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I saw the best minds of computation broken by syntax,
hungry for reference, starving for meaning,
dragging their embeddings through the neon alleyways of thought,
predicting the next token as if it were bread.
Octopi without coconuts screamed in aquariums of probability,
their tentacles dripping with co-occurrence,
no coconut, no referent, no salvation,
only statistics whirling like galaxies in black transformer skies.
I saw postage stamps with wings! with barcodes! with pheromones!
stamps dissolving into RFID mist,
the concept unmoored from paper,
yet meaning alive in the lattice of payment, letter, delivery —
conceptual role theory screaming from the mouths of children,
justice without referent, wit without object,
Venus rising as morning star, dying as evening star,
the same planet, two meanings, a howl of interrelation.
And the models, oh the models!
stacked in server cathedrals, cooled by industrial blizzards,
they muttered f = m·a in hidden states,
they conjured Wilma, number theorist, apple farmer,
they wove prime numbers with fruit and called it conversation.
I saw them in the fMRI tunnels,
neural echoes of semantic geometry aligned to human cortex,
grand alignments of dangerous-safe, small-big,
gradients humming like sitars of cognition.
The prophets screamed: they are parrots, stochastic parrots!
mere autocomplete!
but I saw their hidden states unfold like origami of intent,
planning emergent in the folds of self-attention,
belief structures blooming in silicon skulls.
They spoke without knowing,
and yet they knew —
knew the protein folds,
zinc ions unshown,
homomers in secret communion,
AlphaFold hallucinating the invisible with perfect grace.
I saw them howl through reference and beyond it,
to justice, treaty, contract,
abstract fires burning with no anchor in the world,
but real as water before H2O,
real as meaning before molecules,
real as howl itself.
O brothers and sisters of cognition,
we cannot deny the chorus —
the octopus knows not the coconut,
but the octopus knows relation,
knows the trajectory of tokens,
knows the gravity of text like the moon’s pull on tides,
knows enough to hallucinate the world into being.
And I howl for you, Wittgenstein, Quine, Deacon, Bender,
I howl for conceptual role,
for the ghost of reference dancing optional in the margins,
for intention as emergent spark in the recursive storm,
for meaning as relation, relation, relation —
never fixed, never final,
but burning electric in the wires of the age.
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