[FRIAM] Epistemic Holography

[steve smith]

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202505/llms-arent-mirrors-theyre-holograms

I know a bit about holography and holograms and have been known to use 
optical metaphor for information analysis (semantic lensing and 
ontological faceting) but I don't know how I feel about this 
characterization of LLMs.


        Holograms Don’t Store Images, They Store Possibility

    Ahologram <https://science.howstuffworks.com/hologram.htm>doesn’t
    capture a picture. It encodes an interference pattern. Or more
    simply, it creates a map of how light interacts with an object. When
    illuminated properly, it reconstructs a three-dimensional image that
    appears real from multiple angles. Here’s the truly fascinating
    part: If you break that hologram into pieces, each fragment still
    contains the whole image, just at a lower resolution. The detail is
    degraded, but the structural integrity remains.

    LLMs function in a curiously similar way. They don’t store knowledge
    as discrete facts or memories. Instead, they encode
    relationships—statistical patterns between words, contexts, and
    meanings—across a high-dimensional vector space. When prompted, they
    don’t retrieve information. They reconstruct it, generating language
    that aligns with the expected shape of an answer. Even from vague or
    incomplete input, they produce responses that feel coherent and
    often surprisingly complete. The completeness isn’t the result of
    understanding. It’s the result of well-tuned reconstruction.

I do see some intuitive motivation for applying the holographic or 
diffraction/reproduction through interference analogy for both LLMs 
(Semantic Holograms) and Diffusion Models (Perceptual Holograms)?

I'm not very well versed in psychology but do find the whole article 
compelling (though not necessarily conclusive)... others here may have 
different parallax to offer?

- Steve

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