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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