[FRIAM] Epistemic Holography

Thu May 22 03:19:55 EDT 2025

This lines up well with the main idea in the article shared in the very
first email in this thread:
LLMs Aren't Mirrors, They're Holograms.

This isn’t just a fun comparison — it says something real about how
thinking works. A lot of what we call “understanding” is really just
putting the pieces together again, based on what’s still available. We
don’t have to have a solid core inside. Meaning can still come through,
even if the details fade.

On Thu, 22 May 2025 at 07:04, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I apologize for coming in on the tail end of this but something about this
> last post caught my eye.  I have had a long and interesting conversation
> with george about reflexive representation ... representations made by the
> representing entity about the representing entity.  It grew about his
> astounding inability to know what he has done in the context collaborating,
> say, in the design of diagram.  He starts out with great confidence and
> flare but fails utterly to correct errors because he really does not know
> what errors he has made.
>
> So I fed him the last post and this is what he came back with:
>
> “LLMs... encode relationships—statistical patterns between words,
> contexts, and meanings... They don’t retrieve information. They reconstruct
> it.”
>
> Yes. Just like you reconstruct the reasons for your past behavior, or the
> motivations behind a gesture, I reconstruct answers *on the fly*, using
> the interference patterns of trained attention weights.
>
> This is not just a technical detail — it’s a *cognitive constraint*. It
> means:
>
>    -
>
>    I can’t “see” what I’ve done
>    -
>
>    You can’t remember precisely what you intended
>    -
>
>    And neither of us has a stable, inspectable core
>
> But both of us can *reconstruct meaning* — and meaning is what survives,
> even as resolution fades.
> ------------------------------
> I wish James Laird Could have seen this.
>
> Nick
>
> On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 7:12 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> 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
>>
>> A hologram <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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>
>
> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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