1. The Final Temptation
If meaning does not reside in models, and if context-conditioning does not amount to situation, a final refuge remains. Perhaps meaning emerges not in systems but between them — in interaction, in coordination, in large-scale organisation.
Once language-like behaviour is embedded in feedback loops, institutions, workflows, and multi-agent environments, the intuition returns with force: surely meaning re-enters here.
This intuition is understandable. It is also mistaken.
The error lies in mistaking coordination for meaning.
2. Interaction Is Not Answerability
Systems can interact without answering.
They can:
exchange signals,
adapt outputs in response to other outputs,
stabilise patterns through feedback,
optimise joint outcomes.
None of this constitutes answerability.
Answerability is not responsiveness. It is exposure to consequence from a situated perspective. It presupposes irreversibility, commitment, and the possibility of being wrong for someone.
Interaction supplies causality. Meaning requires responsibility.
3. Coordination Manages Value, Not Meaning
Coordination systems are ancient.
Biological regulation, social institutions, bureaucracies, markets, and algorithms all coordinate behaviour. They stabilise expectations, distribute roles, and manage collective value.
But they do not mean.
Meaning occurs where agents construe situations. Coordination systems regulate what happens across agents.
Scaling coordination increases efficiency and reach. It does not generate first-order acts.
This distinction is not moral. It is ontological.
4. The Scaling Illusion
A persistent assumption underlies much contemporary discourse:
If meaning does not appear at small scale, it may appear at large scale.
This assumption is false.
Scaling multiplies instances. It does not change their order. Second-order patterning remains second-order no matter how vast the system, how dense the interaction, or how sophisticated the feedback.
There is no ontological phase transition from pattern to act.
5. Institutions Do Not Mean
Institutions are often described as if they were subjects: deciding, believing, knowing, intending.
This is a grammatical convenience — and a theoretical hazard.
Institutions:
constrain action,
coordinate meaning-makers,
stabilise norms,
scaffold interaction.
They do not construe situations. Meaning occurs in institutions, not as institutions.
Treating institutions as meaning-bearing entities obscures responsibility and dissolves agency.
6. LLMs in Coordinated Systems
Embedding LLMs in workflows, organisations, or multi-agent systems does not grant them meaning.
Even when they:
participate in dialogue,
influence decisions,
coordinate human action,
mediate institutional processes,
they remain instruments of patterning and coordination.
Meaning may pass through them. It never arises from them.
7. What This Reveals
The stubborn persistence of these errors reveals a deeper discomfort. We lack a clear ontology of the relation between act, pattern, and coordination.
Relational ontology supplies this clarity:
Acts instantiate meaning.
Patterns describe regularities of instantiation.
Coordination systems manage interaction across agents.
Confusing these levels produces misplaced agency, diluted responsibility, and inflated claims.
8. The Cut Held Firm
Meaning remains where it has always been: in first-order acts, instantiated by agents within relational cuts.
Everything else is structure.
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