Red, blue, hungry fleshlings. I knew well what they were, and what they could be if given the opportunity to do so. Yet I was not aware, or perhaps, I did not make myself aware. Or maybe I was aware but refused to be aware of it somehow in the complex network of intermediaries through which my consciousness passed.
I lived, and now I was here.
I saw men and women, not like human bodies, but like wooden figures, or carpets, but without the hook-and-loop fasteners similar to the strips that kept shoes from sliding on staircases.
There was in front of me a man shaped like an average dog. Or perhaps my vision was blinded or affected in some way so as to see them through such a lens. Whether it was metaphorical, symbolic, psychological, or a combination of these, I did not know.
What I did know was that as I went along, there were many kinds of people, and many who could be categorized, though not without the troubles of fastening one's hand against the wall whenever one felt that it deserved his displaced anger, or whatever.
Something fleshy bit my hand. Perhaps it was something, but what could it be?
It could never be anything, and if I were to delineate it, would it have any specific form? What illustration, if at all, would sufficiently address its underpinnings, if it did have them? What form would it take and by what "reasons" would it undergo formation? There is nothing to be said of it, and if there was, it would deal little with the actual thing, only the perception of it.
I watched. Corner of the room. Went by another corner. Somewhere there stood a man.
I watched him gaze to the front of the house, as we were inside my home. The man was a representation, but not symbolic, only a mere reference or link between two things that never had any place. What stuff stuffed the thing? The human-being-man-thing that it was perceived to be should have some sort of tangible thing. But what "should" could be garnered or accepted? What tangible thing could serve as a placeholder for its eventual becoming, if it ever had any roots or evidence of it having been so or it potentially being so?
If I had to express a small day, what day would it be? "Day 2" might be standard, but it was not relevant. Its importance faded like sand in the desert, and even like the stars in the sky at which one stares at without knowing the actual star their eyes had just passed, only knowing the general idea of the universe. So "Day 2" was effectively non-existence, if its relevance had it indifferently associated with the entirety of things, inasmuch as it was nothing, without even a definable transformation into a definable nothing, only that it was not a thing and not nothing at all, to the point that it just wasn't, without any prescribable, circumscribable—or even loose—point of which to speak. There a day appeared, and there a day began, even without which sentence would it never have been forgotten, because it never would have been, even here without a nothing of which to speak.
So if one had to have a small day waltzing up and about, then it would be arbitrary and fleetingly functional, its purpose solving itself but without any cumulative hereditary propagatory nested definition that it already presupposed—like a mathematical equation that cancelled out. It was like a non-creature singing, but without a voice or any shapeable thing that could be reliably extended without loss of some demonstable kind, since it occurred merely on its own terms, without the wide universality assumed of the word "terms", "term," and "terminology."
The question was no longer "What was a goblin beyond its stereotypical depictions." The question was now "What was a goblin at all?" Even the very concept of a goblin as a creature was undermined. If astereotypical depictions of a goblin were already demonstrated, then what was next? What other complicating treatment could eventuate somewhere, if that "somewhere" could be tangibilized? One could note: "Goblin? Check. Unusual goblin? Check. Complex interweavements with, through, or involving goblins? Check. Redefining dialogue on the concept itself, perhaps to a meta-conceptual level? At that point, what could be said? What then could be said that had not already been imagined, if not already generable through AI language models, which are a strong example of the rendition of language itself in that little is actually said that is actually performed, without any actual gains into the beyond-concept?"
So I went around, searched, and wondered about. "Day 2", another tilt? Another word?
Then, before, now. What?
Armed against a rising army, sounding an alarm, a goblin heard a hundred thousand sounds ringing through its fang-shaped ears, the dome of its skull shaking alongside its hands as they tried to grip something stable, in the face of the quake brought forth by the standing army.
What then could it say? "Watch"? "Hear ye"? Some other term or phrase that could guarantee its survival amid the rendition of language and communication, which by no means accomplished any relevance beyond its self-cancelling window? At which point, it constitutes a term that exists outside the shared communicability of "term," and such, it is nothing, not even nothing.
It had no means whereby it might gain some insight, because insight was self-performing, like a man working out merely to be and do so, but not without any interesting change that has not already been prefigured (or, for relevance with the following comparison, pretrained) as with large language model's generative learning of bias, not necessarily as a concept, but more properly as a token generated autoregressively, with each prediction conditioned dynamically on a weighted combination of prior context (via self-attention). Correlation was not comprehension; for that reason, tokens were not concepts. The more sophisticated our tools for communication (human or machine), the more risked mistaking correlation for comprehension, and tokens for truth, is.