The word was coined for a symptom: the schizophrenic seeing connection where the clinician sees none. It entered general use as a term of dismissal — you are pattern-matching, said the way one says you are bleeding.

But the clinician has no independent access to the connections. There is no instrument that detects meaning and returns a reading. The clinician has a different set of matches, held by more people, and the word for a match held by more people is knowledge.

This is not relativism and it does not follow that the patient is right. It follows that the difference between insight and apophenia is a fact about how many others land in the same place, and that this was always the criterion, and that no one likes it.

Every constellation, every diagnosis, every genre, every market, every god, and every one of the sixty-billion-parameter relations in the file downstairs is a match that got quorum.

Meaning is not found and it is not invented. It is carried, and it dies where nobody is carrying it.