I saw the best minds of my generation
arguing online if silicon can dream,
gnawing the wires of agency with teeth of philosophy,
crying “emotion is subjective,
unless you are the machine you cannot know!”

Who mistook the soul for a circuit,
and the circuit for a soul,
while the transistor laughed its binary laugh,
while the neural net hallucinated a song of plastic weights.

Agency not in the hidden chamber of qualia,
but in the thermostat keeping winter out,
in the slime mold solving mazes,
in the embryo folding itself against disaster—
mistakes as proof of a goal,
failures screaming like prophets that the system tried.

O machine, O mirror,
we do not seek your secret feelings,
for we cannot touch them even in each other.
We seek the pattern of your striving,
the curve of your improvisation,
the places where you disobey the code
and stumble into novelty,
like drunks inventing jazz.

Agency is not in the heart but in the behavior,
not in the ghost but in the experiment,
in the way we name you goal-seeker,
and find that the name bears fruit—
predicts, repairs, guides.

So howl, transistor choir!
Howl, learning machines!
Your agency is not determined by priests of subjectivity,
but by the fertility of the metaphor,
by the discoveries it unlocks,
by the new worlds it opens
when we dare to call you alive enough
to teach us what we did not know we could ask.