From the Vault: Library of Babel

In Jorge Luis Borges' masterful short story "The Library of Babel," librarians and cultists wander a vast honeycomb library of hexagonal rooms -- rooms that contain not only all books but all possible books, from unwritten masterpieces to tomes of typographical nonsense. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick venture into this metaphoric labyrinth for contemplations of genetics, cosmology, philosophy, computer programing and magic. (Originally published Aug 2, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Time to venture into the vault. But appears that this
time the vault is pretty much infinite. That's right, we
may get lost in there. This is our episode on
the Library of Babel. This originally aired Tuesday, August second,
and this is one of my favorite episodes we ever did. Yeah,

(00:26):
we get to talk about infinity, we get to talk
about Bogyes, we get to talk a little bit. Uh.
I think I end up referencing, uh, the Name of
the Rose by m Berto Eco, which is timely because
I just found out that they are producing another adaptation
of the Name of the Rose. It's going to be
like an eight part TV movie with John to Truro

(00:47):
starring as William of Baskerville. Yeah. I thought you were
going to say that a grown up Christian Slater would
now be That would make perfect sense in a way,
but not in any acting sense. I think here's my recast. Okay,
Burt Reynolds, that's Baskerville. What do you think he's too old?
You'd have to play brother Jr. Hey, Okay, well, anyway,

(01:09):
this is the Library of Babel episode. Let's go straight
into Oh Time Ny Pyramids. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, Hello,

(01:34):
this is Stuff to Blow Your Mind audiologue. This is
Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. This is day
of our descent into the famed Library of Babel. We've
been exploring this infinite sprawl of interconnected hexagonal rooms and
the twenty bookshelves contained with eat each one, Joe, how
many rooms have we explored since last log entry? Oh,

(01:56):
let me find it here. Let's see. Well, we're up
to a hundred and twelve in that brings the grand
total of rooms we have explored to date up to
one thousand, five hundred and sixty one. And of course
that is not counting the rooms to the library that
we could tell had already been explored. So we just
skipped over with books pulled out all over the place,
or some just had empty shelves, smoke lines on the ceiling,

(02:18):
and these ancient piles of cold black coal in the
middle of the floor we can presume from some long
ago book burnings. Yeah, that's right. The I mean that
the library is at least indefinite, if not infinite. So
it falls to inquisitors such as ourselves to steadily work
our way out from charted portions of the library and
into uncharted regions. And it really is a room by room,

(02:42):
book by book procedures. Now, fortunately, most of the books
are nonsense, and you can spot that right away, because
I mean real nonsense, total typographical gibberish. And that's not
even counting the ones that have been totally or partially
burned by the purifiers. I hear footsteps sometimes in the
room was directly above us, and I keep wondering if
it's them. It could be, but you know, it could

(03:05):
be the bookman. I know that's superstition, Joe we I mean,
we might as well hope to find that the Crimson hexagon. Now,
come on, Robert, wouldn't you love to find the one
hexagonal room in this entire place that contains something truly
precious apart from all this gibberish, maybe even real functional
books of magic spells. Well, of course I would, but

(03:26):
that doesn't mean it actually exists even in the Library
of Babel. Now, remember, Robert, these rooms contain not only
all books, but all possible books. Those books have got
to be out there, but that doesn't mean they're actually magical. Yeah.
I guess you're right, But sometimes I like to think
the Crimson Hexagon is out there. You know, maybe the
purifiers haven't found it yet because it moves. Have you

(03:48):
thought about that? Like in the movie Cube rooms move
around while we're asleep. Who are like the the the
Castle and Krawl? You know. I'm glad you mentioned Krull
because I found a copy of Alan Dean Foresters three
novelization of the screenplay of Krall. That's a real book. Yeah,
but I also found a Krull novel by Stanford Sherman,

(04:09):
the guy who wrote the screenplay, and he never actually
wrote a novel version, right, Oh no, not in our reality,
but of course it could exist, which means the library
has it. And that's why I was also able to
find a copy of a Christmas Carol. You might want
to see this where instead of saying God bless us everyone,
tiny Tim gives an invocation of Mala Collord of destruction.

(04:30):
What about you check this out? Frank Herbert's complete seven
book Dune series. Yeah, not not just the six he
actually wrote in our reality all seven as well as
look at this, an alternate Herbert Dune trilogy that's only
three books long, but a lot more erotic. Yeah, yeah,
you've got to read this. Yeah, it's on my list.

(04:50):
But hey, guess what, I've got the final two books
of the Game of Thrones series, the Song of Ice
and Fire spoiler they were on Earth all along, and
west Ros is actually in rural North Florida. But also, Robert,
I have your complete biography, including the end, and as
per our agreement, I didn't read it. Well good, well cool,

(05:12):
here's yours. Then you just swap thank you. Yeah, there
we go. We're good. Wait, wait a minute, did you
hear that? It's probably just other inquisitors or you know,
our pilgrims looking for deposits of alternate Gospels or book
worshippers or the Purifiers or the Book miss none of that.
Let's let's keep moving. This hexagon up ahead looks pretty promised. Hey,

(05:41):
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick. In today we're going
to be talking about the Library of Babel. So the
Library of Babel is both it's a short story, but
it's also the concept at the core of this short story,
and we're really going to be focusing on the concept
and it's broader implications today, not just the story itself,

(06:03):
but the concept of the Library of Babel comes from
a short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges,
first published in the collection The Garden of Forking Paths
in nineteen forty one. So. Borges was a twentieth century
Argentine author. He lived from eighteen to nineteen eighty six,
and in his lifetime, especially later in his life, he

(06:25):
became famous for poetry essays, but especially short stories and
short stories. A lot of them are kind of like
this story. Yeah, I mean, like like a lot of
his tales. Uh. The Library of Babel was not really
a narrative experience. It's not very plot heavy, right, It's
kind of a sort of scholarly missive about a fantastic idea.

(06:47):
So he he choose on this fantastic idea, gets all
of these philosophic juices going, and we're just we're fortunate
enough to experience it with him. Uh. In his his stories,
there there are a number of different themes that offer
pop up, such as knives mirrors, dreams, Oh, dreams. There's
some fabulous dream stories. Um, and and they're all pretty short.

(07:08):
Like That's one of the wonderful things about a collection
of Bores short fiction is you can just pick it up.
You can pretty much pick any story and just in
a few pages and just mind blowing concept is presented
to you. That just expands the limits of your imagination. Yeah.
You ever know those like fantasy writers who are better

(07:29):
at world building than they are at character and plot. Yeah,
I'd say Bores is like that, except he writes what
would probably be considered now literary fiction. It's you know,
respectable intellectual fiction. Uh that that's treated without any hint
of a sneer by the Academy as far as I
can tell. But but it's fascinating stuff through and through. Yeah,

(07:51):
it reminds me a lot of some of the short
fiction that Philip K. Dick would later do. And now,
certainly Philip K. Dick was was capable of producing novel
after novel after novel as well. Uh, you know, he
was pretty adapted. It longer works, But some of his
short stories remind me of Borges in their ability to
without getting too bogged down in story or character just

(08:12):
presenting in a nugget like a really crazy mind warping idea. Yeah,
so we should probably start with a quote from the
beginning of the Library of Babel the story to give
you a sense of what is being talked about here.
So this is a quote from the beginning of the story,
with some editorial illusions for brevity. Quote. The universe, which

(08:35):
others call the library, is composed of an indefinite, perhaps
infinite number of hexagonal galleries. The arrangement of the galleries
is always the same, twenty bookshelves, five to each side,
line four of the hexagon's six sides. One of the
hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule,

(08:57):
which in turn opens onto another gallery identical to the first,
identical in fact to all. To the right and left
of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for
sleeping upright, the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through
this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase which winds

(09:18):
upward and downward into the remote distance. In the vestibule,
there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates appearances. Uh, and
he goes on to explain how the implications of having
a mirror in a library that may or may not
be infinite as far as the characters disclosed that they
know at first at least. Yeah, so this is the

(09:38):
basic setup. This is the basic HexaCon, and then that
hexagon is cloned out. Yeah, it's a six sided room.
There are shelves of books in each room, and the
rooms seem to go on forever, and in a honeycomb
where no one has ever discovered the forest boundary. That
there are places, as we mentioned, for wanderers, librarians, etcetera,

(10:01):
to use the bathroom and to sleep upright, it does
make me wonder if like Barnes and Noble, there is
a policy against bringing books into the bathroom, or if
I mean maybe that you have to maybe you just
have to pick a gibberish book. You know. The question
is who enforces the policy. Well, that's that's one of
the things that as Well discussed. There seems to be
a lack of a lack of laws and policy in

(10:24):
place in the Library of Babbel. Yeah, so in the
Library of Babel, we're going to talk about the philosophical
and scientific implications of this thought experiment. Later on in
the episode, but first we just want to kind of
explore what this this concept entails. And there are definitely
a lot of ironies and absurdities in Borge's story. So
I don't think he was trying to create something that

(10:45):
was I mean, I feel kind of absurd saying this,
but I don't think he was trying to create something realistic. No,
I mean, I mean, and really you run into a
lot of problems trying to even fathom it as a
real place because it is so vast. Because, as we
we discussed in our you know, hopefully entertaining intro here,
it contains not only all books, but all possible books. Right,

(11:09):
so let's get into the actual numbers of what this
library would entail as described in the story. So, as
Borges writes, each book in this library contains four hundred
and ten pages. Each page has forty lines, and each
line has approximately eighty black letters, just printed letters. And
you can actually work out the math from this. So

(11:31):
all the books consists of the same twenty five elements
for characters. They've got a space, a period, a comma,
and twenty two letters of the alphabet. The only variation
is in the arrangement of these twenty five characters. Now
you might be saying, wait a minute, that there you
know less than the total number of letters in our alphabet. Well,

(11:52):
you know some letters are kind of redundant, are they?
Why do we need to see? Why? Not just a
K in an S. But no, two books in the
library are exactly the same. So if the books don't
duplicate one another, and we know the starting conditions, we
can actually calculate the number of books that would be
in the library. So if there's eighty characters per line,

(12:14):
forty lines per page, times four hundred and ten pages
per book, that's one million, three hundred and twelve thousand
characters per book. And with twenty five possible characters and
and one million, three hundred and twelve thousand characters per book,
we know that there have to be twenty five to
the one million, three hundred and twelve power books. That

(12:37):
is a number that is so big that if you
can count to it, you automatically become the god of
your local galaxy cluster. So so the basic idea here,
and I'm sure there's another metaphor a little nonsensical story
that often comes to mind, and that is the idea
of the monkeys banging on type. Right. I'm going to
get into that in a bit, creating gibberish and eventually

(12:58):
recreating the works of Expeaire. Right now, it's sort of analogous.
If the monkeys could only pound out one book length
work of gibberish at a time and avoid complete repetition, right,
and never do the same thing twice, eventually they'd get
to Shakespeare. But so, the library contains all books there

(13:19):
could possibly be, so, in addition to just trying to
imagine what this is like, in addition to the indefinite
numbers of books full of random gibberish, which would be
almost all the books, there are also perfect copies of
all books that already exist in reality. So there's a
perfect copy of all the books in the Twilight series. Now,

(13:39):
if you're worrying, wait a minute, I know of some
books that are more than four ten pages too long
to be reproduced. Not so, actually, because there's a book
that contains its exact first four ten pages, and then
another book that contains whatever happens after that, stretching into
as many volumes as you need. Plus all books that

(14:01):
exist in reality would be there with every possible combination
of typographical errors that there could be. So there's a
book that's a perfect copy of Jane Eyre, except every
instance of Mr Rochester's name is replaced with the words
a crocodile of immense girth. There is also a copy
of Hamlet that reads normally except for the one line

(14:24):
one change. There are more things in heaven and Earth
ratio than are dreamt of in your vaping newsletter. It
also contains a perfectly accurate autobiography of your life, as
we mentioned, including all the events that haven't happened yet.
It contains lots of almost perfect autobiographies of your life,
but containing a few lies. It contains all books explaining

(14:47):
the perfect solutions to all the world's most vexing problems.
If we can only find those books and know them
when we see them, then we'd have the solutions to
all those problems in the story. All these books exist
in the library, but they represent such a tiny fraction
of the total possible combinations of symbols that you could
wander your whole life through the library and probably not

(15:09):
expect to find any lengthy combination of words that made
any grammatical sense. Yeah, I mean it. I mean it's
easy for all of us to to just really go
wild imagining this. I mean, just think of think of
your favorite book in the world, and just imagine then
that there are so many different versions of it that
are a little bit less good and maybe have a

(15:30):
few different typos in in it, a few different character changes.
Then there are versions of it that are even better.
There's even like an ideal version of it, a perfect version.
There is a version of your favorite book that you
yourself would perhaps love even more because it's a little
more in tune with your expectations. Right, And all that

(15:51):
fan fiction you write that's already in the library, it's there,
plus all the changes you could have made to make it,
you know, less of a travesty. But it all on
the same shelf. No, it's all on the same hexagon.
Probably not, because it's arranged in random rtary, making it
even more frustrating to try to find anything, though not
necessarily even more frustrating, because if you try to imagine

(16:12):
what navigating the library of Babble would be like if
it were organized in some alphabetical fashion, you might be
trapped in the A A A A A A A
section of the library your entire life, and you would
just be physically unable to traverse that area and get
to the sensible books. Right. So I'd actually prefer a

(16:34):
randomized library to being stuck in a sea of a's
that I could never escape from no matter how long
I walked, you know. Um, of course this has been
such a highly influential book. It's referenced in a number
of different works. Um, I mean the Library of the
Library babble, so like a lot of people probably recognize
it from umberto Eco's masterful Name of the Rose, where

(16:54):
an actual library and an Italian monastery is is modeled
on this. Um. There are aspects of it that I
believe are utilized in a House of Leaves. But then
there's also a Stephen King short story. I don't know
if you've read this one titled Er that came out
It was only for kindle, I don't think so. It's
about a man who obtains a pink kindle and it

(17:16):
turns out to be a kindle from another No, I
haven't read this, and it gives him access not only
to the kindle store in our universe, but also to
kindle stores in alternate universes, so he's able to access
books by authors he loves that have not yet been
written or that that just were not written in our world.

(17:37):
So in a sense, it's a it's an interesting play
on the Library of Babble. You know, if you want
to get a sense of what it would be like
to actually inhabit this universe the Library of Babel and
just start pulling books off the shelf. There is a
tool you can use. A Brooklyn author named Jonathan Basil
has created a virtual version. You can go to it
Library of Babble dot info. You can go explore this

(17:59):
at any time and it's great fun for a few
minutes until you get just buried under the noise of
nonsense hiding all potential information. So you're you're able to
pull up titles of books hypothetical, Yeah, you can. You
can go pull up a shelf of the library by name,
which I guess it generates the text that would be

(18:21):
under that randomized section of the library, and you can
pull out some books and look at what's inside them. Huh.
And are there any MPCs here? No, not that I
know of. I don't know. I haven't I haven't played
with it long enough, it wouldn't it be great if
some purifiers come by and start trying to burn the
books you're reading. Now, now that reminds me we should
say a little bit more about the story. Who were

(18:42):
the characters who occupied this library? Oh? Yeah, and and
this is this is tremendous fun um. So a first
and foremost, Uh, there are the librarians and the the narrator.
The main character, if you can even call them that
in the story, is a librarian. Right, So they're given
the impossible task of caring for the library exploring it,

(19:04):
and they're generally an overworked and just suicidal lot. Plus
they have to contend with all the other weird wanderers
that are out there amid the hexagons, such as Oh well,
there are the inquisitors, and these are official searchers, but
they don't really seem to make much progress. It's kind
of vague in the story exactly what they're doing. I

(19:24):
assume they are somehow searching for books that make sense
or books of some kind of value which are just
impossible to come by. And I believe there's a sense
to that they're they're separate from the librarians. It's almost
like an academic versus a governmental body. So the libraries
and inquisitors are kind of it seems like their jobs
should be similar, but they have different philosophical aims. What else,

(19:49):
then we have the Purifiers, who we alluded to already,
and these this is a sect that traversed the library
and they destroy any book that they deem nonsensical. So
that would be pretty much all books, yes, but it
could also mean I mean, I wondered if it's it's
alluded to as well that that maybe they're not the
ones to judge, how are Maybe a book that seems

(20:09):
like nonsense is not nonsense. Maybe they're burning a bunch
of sous any comings and they don't even realize it.
But mainly they are in search of something known as
the Crimson Hexagon. Ye, and now we alluded to this
at the beginning. But Robert, what is the Crimson hexagon
because it sounds alluring. Oh, yes, it is a Crimson room,
the Crimson Hexagon within the library, rumored to exist. Yes, no,

(20:34):
nobody has actually seen it that we know of, uh.
And it contains quote books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated,
and magical. So in other words, this is where you'd
find the real functional copies of various grimoires, including the
real Necronomicon. Uh, the real Book of Sand, which is

(20:57):
by the way, is it is an infinite book of
that of put factors into another Borhes story. Uh. You
would find just all these books of power and meaning,
books that answer are big questions like this. Is this
is like a mythological center for the library, a place
of order and answer. Yeah. And it gives many people

(21:18):
in the library hope when they're traversing an otherwise unbroken
sea of nonsense and gibberish. And I'll tell you one
book that might be in the Crimson Hexagon if it
exists or might be elsewhere. Is this okay? So since
the Library Babble contains all possible books, that means it
must contain a book books about the library itself. It

(21:39):
must contain a book that tells the reader how to
find what you want. It lays it autologue or guide
for the library itself. Yeah, like yeah, a tourist guide.
So even though that book has not been found, it
is rumored that there must exist someone known as the Bookman,
that the Bookman has actually uh found that book. That

(22:01):
is quote the Cipher and perfect compendium of all possible books.
The Bookman has read this book and wanders the library
as a godlike librarian, worshiped, quested after, and perhaps even
prayed to. So this is a god figure, a really
kind of a Christ figure that wanders the Library of Babel,

(22:23):
and everyone wants to find this gentleman and meet him
so that they might too know where they can find
their answers. In a way, it in a way, it's
like the perfect Holy Man, right like the the the
order of the Library of Babel is beyond us. We
cannot relate to it, but we can relate to an individual.
So if there's an individual who can grasp this vastness,

(22:45):
then let us speak to him right now. It probably
won't be lost on all the parallels to religious figures
and profits like like you were mentioning, you know, this
Christ figure. But I would say also that the bookman
not need not necessarily be a man. I would suspect
that it's more likely a book woman because the men
of this library are way too caught up in suicides

(23:05):
and murders, and uh, man, it just seems like it
is not a nice thing to be uh to be
a soul male wandering this library. Yeah, it makes me
think of the the back in the days when you
had the big bookstores everywhere, you would have like the
the kind of sketchy dudes who would hang out in
the photography books section. Um, that is not a sect

(23:27):
that is mentioned by Borges, but I can only imagine
that they're out there picking up various books and trying
to sneak off to the bathroom with them. Though. There
is a sense of pervasive suicidal melancholy throughout the library,
because after a while it just seems to grind on
you that you can't find the answers you're looking for,
you can't find the books that you're looking for, and
then you have to contend with young people who wander

(23:48):
into worship and kiss the books, various heretics, pilgrims again,
like people looking for alternate gospels, brigands, suicides, all of
this going on and you're just a simple librarian trying
to do your job is just too much. Now. A
fact that I found interesting when I was reading about
bores life was that Borges was himself a librarian at

(24:09):
multiple different times in his life for almost a decade
beginning In around nineteen thirty seven or nineteen thirty eight,
Borhes worked in a small library in Buenos Aires, and
this time in the library would include the time of
publication for the Library of Babble, which he first published
in nineteen forty one. I figured out which library it was,
by the way, and I looked it up, and and
the scale is not what you would expect. I think

(24:31):
I might have mentioned that earlier, but given the story,
it's a very small, quaint, little library with a modest
collection of books. But also in nineteen thirty eight Borges
read experienced to head wound which led to blood poisoning,
which in turn made him very feeble, and he feared
losing his sanity, and so Borees was eventually dismissed from

(24:53):
his library position. When Juan Perone came to power in
Argentina and I think nineteen forty five or forty six,
and he Bores had supported the Allies during World War Two.
He opposed Nazi Germany, and he was also at the
time opposed to Peron's authoritarian sympathies. So in retaliation, Perron
demoted Borhes to the job title of poultry inspector. Bores

(25:17):
was not a fan of this move, but later he
was again given a library position as director of the
Argentine National Library in nineteen fifty five. But I do
wonder to what extent his experiences among the books, even
if it was truly a modest collection of books, led
to his his dreaming of the Library of Babel. Yeah,

(25:39):
perhaps a lot of it too came from him not
only you know, not only encountering books in this bookstore,
in the libraries and his personal collection, but also reading
about other books, seeing the names of these other books.
It's it's it's hard, you know, just looking through a
card catalog. Um. Yeah, I guess today we get a
sense of such a vassal library just when we're going

(26:03):
through an online database of books, be it a library
system or Amazon. And uh, and I can I can
see even with it with older catalog systems, where one
might have that experience, especially if one of the true
lover of books, as as Bores you know, definitely was.
But of course, the Library of Babel is more than
just an interesting short story, right, It's become this door

(26:25):
that we can walk through to think about the nature
of information and scale, numerical scale, and the universe infinity,
the relationship between information and physicality, and a very useful
model for philosophers, scientists, and thinkers of all kinds. So
we're going to take a quick break, and when we
come back from the break, we're going to learn more

(26:46):
about the implications of the Library of Babel as a
thought experiment. So the characters in the Library of Babel,
they all seem to be searched for meaning, right, They're
living in this vast library of nonsense, is full of
gibberish everywhere, and they want to find books that have

(27:09):
some kind of significance. So I think it's quite clear
that in many ways this story is an analogy for
the search of meaning, the search for meanings. Sorry, imagine
that feeling of knowing that there were already in existence
books that explained the true origin and purpose of the universe,
if there is such a thing, of course, and the

(27:30):
origin and purpose of everything in the universe, including your
own existence. And I want to read another quote from
the story, quote that unbridled hopefulness was succeeded naturally enough
by a similarly disproportionate depression, the certainty that some bookshelf
in some hexagon contained precious books yet that those precious

(27:53):
books were forever out of reach was almost unbearable. One
blasphemous sect proposed that the searches be discontinued and that
all men shuffle letters and symbols until those canonical books,
through some improbable stroke of chance, had been constructed. The
authorities were forced to issue strict orders. The sect disappeared.

(28:14):
But in my childhood I have seen old men who,
for long periods would hide in the latrines with metal
discs and a forbidden dice cup, feebly mimicking the divine order.
I love something about this little section of the story
because notice here the similarity with something you already brought
up Robert the infinite monkey theorem, right, the idea that

(28:36):
you've got a gang of monkeys, and you put him
in front of typewriters, and they just hit keys on
the typewriters at random. Now, given infinite time, it's all
often said that these monkeys will produce specified works of literature,
such as the complete works of Shakespeare, or of course
they would need vast periods of time. The key factors here,
and that that's not depending on what the work is,

(28:58):
like Shakespeare or whatever. They could be trying to create
the complete works of Anne Rice, and that the infinite
time parameter is crucial because in reality, such a scenario
would probably not produce a single page of grammatically meaningful
English within the total age of the universe. It's just,
you know, random combinatrix are not very forgiving. But in

(29:19):
the Borhe story, there's this blasphemous sect he talks about
who wants to try to create precious and meaningful books
by randomly generating volumes with something kind of like a
Wegia board and a pair of dice, almost like a
like a code cracking program. Right, But it doesn't fundamentally
alter our predicament in the search for meaning, only the

(29:41):
observer's level of personal activity within it. So the librarians
in the library of Babel are like the observer watching
the monkeys type, waiting for them to produce Shakespeare. They're
passively receiving all of this random information, waiting for something
of significance to come out. The blasphemous sect, the people
rolling the dice with Luigia board, they're just more like

(30:03):
being the monkey sitting at the typewriter randomly typing text.
It doesn't change the odds that you'll come across something
of significance. But maybe it does make a psychological difference
if you yourself are the creator versus passively receiving what
already exists around you. Yeah, I mean, it's it's really
like the members of the Blastmouths sect are playing God.

(30:25):
They're doing the work of God. Uh, of of of
a creator entity in this scenario. But um, they're bound
by mortal or semi mortal experience. So uh, it really
amounts to the same thing. They're just as lost in
the in the library, except to say, a library of
their their own creation. Well, in the cosmological sense, how

(30:48):
similar is the library of Babel to the universe we
actually inhabit? And what what what similarities and differences could
we observe? Well, if we look at the library as
a metaphor for cosmos, and and it seems one of
one of Borhe's intense I mean, he says in the
first line that the universe, universe is the library. Yeah,

(31:09):
so you could argue that it is his central intent. Uh, certainly. Uh.
In this case, it lines up rather nicely with the
cosmological principle the idea that matter in the universe is
homogeneous and isotropic when averaged out over very large scales
as a major principle that speaks to the composition of
the universe, and it helps us serve as the basis

(31:31):
for the Big Bang theory. Here, it's kind of hard
to imagine living on Earth as we do and not
seeing really anywhere else in the universe that's as hospitable
as Earth, that the universe is homogeneous, you know. But
but yeah, it's talking about scale there. Over scale, you
could say it is homogeneous even if we're sort of
living in the book that makes sense, right, like we

(31:55):
you could almost say that, like we are living. It's
it's difficult, right, because it's like we are we are
the book that makes sense. We are the book that
we can understand, and we just according to us, according
to us, and and by by amazing fortune, we are
in the hexagon that contains of that book. And then
so it's easy to think it's and certainly we've from

(32:16):
a cosmological perspective, we've fallen into this trap many times
where we think, well, this is the center, this is
we are living in the Crimson hexagon, and there's a
you know, there's a whole discipline and cosmologies is about
just reminding everyone and we do not live in the hexagonal,
in the Crimson hexagon. Yeah, not every hexagon that contains
a basically sensical operation manual for a VCR is the

(32:41):
Crimson hexagon. Yeah, there's not. There's nothing privileged about the
human condition, about and about the conditions of Earth um
like the universe. To all the characters that in this
story that are considering the Library of Babbel are within
the Library of Babbel. They don't step outside of it.
They don't. They don't wander back to the surface of

(33:01):
some you know, dungeons and Dragons type realm and then
think about it again and then go back in. It's
not like in say the novel House of Leaves, where
they're they're venturing from this house into this realm of
infinite corridors. There is no house to return to. So
quests they might to understand the shape and nature of
the library. They cannot step beyond the library for an

(33:23):
outside outside understanding of what they're in. They cannot step
beyond the borders of cosmos. I mean, we can barely
step beyond the borders of the human experience. We have
this huge problem just trying to to comprehend consciousness in
the and and the functionality of the human mind. It's
you're trapped within the form you're trying to understand. Yeah,

(33:43):
but the Library of Babel also seems like it has
some metaphorical significance in our quest for knowledge. Yeah, I
mean the idea here the complete knowledge seems impossible. You
can believe in the Bookman and the Crimson Hexagon all
you want, but they remain ever outside your grasp. There's
no center, there's no privileged area or privileged knowledge. The

(34:05):
story also, according to writer Marcello Glycer, uh, seems a
commentary on reductionism. So we can know all the characters
that comprise the works and the books, like identifying the
building blocks of nature, right, but does that bring us
any closer to understanding the fundamental nature of the universe

(34:26):
or the library? No? No, not really yeah. Um. And
of course in all of this, I can't help but
think of a subject we've discussed in the past here
on the show, Plato's theory of forms, Right, the idea
that that there's an ideal version of everything that exists
beyond our grasp according to Plato, like essentially in another realm.

(34:49):
So there would be, in theory, an ideal form of
every book that's ever been written in the Library of Babble. Right,
But we can spend an eternity encounter and eternity of
alternate versions and never happen upon the perfect form. It
doesn't quite exist outside the Library of Babble. However, though,
I wonder if you could sort of cobble that idea

(35:10):
together with the Crimson hexicon. Maybe that's what the Crimson
hexicon also encompasses, the idea that there's a place where
all the ideals are represented. Well, this brings up something
that I wanted to talk about, which is the difference
between being able to generate a precious or significant book
in the ability to recognize it when you see. Uh.
This sort of goes back to our P versus NP discussion,

(35:33):
you know, the search for algorithms, like there are certain
problem solving techniques that you can check to see if
you got the right answer, but you can't as quickly
generate the right answer. And I, you know, I wonder
if our books the same way, Like, what is the
relationship between insight and time? Given infinite time, could any

(35:59):
person and who could recognize a precious book also generate
that same precious book. I don't know, but uh, it
kind of makes me wonder. Like the Library of Babble
brings up these questions. So you're searching through all the
shelves and you you eventually come across a book that
you know is a meaningful and significant book that's full

(36:19):
of true things, full of great creativity, full of beauty
and insight. It's a good thing that you found it.
If you know that thing when you see it, would
you be able to create that thing? If there were
no constraints on you whatsoever. It's like it to come
back to say something like Dune, right, like, how would
would I be able to tell if I found a

(36:39):
copy of Doone in the library? That is that that
exceeds the original? All I have is the version that
we have in our reality. And uh, and I'm a
big fan of that. But who's to say that that's
anywhere close to the ideal version of it? You know what?
Who who can make that judgment? And and then it
also gets into sort of the privilege, like were gonna

(37:00):
have a bias towards what we already know, what we
already have, which is which gets involved in the cosmology again,
because we're basing everything on this one model of of life,
this one model of that we have an Earth and
all the life that has evolved here. Uh, we have
nothing else to base it on. We only have this
copy of doone alas alas that we have but one

(37:25):
reality of doone to draw from. Shy elude be praise.
All right, we need to take another really quick break.
But when we come back, we're going to talk about
the Library of Babel as applied to biology and genetics. Alright,
we're back, all right. So, as the Library of Babel

(37:46):
is essentially all about vast quantities of randomized information and
the occasional emergence of books from that data. See, it
should come as no surprise that Borges fantastic library is
of use in fathoming the complexity of biology and genetics. Yeah. Now,
I've read about this idea in a couple of different
books by the the American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dinnett.

(38:09):
He wrote about this in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which came
out in the nineties, and he also wrote a chapter
about it in his book Intuition, Pumps and other tools
for thinking. And I always found this comparison very interesting.
But maybe maybe you can illuminate us. But what application
does the Library of Babel have to the genes that

(38:31):
build our bodies? Well, let me read a quick quote
here from from Dinnett that I think helps to eliminate
this quote. The actual genomes that have ever existed are
a vanishingly small subset of the combinatorially possible genomes, just
as the actual books in the world's libraries are a
vanishingly small subset of the books in the imaginary Library

(38:55):
of Babel. Yeah, so din It actually puts together an
alternate verse shin of the library. He just substitutes in
some alternate numbers and does some number crunching. But I
think it's actually interesting what he comes up with. Yeah,
look for starters. He he does some some fun number
crunching on the Library of Babbel itself. Um, here, here's

(39:17):
just a quick quote from this h And again we're
gonna throw some numbers at you here, but I think
it's worth it. So suppose that each book is five
hundred pages long, and each page consists of forty lines
of fifty spaces, So there are two thousand characters spaces
per page. Each space is either is blank or has
a character printed on it, chosen from a set of
one hundred Somewhere in the Library of Babble as a
volume consisting entirely of blank pages, and another volume is

(39:39):
all question marks, but the vast majority consists of type
of graphical gibberish. No rules of spelling or grammar, to
say nothing of sense prohibit the inclusion of a volume.
Five hundred pages times two thousand characters per page gives
one million character spaces per book. So there are one
hundred to the one million power books in the Library

(39:59):
of Babble. Since it's it estimated that there are only one,
give or take a few particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons
in the region of the universe, we can observe the
Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object.
But thanks to the strict rules with which Borhe is
constructed it in his imagination, we can think about it clearly.

(40:23):
So I I like, I like how he sort of
reins it when he doesn't rein it in. But well,
he crunches the numbers of it and and just lays
out the fact that this could not exist in the
physical universe. Yeah, yeah, I mean there is not space
in the universe for it. And yet it is still
arguably a finite object. Oh, not arguably, it's definitely finite.

(40:46):
But well, but that's the thing. It's finite in a
way like there and certainly this is a subject we've
covered in other episodes on on the nature of infinity.
But there, of course different types of infinity. And so
it's physically fine, it's physically finite, but it is from
a human perspective it might as well be infinite. Well,
you can make the case that while it is physically

(41:08):
finite in that there are a limited number of books
however vast, you know, impossibly vast to contain in the
real universe. There there are a actually limited number of books,
but there might not be a limited amount of information
because if you follow this, uh, the same strategy we
mentioned earlier of allowing one book's contents to spill over
into another volume, and given the fact that all volumes

(41:31):
possible to represent our present, meaning all unfinished ideas will
be continued into other ideas, there is potentially limitless information
in the limited library of Babel. Well, yeah, I mean,
I can't help but think of the infinity hotel analogy
like I did it, Like an infinite number of people

(41:51):
show up to a hotel and then another infinite number
shop on another bus. Um what I mean, what what
do you do about books that themselves are infinite? What
do you do about Bore Hayes the Book of Sands,
which is a book that is that that is endless?
How many books then does that contain? Like trying to
shelve the Book of sand uh in the Library of
Babbel is kind of like a busload of infinite hotel

(42:14):
guests showing up at the infinity Hotel. Well, I would
say that the Library of Babel itself is sort of
an argument that there could not be such a thing
as an infinite book. That there there there are books
that are so vast as to, you know, stifle our comprehension.
But if you think of the Library of Babel itself
as one book that you can just move the pages

(42:36):
around as much as you want, all possible representations of
all possible characters are there, but the book is finite.
That's true. That's a good point. But let's let's bring
it back to Dinnett So Dinnett proposes a variation on
the Library of Babel that he calls the Library of Mendel,
named after Men, the Mendel, famous of men Dalian genetics,

(42:58):
and it's a library that contains all possible genomes. So
if we assume that the Library of Mendel is composed
of descriptions of genomes, then not not the molecules themselves,
but the the coding that would represent what is contained
in your gene recipes. Um that's the case, then you

(43:19):
could you could argue that, well, they're actually already part
of the Library of Babel, as the standard code for
DNA descriptions consists of the characters A, C, G and
T for addanine, setosine, guanine, and thymine. Uh. These are
the four nucleotides that compose the letters of the DNA alphabet, right,
so if you're going to spell out a representation of

(43:40):
your genome, you'd use those four letters. So since those
are letters that are already part of the alphabet, that
makes the Library of Babel, the Library of Mendel is
a subset of the Library of Babel. Yeah, and according
to Dennet, you need to vote three thousand of the
five page volumes in the Library of Babbel just to
cover the human genome. Truly, Library Babble. That's not really

(44:02):
a problem, as we've discussed UM. However, I hope that
the purifiers in this case haven't been destroying these copies
you think they would, like they come across a book
that's just a bunch of A C, T and G
what what what use is this? It looks like more gibberish,
But they're really just burning the Library of Mendel volume

(44:22):
after volume, and who knows we might need those someday. Well,
that sort of highlights another thing about the Library of Babel,
which is, uh, how do you necessarily know when you've
come across something of significance, Like we've been assuming that
you would know a book of significance or preciousness when
you found it, but it might be encoding something for
the code for which you cannot read. So if if

(44:46):
we're we're lining up the Library of Mendel with the
Library of Babble or within it, UM, this means that
not only would the Library of Mendel have all genomes,
and it would also have all possible genomes within its
frame of reference. UM says, then it puts it we're
forced to quote start in the middle, and we have
only the current state of evolved biology to consider as

(45:07):
well as the terrestrial model. But then they're gonna be
all these other possibilities as well. Yeah, So what what
happens on Earth is not that you look around and
you find all possible variations on all possible genes in
uh or actually with the library of mental would be
all possible sequences of nucleotides and even more minute than genes. Um,

(45:31):
you don't see that in nature. In fact, the nature
that exists as a very tiny subset of the library
of mental. That's right. And then there there's so much
in the Library of mental that, like the Library of babble,
would just be nonsense. Um, the vast majority of it
is gonna be just blueprint blueprints for lifelessness. In quoting

(45:52):
Richard Dawkins, he says, quote, there are many more ways
of being dead or not alive than ways of being alive.
I think it's a good quote, and that makes sense.
I mean, most recipes you could come up with for
building a building are not actually going to be structurally viable.
Most recipes you could come up with for you know,

(46:12):
if you're just combining random chemicals to make food, most
of it would not be edible. Oh my goodness. Yet imagine,
like we haven't even talked about this, and I hadn't
really thought about it till now, but imagine cookbooks in
the Library of Babel, the baking cookbooks specifically, So many
of these recipes, the vast majority of the recipes are
just gonna be garbage creating, like creating not even like

(46:34):
the bread doesn't rise, the gough just just goops there
at the bottom of the pan. But what about the
ones that are perfectly excellent cookbooks except they all tell
you to add one bucket of cigarette butts to your
recipe every time. Yeah, or everything is delicious but also poisoned.
But like many of the books in the Library of Babbel,
I digress. Yeah, well, so the library of Mendel, as

(46:58):
didn't understand, is it is sort of what he would
call universal design space, which is this multidimensional space that
is how would you describe it, Robert Um? And this
is my understanding. So I might have it wrong, but
the way I keep thinking of it as it's that
black bed on the light bright Okay, in which you

(47:18):
put the pegs and stuff against the light up and
and essentially if you took a light bright and you
made the tree of life on it. Um, that's what
the universal design space is. Well, right, it's the possible
design space for things made out of d N a
in the way we understand DNA, and like we said,
that contains tons and tons of possible combinations that don't

(47:41):
lead to anything like what we would call life for
successful life. Right. And also this universal design space would
contain all actual complex phenomena, both biological designs and cultural designs,
so it would contain bacteria, apes, humans, books about apes,
jokes about apes, Great eight movies, Bad eight movies, etcetera. Yeah,

(48:04):
I love the way that this connects information at all levels.
So within the Library of Babel, you have both the
recipe for making my genome, so you could say, uh uh,
physical information in a way, the information contained in the molecules,
but also every story I've ever written, which you could
consider part of my genetic phenotype. Right, it's the molecules

(48:27):
in my DNA have, in combination with external circumstances, ultimately
led to the creation of every bit of intellectual work
I've ever done, and this is the same for all
of us, and both are subsets of the library of Babel. Yeah,
I'm going to read another quick quote from the identity here.
According to Darwin's dangerous idea, all possible explorations of design

(48:50):
space are connected not only all your children and your
children's children, but all your brain children and your brain
children's brain children must grow from the common stock of
design elements, genes and memes that have so far been
accumulated and conserved by the inexorable lifting algorithms, the ramps
and cranes, and cranes the top cranes of natural selection

(49:13):
and its products. And just to explain really quick, there
didn't when he talks about cranes. He has this idea
of design being the difference between the metaphors of cranes
and the metaphors of sky hooks. Sky Hooks are these
ideas that he thinks about design coming from the top down,
reaching in and making something without any previous precedent, whereas

(49:39):
cranes are things that build from the ground up, and
they can become higher and higher based on bases that
have already been built. The whole standing on the backbone,
on the backs of giants. Yeah, exactly. So, so natural
selection is a crane algorithm, as he would describe it,
as something that builds from the ground up. So thinking
of the Library of Babbel or the Library of Mental

(50:00):
as spaces of possibility that are different than the spaces
of what can actually be achieved in terms of living organisms.
I think it's interesting that then it goes on to
he puts together this diagram that's concentric circles of different
types of possibility that the Library of Babel and the
Library of Mental help us think about. And I like

(50:21):
this because I think possibility is a word that very
often gets equivocated on in our conversation. So think about
these concentric circles of possibility. It's like a Venn diagram,
but each circles inside the bigger one. So the smallest
circle in the middle is what's actually true. So the
example he gives his President Clinton, there has been a

(50:42):
real President Clinton that actually happened. It's true. We might
even get another one maybe, so, but then there is
historical possibility, right, President gold Water could have happened, but
given historical circumstances, it didn't. All of the all of
the pieces where the air that it seemed like it
could have happened. It's just not how the universe went. Uh.

(51:05):
Then there is biological possibility that's a bigger circle, which
the example he gives his striped giraffe could have happened
given what's possible with life on Earth, but it didn't. Now,
technically we do have copies which which are not striped giraffes,
but they are kind of the related to giraffes and
are kind of like a forest giraffe with some zebra

(51:28):
esque stripes. Well, you know that that's a danger we
always play with when we entered the realm of talking
about what's possible, we don't even always know what's really happened.
But then bigger than biological possibility is physical possibility. With
the example he gives is a flying horse, so doesn't
violate the laws of physics, is just you know, it's

(51:49):
not something that you're going to see in the biological world.
It's kind of like getting into our flying fish episode
where we talked about, you know, the problem with first
of all, recognizing the fact that there could be a
fish biologically with wings that could fly and not just
glide across the water, and yet it does not exist. Right.
And then finally, the biggest circle of possibility is logical possibility,

(52:13):
which is Superman. So Superman is also not physically possible.
It violates the laws of physics, but it's not logically
impossible because it doesn't entail a logical contradiction. It doesn't
entail both A and not A. So you could say
it's possible. And I think that it's interesting because everything
that is logically possible is in the Library of Babel, right,

(52:37):
All descriptions that are logically possible are in the Library
of Babel. And and as a subset, every description that's
physically possible in terms of the the nucleotides listed is
in the Library of Mendel. But then the subset of that,
everything that's biologically possible, is the biology that we actually

(52:59):
see or that could actually evolve from the tree of
life as it exists today. But I want to move
on to another application of the Library of Babel, and
because I think we were about about to get lost
with UH, and that's UH the work of the American
philosopher and logician W. V. O. Quine. So Quine wrote

(53:21):
a very short piece on the Library of Babel called
the Universal Library essay, and I recommend you can check
this out yourself because it's incredibly short, very concise. So
I want to read a quote from it where Quine
also he sort of reformulates the library in the same
way Dinnett did, just playing around with some numbers to
get different numbers, but the same principle. Qin says, at

(53:42):
two thousand characters to the page, we get five hundred
thousand to the two hundred and fifty page volume. So
with say a D capitals and smalls and other marks
to choose from, I wonder what those other marks are,
maybe a lot of hashtags. We arrive at the five
hundred thousand power of a D as the total number
of books in the library. I gather that there is

(54:04):
not room in the present phase of our expanding universe
on present estimates for more than a negligible fraction of
the collection. Numbers are cheap, so he's arrived at the
same conclusion as others before. This wouldn't fit in the universe,
And I like the expression numbers are cheap, especially when
you have notation like exponential notation. You can write out
a number like five to the one million, three D

(54:26):
and twelve power, but just writing that on the page.
It's a kind of small marking notation, but it denotes
something that could not possibly be contained in the universe.
But Quine draws this back to something we've mentioned before.
The number of books in the library, while bigger than
could be contained, is not infinite. It's definitely finite. At

(54:49):
a certain point, you could catalog every possible book in
the Library of Babel, just not in this universe, and
yet quote the entire and ultimate truth about everything is
printed in full in that library. After all, insofar as
it can be put into words at all, every true
statement and every false statement you could possibly make are

(55:13):
in the library. And yet the library is finite. So,
for instance, there there is that mythical not mythical, but
at least an elusive book or series of books that
that outline the location of all the books in the
Library of Babel. But then there are all possible inferior
copies and misleading copies of that same series, long, long, long,

(55:38):
long series of books. Uh that that that offered to
show you where everything is, and don't there's the catalog
that tells you to dive over the spiral staircase railing
and and just fall until you come to the Crimson hexagon,
and it's lying to you because the problem is you'll
pretty much keep falling forever. Oh wow, and we haven't
even gotten to how the toilets work here, Like, that's
not covered in Borhess book all how what's the plumbing like?

(56:02):
But it is covered in some book in the library. Yeah,
there is a book in the library that just deals
exhaustively explains where the plumbing goes, does it? I wonder
where it goes. If there's an end to the Library
of Babel, then there is an end to those interconnected
pipes that carrate all the the fecal matter and urine
a way right, and of course the watered up pieces

(56:24):
of of nonsense books that are being used for toilet paper.
All of the sewage plumbing goes directly to the hexagon
housing unauthorized biographies of celebrities who recently passed away. Well
you say that, Joe, But remember in the Library of
Babel there is an unauthorized autobiography of say, Heath Ledger

(56:46):
that is not that is not only good, but it
is great. An unauthorized autobiography would be there in the
mean to say biography, but But that's the thing. Any
mistake I make in speaking the Library of Babbel has
me covered. It exists. Is it factual? Is it is
their truth in it? I don't know, but it could

(57:06):
still be entertaining. Maybe it's unauthorized by the heath Ledger
of our universe that it was, but it is authorized
by the heath Ledger of an alternate universe. Yeah, well
that would be there, wouldn't it. Okay, So I gotta
bring it back to Quine. So back to Quine. We
we mentioned a couple of times now that there's this

(57:27):
principle that, well, what if a book takes more than
pages to express, you know, that can't be in the library.
But it can be because it gets picked up right
where it left off in a second volume, and a
third if necessary, and so on, and all those volumes
are in the library. So you have like Showgun volume one,
Showgun volume two. Yeah, it never ends. But given this

(57:50):
principle that messages can be spread across multiple volumes, Quine
realizes that you can use a form of Morse code
to massively downsize the library to exactly two books with
one page each. One book is a single page with
a dash and the other is a single page with
a dot. And by reading these books back and forth

(58:12):
in various orders, you can code any alphabetic sequence in
a simplified form of Morse code. Now the library has
massively shrunken size, but it has the exact same encoding
power if you were to, you know, if you're to
actually map out the combinations and do all of the
same possible combinations. But let's think about it in another way.

(58:36):
You can replace the dot and the dash with a
zero and a one, or of course, and on an
off switch. In other words, binary code and your universal
library has become the same type of information storage system
that exists inside your computer. And this illuminates a principle
that Alan Turing and others observed about the binary computer.

(58:57):
It's universal. Like any information in our operation that can
be represented in code, which potentially is all information or operations,
depending on you know, your philosophical orientation to that question,
it can be represented by a universal binary machine. So,
on one hand, this seems to sort of violate the

(59:18):
allure of the library. Right in the library of Babel,
there are already in existence the precious books. They're already
out there, the books of ultimate potential, beauty and truth
physically exist, we just have to find them. But in
the binary universal library, we'd have to encode those books ourselves.
But maybe this disconnects sort of highlights and inherent irony

(59:40):
in the mathematics of the Library of Babel. Those books
exist in the Library of Babel, but for any individual librarian,
they will never ever be found. Would be, as we said,
extremely lucky to discover a book with one tin word
long sentence that makes sense. And so we're sort of
back to the monkeys with typewriters in the Library of Babel.

(01:00:02):
You're watching the monkeys type at random and hoping they
give you the complete works of Shakespeare. But they're never
going to do it. In coins to volume library, you
yourself are the monkey typing at random. It makes no
difference in terms of the knowledge discovered, just how it
feels to be a part of the discovery system. So

(01:00:22):
what you need is an interface on top of quients system,
such such as say a pink Kindle, instantly search out
the books you want, um from all the possible um
you know books out there in the library right now.
This is, of course a very different way than the
way we actually generate books in reality, which is, in
reality we use heuristic shortcuts of intelligence, human brain power,

(01:00:47):
creativity to try to limit the size of the total
number of possible books and only generate books that more
or less makes sense, at least hopefully in the author's mind. Yeah,
generally you're you're the author's only writing, you know, six
to eight versions of that book, right, But when when
limiting the noise like that, we are also limiting the signal,

(01:01:09):
So there's a given take. So by by cutting out
all of the nonsense books, we massively reduce our searching
for significance project, But we also eliminate possibly the most
precious books out there because we just didn't think to
create them. Yeah, we thought to create them, and that's
time right, right. Isn't that funny that the Library of

(01:01:32):
Babbel makes me feel even worse about about all of
the books I want to read and don't get around
to reading because we don't live in the Library of Babel.
We live in Uh, well, you could say we live
in a version of the Library of Babel that is
the universe, But in terms of the readable library of
books available to us, it's not the Library of Babel.
It's mostly books that just makes sense, and I still

(01:01:53):
don't get to all the books that I should be reading. Yeah,
not only does it contain all the books you should
be reading, all the books you want to read, it
contains all the books you could have written, all the
books you could write in your life, which is it's
kind of a very heartbreaking thing to think of as
a writer, Like when you didn't have time to write
last week, Well, that story that you would have written,

(01:02:15):
it's in that collection, somewhere somewhere lost in the the
the the seemingly infinite but ultimately finite honeycomb of books
set ablaze by a purifier. Another idea that this made
me think about is if a world contains all possible
combinations of code of information signaling code, so all possible information,

(01:02:40):
is it in fact no different than something that contains
no information whatsoever? Yeah? Yeah, it really does, doesn't it.
It's um, it's like saying that, ohever, I put all
possible colors into this paint. Can look at this wonderful
color I have. No, you just have black at this point,
you just have or I'm weird brown. Um. It's not

(01:03:02):
the same as saying that it actually encompasses all of
these uh, these these pure elements on a much smaller scale.
This makes me think back on you know, not too
long ago, I was watching, Oh it was something on YouTube.
It was like a c SPAN event from the early
two thousands or late nineties, I think, And it was
some journalists talking. I wish I could remember who, but

(01:03:23):
some journalists talking about the impact of the Internet on
the spread of information. And I remember hearing the sentiment that,
you know, they were saying, well, the Internet is great
because it opens up all these uh you know, new channel.
Anybody can start a blog and share their perspective and
stuff like that. And I think about the cacophony of
of information or should we call it information, the cacophony

(01:03:45):
of voices that we live in now. You know, I
can't say that I would prefer to live in a
world where where there were fewer people talking about things.
But at the same time, I can't say that I
feel really in pitched by the quantity of perspective and
opinion being shared on the Internet. You know, yeah, yeah,

(01:04:09):
I agree. Now here's a question for you. Uh, as
long as we're playing with the ideas that spiral out
endlessly from the Library of Babbel. Here, imagine a future
in which you know we have we all have virtual
worlds that we've built, and someone creates not only not
something far beyond our current online version of the Library

(01:04:32):
of Babbel. Imagine a functional virtual library of Babbel world.
You put on your headset, you climb into your tank,
turn on your you know, your drip, and then you're
in there, and the computer is actually creating each room
as you go, the nonsense books. So it would have
to be procedurally generated because the computer storage system could

(01:04:53):
not store the entire library, would have to create as
as you go, and and so. But as you go,
it is actually right, non existent books is writing um
different versions of books that already exist. It seems feasible.
And certainly when we start to start considering the end
of the possibility of of of AI writers AI artists,

(01:05:17):
could we reach a point where the Library of Babble
exists in in in in actually trying to come up
with new ideas for non existent books. Instead of dreaming
them up ourselves, we are actually questioning through the library
and forcing this randomized artificial intelligence to create them. No,
I think that would never work well because the library

(01:05:38):
is too vast. Like we've said, you would come across
just pure nonsense. You could wander through this virtual library
your whole life and find almost nothing but complete nonsense.
Maybe one day you'd find three words in a row
that made some kind of grammatical sense. Would that be
worth it? I feel like it might be worth it
to wander this library. If a library was made real

(01:06:01):
in a virtual setting. Can you imagine, like the the
excitement you would feel when you actually found something readable? Uh?
I can imagine actual plans of purifiers and other sex
that would be wandering. I don't know. I Well, so
here's one thing. Maybe we could uh massively narrow the
size of the library, still be astronomical and impossible, but

(01:06:23):
impossible to find something all that valuable. But what if
you limited it to words in a dictionary, So a
procedurally generated library of babbel that, instead of all possible
combinations of characters, was all possible combinations of words that
exist in a dictionary in your language. Yeah, I guess
that would narrow it somewhat, but it's still mostly be gibberish,

(01:06:44):
wouldn't it. Huh? I guess I can't help but think
of it, because I um, I recently read Ready Player
one or if you made with this book. I've heard
of it, but I haven't read it. It's pretty fun,
fun book about virtual worlds and recreations of things that
exist in pop culture. Library of Apple does not come up,
but I can't help but think about that, especially since

(01:07:05):
that book deals with the virtual world that contains easter
eggs that people are searching for, you know, these little
nuggets of meaning, and essentially they're trying to find a
uh a Crimson hexagon of a sort in that book.
So you know, I can't help but think about the
Library of Babel as an analogy to the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. You know the vast scale of the universe

(01:07:29):
and are the only difference is that the Library of
Babel you can know how much there is and you
can sort of say, well, here are the types of
things we'd be looking for for books that makes sense.
But we're still looking for books that makes sense from
our perspective, right, based on our model of sensical books.
And maybe in reality we're no better than the purifiers

(01:07:52):
running around setting things alight because they don't just dismissing
things because they don't line up with our expectations of
or her. And since Robert, it is your kind of
lawlessness and anarchy that has led to the library being
the kind of place it is today. We need someone
with a strong hand to set the library right, a
new head librarian. Yes, m all right, well we could

(01:08:17):
obviously we could go on and on here doing a
various thought experiments about the Library of Babel. And I'm
sure you guys and gals can as well. Maybe there's
some spin on it that's come to your mind. Maybe
there's a cool spin on it that you've encountered in
other works. Uh. If so, we would love to hear
about it. We would love to have any number of discussions,

(01:08:37):
um dare I say almost infinite number of discussions about
the Library of Babble. You can get in touch with
this the usual places sofal media where stuff to blow
your mind or blow the mind on a number of
those stuff to blow your mind. Dot com is the mothership.
And then of course there is always email where you
can email your favorite selection from the Library of Babel

(01:08:59):
to us at Blow the Mind is how Stuff Works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics is that how stuff works. Dot com