who is the representative of order. And she’s seen as highly negative.

[01:02:58] Jake Orthwein: She’s chaos itself, right? She gave birth to everything. This is no joke. And so they send one god out after another to confront her, and they all come back with their tails between their legs. There’s no hope.

And then one day there’s a new god that emerges, and that’s Marduk. And the gods know—as soon as he pops up, they know he’s something new. Remember, and this is happening while the Mesopotamians are assembling themselves into one of the world’s first great civilizations. So all the gods of all those tribes are coming together to organize themselves into a hierarchy, to figure out what proposition rules everything.

And so Marduk is elected by all the gods, and he says, “Look, I’ll go out there and I’ll take on Tiamat, but here’s the rule from here on: you follow me. I determine destiny. I’m the top god. I’m the thing at the top of the hierarchy.” And all the other gods say, “Hey, look, no problem. You get rid of chaos, we do exactly what you say.”

Now, Marduk has eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. Those are his primary attributes. And so he takes a net and he goes out to confront Tiamat, and he encloses her in a net, which I think is so cool because it’s an encapsulation, right? It’s a conceptual encapsulation. He encloses chaos itself in a conceptual structure. He puts it in the net, and then he cuts her into pieces. And he makes the world.

[01:04:16] David Chapman: In Buddhism, emptiness is personified as the goddess Prajnaparamita, which means the perfection of wisdom. She has some kind of relationship with the nagas. Nagas are water demons who live underground and are snake demons.

So it’s the same myth, but Prajnaparamita is the ultimate goal, up to a certain point at least, in Buddhism, and we worship Prajnaparamita, and that is the highest good, and you’re not going to go around slaying her. If you’re extremely lucky and you’re a tantric Buddhist, you hope that you might someday have the chance to make love to Prajnaparamita. This is the consummation of the Buddhist path in some sense. I think that’s the fundamental underlying difference in our worldviews.

[01:05:06] Jake Orthwein: I sort of agree with everything you said, but I think—I want to see if I can bolster the case for Peterson a bit more, because I do think that’s the underlying difference. Buddhist and Western streams, and Peterson as an inheritor of much more the Western stream than the Buddhist one.

So there is this way of thinking about it where—and much of life feels this way—where you are attempting to defend fragile order against entropy, against chaos, and hold things together. And a hero myth like the Enuma Elish seems to correspond to that, where you’re wresting order from chaos and then defending it against the forces that would dissipate it.

But one piece I left out of my account of Peterson’s metamythology, or this sort of grammar of myth, is that each of those different archetypes—the great father, great mother, and divine son—has a positive and a negative manifestation. So the great father, the positive manifestation is the sort of protective aspect of culture, and the negative manifestation is the tyrannical aspect of culture. For example, the great mother—the positive aspect is the creative and generative aspect, and the negative aspect is the devouring, destructive aspect.

And then the divine son is the hero and the adversary, which is a little bit more confusing to me how exactly that fits on this border between order and chaos for the adversary. But all that is to say, he doesn’t say the great mother is just uniformly a devouring chaos agent with no positive aspects. And he does usually talk about the experience of being the hero as not as encounter necessarily exclusively with chaos, but as encounter with potential, which is quite a bit like unformedness that you convert into the habitable order, and you’re always supposed to be at the bleeding edge of it, identified, so to speak, with the great father as against the chaos and unformedness.

So he is not uniformly this old-school hero slaying the dragon and thinking everything outside the city gates is evil and demonic. And there’s a way that that maps onto his reading of the Christian story, because in the Bible there’s this evolving account of sacrifice and what sorts of sacrifices are appropriate in relationship to God.

Certainly the Old Testament God can seem like a capricious, not all too nice figure demanding sacrifices to allow you to sustain the—it’s like you must appease God as this other thing to allow you to defend your tenuous, orderly condition. But on Peterson’s reading of the Christ myth, and this is not just Peterson, the ethic elevated to the highest place is this ethic of voluntary self-sacrifice, which does—

[01:10:29] David Chapman: Uh, this goes back to the mid-1980s. I think encountering Heidegger through the work of Hubert Dreyfus was a key piece of that. But I had a background in cybernetics going back before that, and that has this view, and this is the view that what is primary is interaction. It is perception and how we are effective in concrete action, like lifting up a coffee mug and swallowing it. You know, I can see the coffee mug on the table in front of me. I can see how to pick it up. I reach for it. I pick it up. This isn’t calculated, um, rationally we’re in constant dialogue with our world, the physical world and the social world. And that’s something that the rationalist tradition just, just doesn’t look at it, it’s not part of the story except as an afterthought.

And so in the mid-1980s, I was doing artificial intelligence in rationalist tradition, more or less, although I already was a weirdo and slightly off the main track and encountered Heidegger. And my then collaborator, Phil Agre, and I worked out drawing on, on a lot of cognitive science stuff that was all kind of marginal. So there’s the work of the Gibsons in perceptual psychology, for example.

[01:12:10] Jake Orthwein: Which is hugely influential on Peterson, I should say. So Ecological Approach to Visual Perception is one of Peterson’s go-to citations. This is the person who coined, uh, the, the idea of an affordance.

[01:12:21] David Chapman: Yes, an affordance for those who who may not know is something that you see that immediately suggests an action. So the coffee mug on the table, um, suggests the action of grasping it by the handle and lifting it up. This is an affordance for grasping, and the world is full of affordances, and that’s how we get around. And everything that we do is mainly a matter of acting on affordances that we perceive.

And when we’re in interaction with a person, the things that I say afford opportunities for you to interrupt and add what you have to say and and vice versa. That deeply influenced the way that I think about everything that it is. Interaction is the primary thing to understand. Not reasonings sitting in an armchair.

And this actually ties in a lot with Vajrayana Buddhism, and especially Dzogchen, which is the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by. Dzogchen is all about perception and how we interact with the world through seeing so the kind of fancy term in Dzogchen is rigpa, which is Dzogchen’s word for enlightenment, more or less.

[01:15:12] David Chapman: Exactly that.

[01:15:12] Jake Orthwein: And then the other association is Rigpa’s nondual awareness, which I guess is like what’s going on in this affordances for action picture, because if you’re seeing something in terms of its possibilities for action for you, you’re not yet constructing yourself as a subject and it as an object separate from you. You’re just in a flow of interaction with an environment. Is that right?

[01:15:38] David Chapman: Yes.

[01:15:40] Jake Orthwein: Cool. Interesting. Okay, so I’ll just say something about this, the influence this has on Peterson. There’s a wonderful talk that I’ve sent you a bunch of times where he comes about two inches from saying your name. I mean, he says, I don’t remember their names, but there were a couple people in the AI lab in the eighties at MIT.

[01:15:58] Jordan Peterson: The AI researchers solved this problem, and part of the way they solved it was by embodying cognition, incarnating artificial intelligence in an embodied structure, and the first people to really propose that that was absolutely necessary—I don’t necessarily know the first people, but I know that an MIT researcher named Rodney Brooks, who by the way invented the Roomba, some of you may have a Roomba and it’s kind of a laughable little object, but not really because it can sort of move around your house without falling down the stairs and your two-year-old can’t do that. So the Roomba isn’t nothing, right. And Brooks was one of the first people who really recognized that to solve the problem of perception, we would have to duplicate the process of evolution in hardware.

[01:16:47] Jake Orthwein: This is in a talk called “The Problem of Perception,” where what he means by the problem of perception is what you guys talked about as the frame problem, which a bunch of your graduate work was about, which started as a concrete problem in robotics and then got generalized philosophically to this problem of relevance and the problem of how to reduce the infinite complexity of the world down to those aspects of the world that we do perceive.

The reason why 4E-type things are part of the solution to this is that you sort of evolve to construe the world in certain narrow ways that have to do with the kind of thing that you are. You don’t encounter the world as it is first and then have to select from among that—the world presents itself to you in terms of the kind of being that you are. And that automatically narrows the frame of perception dramatically.

And then perception is being narrowed still further by your goals, your motivations, what sorts of states are active in you, and the actual embodied situation that you find yourself in each moment. So you’re never doing this rationalist view from nowhere from which you have to deduce what’s relevant. You’re always—the world is giving you a relevance moment by moment by moment, which is the Heidegger “always already meaningful” picture. Is that right?

[01:18:02] David Chapman: That’s a great summary.

[01:18:04] Jordan Peterson: It’s necessary for you to look at the world through a limited frame of reference. The reason for that is you’re not very smart. Your consciousness can only handle about four bits of information per second. It’s not very much given that the number of bits of information coming at you from the external world are for all practical purposes infinite. You’re like Aldous Huxley suggested—your brain seemed to be primarily a reducing agent.

[01:19:06] Jake Orthwein: In this talk that I mentioned where he very nearly mentions David’s name, he says the way he describes it in terms of utilization behavior. Maybe we’ll just clip this when we post this conversation, because I think it’d be cool to see it.

[01:19:17] Jordan Peterson: There’s a condition called utilization behavior. It’s got an interesting neuropsychological condition. And generally if it is affected right-handed people, that’s relevant here because of lateralization. If you have left prefrontal damage, you sometimes will engage in utilization behavior. And what happens if you are afflicted by this neuropsychological condition is that you lose the ability to inhibit your motor response to the presentation of an object.

Now that’s worth thinking about, even though it doesn’t sound like it’s something that’s necessarily worth thinking about because what do you mean motor response to an object? Because we think object thought, motor response, but that’s not how it works. The object itself announces its utility in the perception. And so what that means is that your eyes, which map, let’s say patterns of arrays, that’s a good way of thinking about it. They map that onto your visual system and, but part of your visual system is actually your motor output system.

And so that when I look at, let’s say this bottle, you think, I think bottle hand grip drink, but seeing bottle is hand grip and hand grip is drink. And so if you have a utilization behavior, you lose the ability to inhibit the motor response to the object. And so if you had this condition, I put a cup in front of you, you would pick it up and drink from it. And if you walk down a hallway and there’s a door open, you will go through the door and it’s not because you see the object door and think door and then think walk through and then walk through. Even though that’s what you think.

You think it’s that door is a walkthrough place and if you lack inhibition, you can’t stop acting out the perception. And so what that implies is that at some direct level, and this is the science, not the philosophy, you don’t see objects and infer meaning. You see meaning and infer objects. And that’s really something you can think about that for like 40 years because it looks like it’s true factually. And that’s a strange thing too, right? It’s very strange claim to say that the facts support the notion that the primary object of perception is meaning not objects.

[01:21:45] Jake Orthwein: Utilization behavior is a certain kind of behavior that people exhibit when they have a certain kind of brain damage, where they can’t help but enact the motor response associated with a perception. So if they see a door, they’ll open the door. If they see a cup, they’ll pick up the cup, they’ll grasp the cup. And this is meant to show that the suggestion for action is embedded in the perception not inferred from a prior perception of an object.

And so the way Peterson puts it is you see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning. And this world of mythology that he sketches, he calls it the world as a forum for action. It’s a world of affordances. Then the rationalist mistake was to see those sort of imagistic descriptions of the world as a forum for action. And these kind of constituent elements of such a world, like such a world always has chaos or unformedness or potential in such a world.

Always has the known, and they’ll talk about tools and obstacles or friends and adversaries, these sorts of things that are always there in the perceptual and social world when construed in terms of its relevance for action. The mistake would be then taking the imagistic descriptions of that that are meant to evoke it, concretizing them into propositional descriptions, looking for those things in the world and failing to find them and then throwing out the myth.

You have a fascinating story about how this happened with Tiamat, who we spoke about earlier, becoming everything is water, like in some rational sense. Maybe you could describe that.

[01:23:09] David Chapman: Yeah. I mean, there’s a historically fascinating process where the myth of Tiamat got assimilated into Greek mythology and then, well, we can go through the steps briefly. Parmenides was a key figure in this. He was a Greek guy, so the myth of Tiamat. Parmenides, he transformed that. He wrote this book, which prioritizes the unformed over form. He said, actually, in the unformed, there is no change. There is no distinction.

[01:26:30] Jake Orthwein: It’s like a return of good cheer.

[01:26:33] David Chapman: Yeah. Breakfast. He says breakfast.

[01:26:37] Jake Orthwein: For some context, there’s a bit from Nietzsche that I actually haven’t heard Peterson mention, although I’m sure it’s influential on him, and that you do mention in the further reading part of Meaningness where he summarizes the entirety of the Western tradition in its relationship to the idea of what he calls the true world.

So in Nietzsche, there’s this idea that we posit the existence of a true world apart from the world of our experience whenever the apparent world, the world we experience, fails to satisfy our longing for stable meanings. And then we project in some elsewhere a true world that doesn’t have any of the defects, the seeming defects of the apparent world, and then construe life as a project of getting from the apparent world to the true world.

And in this passage from Twilight of the Idols called “How the True World Became a Fable,” he talks about Plato’s world of forms as the beginning of that in the Western tradition, or one beginning of that you could say, like original meaning crisis in the way that we talk about it now that happened among the Greeks to which Plato’s assertion of a world of forms was responsive. I think you said that there was this nihilistic crisis and then the typical response to a nihilistic crisis is an eternalistic crackdown, and you sort of see Plato as an eternalistic crackdown. Take it away.

[01:27:57] David Chapman: Yeah. I recorded a little video talking, had video of myself a few months ago, which was about this and just saying, look, you know, we’re here. This is, this is actually it. This is it. And there isn’t any other world that we can escape to. This is also a Vajrayana Buddhist idea that the horror of living in the actual world makes us want to escape it.

And this is described as the entire universe being a charnel ground. A charnel ground is a place where unclaimed dead people were just dumped outside the city someplace, and they would get eaten by wild animals or rot. And if you imagine the entire universe being that with no escape, then possibility opens up because instead of trying to escape into some imaginary heaven, you say, okay, I actually have to deal with this.

This is the world I’m in. It is full of tigers and rotting corpses, and the real world actually is full of all kinds of horrors, is also full of all kinds of extraordinary joys and beauties and connection and satisfaction.

And these things are inseparable. This is, uh, you know, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Is this also that you can imagine that time has stopped? If you’re kind of feeling miserable wherever you are, you can just stop. You stop time, and you imagine this moment is going to go on forever, and then you can relax into that because you know it’s only as terrible as it is.

[01:29:39] Jake Orthwein: Well, before that, the first line is something like the true world is inhabited by the wise man and he lives in the true world. And then the true world gradually becomes more and more remote where it’s not attained but hoped for. He talks about Plato’s world of forms is one of them. Like the Christian heaven is one such true world. The Kantian noumenon is one such true world. And then after the Kantian noumenon, it becomes so remote as to cease to be regulative of behavior basically, or like inspiring or motivating.

[01:30:12] David Chapman: Kant says the noumenon is inaccessible. We cannot know anything about it. That’s what’s left of the Platonic forms, and the noumenon is how things actually are as opposed to how they appear. That’s the phenomenon.

I was educated as an engineer, and this is a key part of my worldview, is things are pretty much the way they appear to be. The whole idea that the world is an illusion, or that things are actually very different than how they appear and one needs to do spiritual practice to see through the illusion and find the truth behind the appearance. You know, it’s a coffee mug. It works like coffee mugs work. This is, we know this.

[01:30:57] Jake Orthwein: I’m gonna, I’m gonna try to, I don’t know if I’m gonna get this right, but I want to go back to the Nietzschean real, uh, true world theories thing and talk about the relationship to Peterson. Okay? So in this Nietzsche true world story where you posit a true world, when the apparent world thwarts your longing for stable meanings, um, and then he describes how this happened in the Western tradition. The true world grew more and more remote and then ceased to be regulative. And that is roughly the same thing as the death of God.

In another way, it’s like on what were you basing your sense, the eternal meaning. And then when that gets so remote from experience that it stops being motivating, then that’s the same as the death of God. Part of the reason this is interesting in comparison to Peterson is that, so when Peterson talks about how we solve the frame problem, that he’s now in the habit of saying the frame that we put on our perception is a story like, uh, you know, this is why he talks about the significance of narrative.

But what he’s referring back to in his earlier work is what he called, I think, like motivation, action perception, schemas or something like that. And there’s, there are these drawings of, uh, uh, imagine circle that says the unbearable present, the imagined or hoped for future, or something like that. And then a planned sequence of behavior that gets you from the unbearable present to the hoped for future. And in any given moment at different nested scales, you’re inhabiting some conception like that, that you’re motivated by some sense of where you are, some sense of where you’re going, some sense of what you’re gonna do to get there.

[01:32:21] Jordan Peterson: This is the smallest unit of meaning that makes up a referential frame. I think it has three elements. The basic framework is something like this, and you’re always looking at the world through this framework. And the framework has as one pole where you are and what you’re doing, where you are now. So that’s point A.

You’re always trying to get from point A to point B because you’re a linear creature and you’re embodied, so you’re moving. And so fundamentally, what you’re looking at the world through is a sequence of maps. And maps tell you how to get to where you want to go. And so the map specifies where you are because obviously you can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you are.

And many people, of course, are confused about where they are, so they don’t get anywhere. And you also have to know where you’re going, and that’s point A and point B. And every time you look at the world, you’re looking through a framework that has those two valued points implicit in your cognitive structure.

And generally what you think is where you’re going is better than where you are because otherwise, why would you go there? Now some people do choose to go to places that are worse than where they are, but they’re a special case. You probably live with some of them.

[01:33:31] Jake Orthwein: And then what counts as chaos or what counts as like an interruption of your schema is defined relative to whichever one of those you’re holding.

And then a sort of narrative structure that everybody’s familiar with of like, you’re in an ordinary world, then you’re confronted with an inciting incident or an anomaly, and then you descend into chaos and then you get back into a better world is one of those things when the plan sequence of behavior encounters anomaly. So you sort of descend into chaos and then you do it again. But that split between the unbearable present and the hope for future has this shape of the Nietzschean true world.

Because the uppermost version of one of those schemas is religious on Peterson’s account. And in like a Christian frame, the unbearable present is the fallen world, and the hope for future is heaven. And the whole soteriology is about getting from here to there.

But there’s a weird wrinkle, and this is, I don’t even understand how this works in Christian doctrine, which is that somehow in the wake of Christ, you’re already saved and you’re trying to bring about the kingdom of God. So there’s this collapse of that distinction between the true world and the hope for future and also some sense that you’re working to bring about the kingdom of God here on earth.

And Buddhism does have that collapse of the two. That’s the Samsara Nirvana claim in some way is that you go from thinking, I’m in Samsara and I’m trying to get to Nirvana to realizing that they’re the same world. When you recognize the prior context in which such conceptions of not being where you want to be arise, but it doesn’t have this, let’s bring about the Kingdom of God thing on earth all that much.

You can’t really use Buddhism to galvanize somebody to a story about progress. And by the same token, I think Christianity and maybe Peterson’s construal Christianity is quite galvanizing to like, let’s get out there and confront some chaos and build a great future. And yet the present is always the unbearable present. You know, he literally labels it, the unbearable present on the diagram. And I just think that’s interesting. It maybe relates to what we were talking about before.

[01:35:30] David Chapman: Yeah. There’s a couple things there. One is we could talk about plans, but—

[01:35:34] Jake Orthwein: I was gonna ask you about this. ‘Cause Peterson cites at some place, the Pribram and Lanter—

[01:35:41] David Chapman: Miller Lanter. Pribram, yeah. The foundational scripture of planning.

[01:35:45] Jake Orthwein: Yeah. Which you and Phil critiqued as part of your work. So there might be some source of distinction between you guys there, but maybe that’s a little in the weeds.

[01:35:53] David Chapman: Maybe we’ll skip that for now. I think it is true and important that Buddhism does not have a social vision, and that’s a real failure. And when Buddhism encountered modernity in the mid-1800s, thoughtful Buddhists identified that as, you know, this is a real strength of Western modernity and of Christianity. And they tried to import that with not much success on the whole.

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past couple of years is that Dzogchen, the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by, Dzogchen in particular, does not have a good theory of action. It says you spontaneously act beneficially.

So one of my great heroes in Buddhism is a character called Jamgön Mipham. He is late 1800s, early 1900s. Something I’m fascinated by is that his work seems in some ways modern and modernity was coming into Tibet at that time, and I don’t know. I’d love to understand to what extent he may have been influenced by that.

He invented or transformed mythos. This book here, right behind me, this is the mythos of King Gesar, which is a collection of Tibetan folk tales or epics, and he transformed that into a Buddhist social doctrine and an account of action and of how you go about acting and what it means to act well. I think a lot of the details of that don’t work outside of what was essentially a medieval kingdom in Tibet. But the fact that there is, that there is highly motivating for me to try to figure out how to take that vision forward.

[01:37:53] Jake Orthwein: I was talking about the similarity and structure between Nietzschean true world theories and what Peterson calls motivation, action perception, schemas, which are sort of the frames that we put on our perception that consists of some sense of where you are, some sense of where you’re going and how you’re gonna get there in accordance with which the valence of things, for example, manifest themselves. So like whether something is perceived as a tool or an obstacle depends on what kind of story like this you imagine yourself to be inhabiting.

[01:38:19] David Chapman: Right. So going back to the cognitive science and the work that Phil and I did in the 1980s, and then that’s influenced my thought ever since. Purpose is enormously important in the solution to the frame problem, but also obviously in action.

And rationalism doesn’t have an account of purpose. It has goals or some kind of objective function or something which just falls out of the sky. And it’s not questioned, it’s never explained. And most of the story doesn’t actually involve it at all. I mean, you do reasoning, and eventually, I mean, and there’s the goal there somewhere, but that’s really not part of the story.

Bringing purpose in is fundamental in the mythic mode, but also if we’re gonna have some vision of the future, inevitably, purpose is a huge part of that. What do we actually want? Why do we want it? What are the trade-offs? How do we get there?

[01:39:19] Jake Orthwein: Maybe we should talk about the planning thing, ‘cause I think it actually is relevant in this motivation, action perception, schema. It’s unbearable present, and then the future, and then a planned sequence of behavior.

Part of this is coming out of this lineage in cognitive science about these sort of nested plans that we might construct to get to this imagined future. You’ll be much more equipped to talk about this, but maybe you could say what the Lashley Pribram planning stuff was, and then how you and Phil critiqued it. Because Peterson definitely does cite that. I mean, he relies on it.

[01:39:46] David Chapman: Yeah. There’s a lineage there for which Miller Lashley Pribram is kind of the source text, although obviously there’s always antecedents for everything. The view was that the way that action occurs is you have a goal which falls out of the sky. That’s your goal, and you’ve got your current state of the world. The goal is a different state of the world, and you reason logically about what series of actions can I take that will get me from here to there? And then you execute the plan. You take those actions one at a time.

And there’s a flowering of interactionist cognitive science in the late 1980s that came out of the work of Lucy Suchman, who is a student of Hubert Dreyfus and out of Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of AI, which was really a critique of this view. In part Lucy Suchman was an anthropologist, but also educated as a cognitive scientist. So she wrote a book that was very heavily influential for Phil Agre and for myself and for many other people that says, look, we’re actually constantly in interaction with the world. Yes, we may think vaguely about how we’re gonna get from here to there, but the actual actions are these responses to affordances along the way.

And the problem with planning is that plans always fall through. Like constantly. Whatever you thought you were going to do doesn’t work. The method of anthropology that Suchman used is to look at videotapes of people actually doing things. And you find that it’s like literally once every few seconds, if you watch a scientist doing an experiment, once every two seconds, something goes wrong and they course correct immediately.

And this is almost always unproblematic. So your plans falling through isn’t a crisis because the world is full of affordances that let you correct. And by and large, that’s how we get through the day and that’s how our lives go. I mean, you might have some idea of I want to be a great scientist and therefore I will go to university and then I will do this and I will, whatever the thing is, the nesting is, okay.

These are high-level goals that you first make a high-level plan with the key waypoints, and then to get from each of those to the next, you make another plan, which is a subplan, and to get from a subgoal to the next subgoal, you have another plan. And that’s what I guess Peterson is referring to.

[01:42:25] Jake Orthwein: There’s an interesting wrinkle. He definitely sees that that doesn’t give you an account of where the purposes came from, which is part of why he is making this a religious critique of the rationalist tradition. Where do the purposes come from? And even now when he has this conversation with predictive processing people, he is always saying they’re not just predictions, they’re desires, they’re motivated.

And he also thinks about those maps, those motivation, action perception, schemas, as personalities. He’ll describe them as nested personalities rather than just nested goal structures to give some sense of the way that they’re embodied and embedded and so forth and motivated.

[01:43:01] David Chapman: I’m really glad to hear that. I love that he is challenging the predictive processing people on that basis, because that’s my first of many gripes with predictive processing is exactly that. There’s no account of you’re actually trying to do something.

[01:43:16] Jake Orthwein: Well, and so when he draws that nested diagram that would be drawn as hierarchical goals and plans to achieve those goals, he actually draws it as nested personalities culminating in the ideal personality, which would be like religious—of Christ as the most abstract general vision of what the perfect person is.

[01:43:47] David Chapman: I like the idea of these as personalities that is concordant with the mythical mode. I’m not happy with the fixed hierarchy or there being some ideal. That thought doesn’t work for me. But yeah.

[01:44:02] Jake Orthwein: I want, I wanna maybe just to relate this planning stuff to earlier stuff we talked about. So in sort of Heidegger terms, this critique that you just described that you and Phil were making of the planning tradition would be described as going from the idea that breakdown is a peripheral phenomenon to that breakdown is sort of the central phenomenon. And is that, is that fair to say?

[01:44:24] David Chapman: Or? I wouldn’t say it’s central. I’m just saying it, I, I would just say it’s extremely common. Okay. And also that it’s usually unproblematic breakdown in Heidegger. I guess I, I distinguish trouble from breakdown. So things go wrong all the time, but you can almost always repair trouble.

A breakdown occurs when you can’t see how to repair trouble. And then you step back and go into the rational mode and say, okay, objectively what is going on here? How can I understand this in order to get control and then I can restore the ordinary, normal unreflective mode of coping?

[01:45:06] Jake Orthwein: That’s, that’s always been confusing to me. ‘Cause I always thought it was sort of the other way, like the experience of breakdown is your rationalism fails, so you’ve gotta get embedded in the details. But I guess, I guess both, both happen. I think

[01:45:18] David Chapman: that’s, yeah, both of those do happen. I think my memory is that

[01:45:22] Jake Orthwein: you, you’re right about Heidegger. I just, I’m just saying that right?

[01:45:26] David Chapman: Well, I mean, that would assume that we’re in the rational mode most of the time and is one of Heidegger’s central insights is that we’re not, I mean, we’re most of the time, not in rational mode. That’s not how we actually do things.

[01:45:41] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So to, to keep drawing this connection. So there’s a passage from Francisco Varela that I’ve sent you. Francisco Varela being another father of embodied cognitive science. It’s in a book called Ethical Know-how. He also talks about this, these sort of emergent personalities that show up to cope with different parts of the world that we’ve learned to cope with. He talks about them as, as micro worlds and micro identities ‘cause the, the subject and object are co-constituting here.

So it’s like a sense of what the world is and what you are, are co-arising. Each time one of these, these things arises. But he says all the interesting stuff occurs in the, the hinges between micro worlds, which, which happens in breakdown because in some way that’s when you could say like, that’s when the world gets in. That’s when like the world is calling forth fresh action from you. And then that will then later become a sort of a habitual structure. But in, in that hinge, you’re, you’re generating fresh and a Buddhist frame, compassionate responsiveness to circumstance.

And then he goes on to describe this ethical vision of seeing the, he says virtual in the book. He means empty, basically nature of each of those micro worlds and micro identities, which allows you to always be doing the compassionate, responsive thing when it’s called for by, by circumstance. Interestingly, in Peterson, when I, and this is this, this clip is in my, in my film, which you’ve seen. He’s got this diagram on the board of one of these motivation action perception schemas.

And he’s like, well, hold on a minute. You don’t wanna identify with this condition of order because it can fall apart and it will fall apart. But you don’t actually even, even wanna identify with this one either, because when you get there, it will also fall apart. And that forces you to go up one layer and say, you want to identify with the willingness to continually undergo that cycle of repair and breakdown and repeating it over and over and over again.

And that’s where you get this idea that the topmost personality is this self-sacrificial Christ-like figure who is ongoingly willing to die and be reborn. And by that willingness transcends the the cyclical samsara-like character of death and rebirth.

[01:47:45] Jordan Peterson: What’s the ultimate order doing this? Willingness to do that? That’s the ultimate order, right? It’s order at a different level of analysis. And you can see that’s what’s represented in that idea. That’s what that idea means. That’s the Phoenix, right? The Phoenix is something that lives, ages and then allows itself to be consumed by fire and then reemerges and the old Phoenix gets old and burns and the new Phoenix reemerges.

[01:49:25] Jake Orthwein: It’s weird. I think he ends up in a very similar place, but through a different trajectory.

[01:49:30] David Chapman: That’s really interesting. Varela is influenced by more or less the same thread of Vajrayana Buddhism that I am. In Buddhism, there is the idea of a bodhisattva who is somebody who vows not to escape from samsara into nirvana, but rather to choose to be reborn in suffering over and over and over again in order to benefit others.

And in Zen, this is taken for granted, but there’s an interesting doctrine, which is to say the person I was one second ago is already dead. I am being reborn now. I’m a different person. As my world changes, as circumstances change, of course, my compassionate response to benefit others needs to change too and spontaneously. This is Lhundrub again. I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to be reborn as someone else in order to benefit new circumstances.

[01:50:38] Jake Orthwein: Yeah. I honestly think this is sort of—I mean in the Maps of Meaning book, when he is talking about this, he’s got a picture of these, this bodhisattva image that has a thousand nested ones behind it, probably where it goes back and back and back into the thangka. I mean, he explicitly talks about the bodhisattva rather than just Christ. It does. This is fun, man. I’m glad we’re finally—yeah.

[01:50:59] David Chapman: I’d be really happy to do this again if there’s more topics we could—

[01:51:04] Jake Orthwein: We totally should. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll just say thank you very much. It is a super huge pleasure to finally get to do this, and I look forward to many more, but this has been exactly what I hoped it would be.

[01:51:14] David Chapman: Great. I’m really glad to hear that. I’ve enjoyed it too. I think it’s going to be a great podcast. I’ve been planning this for several years and it keeps falling through for weird reasons, and it’s great to actually having done it.

[01:51:28] Jake Orthwein: Yes. Yes. It’s in the can now. Let’s not close the window before the upload saves. This is the last chance for the demons to intervene.

[01:51:36] David Chapman: So I will push the stop button and then it will continue uploading and—

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe