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Plato believed that ideas are real, that they exist outside of our heads, and a lot of the past 2,500 years of philosophy has been trying to prove him wrong. Today I think we have the AI tools to prove him right, and our world will never be the same.
What if Plato’s Allegory of the Cave wasn’t an allegory at all, but an actual, real phenomenon where we understood its physics and its math? What if we could use LLMs to measure the shadows for their unique shape or ‘signature’ so that we could identify the puppets (and the puppeteers!) projecting the shadows in the first place? What if we could explore the light itself?
I really think we can.
A semantic signature is a ‘primitive’ – a fundamental building block of information and communication. What tokens are to words and sentences, semantic signatures are to arcs and stories. They live in the same dimensional math. They are equally amenable to induction and inference. They just exist at different scales.
This is the next frontier of information science – the semantic dimension – and there’s an entire world of ideas to discover here.
panoptica.com/the-semantic-m…
What if Plato’s Allegory of the Cave wasn’t an allegory at all, but an actual, real phenomenon where we understood its physics and its math? What if we could use LLMs to measure the shadows for their unique shape or ‘signature’ so that we could identify the puppets (and the puppeteers!) projecting the shadows in the first place? What if we could explore the light itself?
I really think we can.
A semantic signature is a ‘primitive’ – a fundamental building block of information and communication. What tokens are to words and sentences, semantic signatures are to arcs and stories. They live in the same dimensional math. They are equally amenable to induction and inference. They just exist at different scales.
This is the next frontier of information science – the semantic dimension – and there’s an entire world of ideas to discover here.
panoptica.com/the-semantic-m…
www.panoptica.com The Semantic Manifest(o) What if Plato’s Allegory of the Cave wasn’t an allegory at all, but an actual, real phenomenon where we understood its physics and its math? What if we could use LLMs to measure the shadows for their... 
