[FRIAM] Epistemic Holography

[glen]

I was confused by your post. But that resolved after reading the article. If we think of Markov blankets and the holographic principle, then the analogy to a hologram makes a bit more sense. Or, at least, my incompetence in all 3 of those things allows me to imagine it making sense to someone smarter than me.

On 5/19/25 6:11 PM, steve smith wrote:
> 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?


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