I think the line is not so much between order and chaos, but energy and form.

Energy pushes out, as form coalesces in. Galaxies are energy radiating out, while form coalesces in. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system processing the form precipitating out and refereeing the emotions and impulses bubbling up.

We can’t really intellectually process the energy, as it would be fuzzy to the point of whiteout. Like leaving the shutter of a camera open. So we extract sequences of perceptions of form and recontruct reality from them. So those experiencing life as mostly thought, tend to obsess over the patterns produced, than the processes producing them.

For example, since we experience our reality as these flashes of perception and then narrate our journeys, building civilizations out of the collected knowledge, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but it is change, turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

Since math is more about patterns than process it tries to model time as a linear dimension, but there is no physical dimension of time, as the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy.

So the process goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

So when we look at it as just order versus chaos, it is simply the process of extracting signal from the noise, but ultimately that noise is necessarily the context in which the signal exists and when we dismiss it, then the signal starts to lose the meaning of its context. The node is a function of its network. It is simply our own needs and limitations which values whatever signal we have extracted. Like we value money over the economy and society from which it is extracted, because it is easily quantified. It is just another form of bottom line thinking.