[FRIAM] Epistemic Holography

[Pieter Steenekamp]

“You can’t see the forest for the trees.”

My interpretation of the article, without really focussing on the details
of holograms really spoke to me.

The author makes three points that I find helpful:

LLMs don’t just reflect things—they rebuild meaning from patterns, more
like a hologram than a mirror.

Just because they sound smooth and fluent doesn’t mean they truly
understand.

They copy the shape of knowledge, not its substance.

I don’t take these ideas too literally, but the metaphors help. LLMs seem
to do more than just repeat facts. Sometimes, their answers feel like they
see the bigger picture—even if they’re not truly thinking.

That’s where I find the hologram metaphor useful. Unlike a mirror, which
just shows what’s in front of it, a hologram builds an image from many
angles. LLMs don’t just give us back what we said—they sometimes pull
together patterns we didn’t notice ourselves.

But then of course, Google DeepMind claims that their AI does create new
knowledge (
https://www.wired.com/story/google-deepminds-ai-agent-dreams-up-algorithms-beyond-human-expertise/),
but, I don't get too excited about that - their claim of "new knowledge" is
very limited and based on a framework already set by humans.

On Tue, 20 May 2025 at 20:39, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

>
> On 5/20/25 10:19 AM, glen wrote:
> > 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.
>
> This was outside my consideration when I read it, but I definitely
> appreciate the gesture toward Markov blankets.   I've had an intuition
> that in some sense the markov Blanket of an "entity" IS the entity for
> the purposes of other entities interacting with it... a bit like the
> software contract/interface design business?
>
> I'm still pretty perplexed by the cosmological/physics "holographic
> principle"...   just not enough depth or focus applied on my end quite
> yet?  Or as you might frame it "i'm not smart enough".
>
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