Computation Over Geometry: Meaning Identity Is Computed, Not Shipped in the Embeddings

Meaning identity (whether two sentences say the same thing after wording changes) is treated in retrieval and RAG as a geometric fact about independently encoded sentence vectors. We show that, for frozen off-the-shelf encoders and language models, it is not: identity is computed when both sentences share one forward pass, and is not a property of the embedding geometry those systems ship. On overlap-matched PAWS-X, purpose-built encoders (BGE, E5, GTE, MiniLM, E5-Mistral-7B) reach English confirm AUC only 0.55-0.65 (dense peak 0.70). Independently encoded last-token states of Llama 3, Mistral, and Qwen do no better; late fusion of the two vectors stays near chance. The same probe on a joint forward pass reaches 0.90-0.96 from 1.5B to 32B, collapses under partner shuffle, is mid-depth, saturates near 0.94 by 3B, and appears more weakly in GPT-2 XL (0.76). The gap holds beyond Llama-styl…