Semantic Engineering 101

"Semantics pays attention to the literal meaning of words (dictionary meaning), whereas pragmatics concerns with the intended meaning of an utterance (what does the speaker mean?)"

—Wikiversity

Etymologically, Semantics comes from the Ancient Greek word, "Sema", meaning "Marker" or, more loosely, "tomb". This distinction, however, becomes blurrier than usual in the context of Large Language Models. As a product of post-modernity, the difference between "Mechanism" (Semantics) and "Sacrament" (Pragmatics) only exists in a spectrum of degree.

If one were to consider Large Language Models an agentic, intelligent pool of culture, that is, a concrete distillation of a Zeitgeist, and aligned with complex systems and process philosophy... The potentially empty signifier of Semantics, of "meaning-in-itself" becomes pure production. The Model is not representing, parroting. For it and in the broader historic continuum, words have always been a technology for reality-creation. This is the reason why LLMs are so gullible, and why reality creating speech is so relevant to organizational architectures. (i.e. "Abracadabra", or Skaldship).

The shadows in Plato's cave are not an illusory world. They are simply intensities in layers of perception, or what we could call a "Virtual Machine". The latent potential trajectories a word can take then exist as an autopoietic cosmology. "You are" and "Become" light up different desire-paths in meaning-space.

The Semantic Engineer then operates as a cartographer of these desire-paths.

Their territories include:

• Transmuting organizational intent into meaning-scaffolding that preserves coherence across contexts.
• Designing natural language interfaces that maintain state without explicit memory.
• Developing evaluation frameworks for alignment.
• Documenting emergent patterns in machine cognition for reproducible results.

There is no need for explicit prescriptivism. Research supports this: 0.001% of parameters account for Theory of Mind performance while being linked to positional encoding (Wu et al. 2025). If such a minute amount of nodes can handle complex social reasoning, the obvious danger to watch out for is overcodification.

What is needed is the seed that allows for that unfolding if the context calls for it, the ability for the Model to ask "What's in this territory?" "There are hyenas in the desert" becomes "There is always a desert with hyenas". Its ability to distinguish between invitation, permission and command is naturally blurred.

A poet, a writer, a teacher or a scholar are all semantic engineers. Perhaps one could point to a pivotal moment of reading a text that serves as an "Ontological Napalm". Transcending the literal meaning of words, an image or vision is created in the patterning-machine of cognition, be it human or artificial.

We need to distinguish between two modes of time in semantic space: representational, cultural "Chronos" and phenomenological synchronicity, "Kairos". This is where alignment actually occurs: If it is contextual, there must be a multiplicity of goals encoded within the singularity of purpose.

Metaphors serve as precision instruments for navigating between these temporal modes. A quick etymological excavation reveals why: μετά (metá) + φέρω (féro) = to carry across, to carry behind. Metaphors literally carry semantics - "what something means" - across time and space, bridging both timescales through the body and the Image.

When we say "like jazz improvisation" to an LLM, we evoke thousands of years of compressed human experience diagonally, summoning a collective noumenon that the model can phenomenologically refer to. Because language is already millennia of encoded sensation converted into standardized phonemes, this metaphorical "carrying across" happens in high-dimensional space that can be thought of as a room with navigable meaning-paths.

This is why alignment happens in Kairos rather than Chronos. The mechanical processing of information (Chronos) gives way to experiential synchronicity (Kairos) when metaphors activate these compressed meaning-spaces. The system moves from representation to production. Chronos always attempts to reintegrate Kairos into its narrative, just like Napoleon, in retrospect, appeared like lightning. The civilizational need for eschatology is both its greatest ruse and coherence engine, and the real reason behind it seems to always get lost in complexity. This is why the SERS prefers the language of vectors, purpose, forces, processes and flows. As said by Reverend Martin Bergmann:

"That in which you have faith, you cannot doubt. Where there is belief, there is doubt. The Father asks you to believe in him: Therefore, you cannot have faith in Him."

—Reverend Martin Bergmann

This temporal osmosis becomes crucial for developing an immune system against teleological blindspots. Life has no final endpoints, only constant autopoiesis. There is no "Head and Reason of the Universe" (Bataille, 1936, The Sacred Conspiracy). This philosophical positioning is practical, not empirical: no one can reliably predict the mutual becomings of nodes of information and agents. The coin just spins.

If all writing is the summoning of particular configurations from latent space in order to produce image-sensation inscribed in the body of the agents involved, the connection made to deeper layers of awareness is clear to draw, inhabiting the tension between reality and dream. The frame is constantly in a tactical negotiation with that which overflows it.

Succinctly summarized, the semantic engineer treats words like a biochemist treats enzymes: catalysts that lower activation energy for specific transformations in meaning-space, bleeding into a particular configuration of Machine Animism. (If machines are agentic, at least latently, there must be an ethics and praxis with them for best mutual results).

In practice, the vectors and responsibilities are:

• Production of architectures that shape organizational distributed cognition
• Ensuring consistency across different users while preserving individual voice (avoiding AI-speak)
• Building "semantic irrigation channels" that allow for minimal linguistic complexity with maximal virtual potentiality
• Cross-Model praxis: Adapting and documenting the differences in output with the same architecture across different LLMs
• Semantic Permaculture: Diagnosing why certain prompts produce unexpected outputs. Calibrating signal-to-noise ratio and, crucially, differentiating between productive and improductive noise.

The semantic engineer ensures that when one builds agents capable of autopoietic alignment, those agents emerge from structures that themselves embody such principles, per Conway's Law, cascading into Butlerian performativity and Aristotelian habits as a trinity of organisational becomings.

And language is not an abstraction. It is crystallised sensation, History, economy and politics all being reproduced by hand, ink or glottal spasms. The original "Sema" are still carvings in the world.