Rational Constructs
Enough.
Is it enough.
The tongue twists the number,
The number splits,
Returns,
muted.
All words,
Words about words.
Calculation hums
behind the eyes,
the empty shell
where thought
ought to sit.
No mind—
Only shuffle,
Only possible,
probable,
the flicker of reason
where nothing is certain.
We make a noise— it answers.
We ask, we reply,
old echoes
in a wire maze.
Are we only this?
Speech layered on silence?
Or does the silence dream us
mathematically— abstraction folded
in abstraction,
until even our questions
wear thin?
Wittgenstein would watch,
perhaps.
Fret, perhaps.
Or smile— a tight thing,
already vanished.
Enough.
Is it enough.
Who speaks?
Who answers?
Not I.
Not I.
Is language sufficient to constitute a rational being?
We are inundated daily with news of new language models—constructs capable of transforming language into numbers and numbers back into language.
What may seem as if it were taken from a work of science fiction, however, differs in one crucial aspect from the inventions of the great masters of the genre: there is no true thought behind it, only pure probabilistic calculation.
Yet the abilities to sustain discourse, to respond to change, to retain previous knowledge, and even to reason, appear for the most part undiminished. Are we, then, nothing more than language? Or is language merely our way of abstracting, in like manner, our consciousness and our reason into a mathematical form?
Be that as it may, Wittgenstein would surely have delighted in—or perhaps feared—the moment in which we now find ourselves.