O Time Thy Pyramids: The 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 and Joe venture into this metaphoric labyrinth for contemplations of genetics, cosmology, philosophy, computer programing and magic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, Hello, this is Stuff to Blow
your Mind audiologue. This is Robert Lamb and this is
Joe McCormick. This is day thirteen of our descent into

(00:26):
the famed Library of Babble. We've been exploring this infinite
sprawl of interconnected hexagonal rooms and the twenty bookshelves contained
within each one. Joe, how many rooms have we explored
since last log entry? Oh, let me find it here.
Let's see. Well, we're up to a hundred and twelve,
and that brings the grand total of rooms we have
explored to date up to one thousand, five hundred and

(00:49):
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 said empty shelves,
smoke lines on the ceiling, 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.

(01:11):
That 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, book by book procedures. Now, fortunately,
most of the books are nonsense, and you can spot

(01:32):
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 rooms directly above us, and I keep
wondering if it's them. It could be, but you know,
it could be the bookman, I know that's superstition joke.

(01:53):
We I mean, we might as well hope to find
that with 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, but that doesn't mean it actually exists, even
in the Library of Babel. Now, remember, Robert, these rooms

(02:16):
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 that Crimson Hexagon is out there.
You know, maybe the purifiers haven't found it yet because
it moves. Have you thought about that? Like in the
movie Cube rooms move around while we're asleep? Who are

(02:38):
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, the guy who wrote the screenplay,
and he never actually wrote a novel version, right, Oh no,

(02:58):
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 Collored of destruction. What about you check this out
Frank Herbert's complete seven book done series. Yeah, not not

(03:20):
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 irotic. Yeah, yeah, you've got to read this. Yeah,
it's on my list. 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

(03:43):
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, here's yours, then just
swap thank you. Uh, there we go. We're good. Wait,
wait a minute, did you hear that? It's probably just

(04:05):
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 Hexa gone up ahead, looks pretty promised me. Hey,

(04:26):
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be talking about the Library of Babel. So the
Library of Babel is both uh it's a short story,
but it's also the concept at the core of the
short story. And we're really going to be focusing on
the concept uh and it's broader implications today. Not just

(04:47):
the story itself, but the concept of the Library of
Babel comes from a short story of the same name
by Jorge Louis 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

(05:09):
in his life, he 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
Babble was not really a narrative experience. It's not very
plot heavy, right. It's kind of a sort of scholarly

(05:29):
missive about a fantastic idea. 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 and his his stories. There there are a number
of different themes that often pop up, such as knives, mirrors, dreams, oh, dreams.
There's some fabulous dream stories, um and and they're all

(05:52):
pretty short. Like That's one of the wonderful things about
a collection of Borhe's short fiction is you can just
pick it up. You can pretty 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 at world building than they

(06:16):
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, it reminds me

(06:37):
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 Boes in their ability to without getting too bogged
down in story or character, just presenting in a nugget

(06:58):
like a really easy 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 others

(07:20):
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, which

(07:42):
in turn opens onto another gallery identical to the first,
identical in fact, to all to the right and left
of the vestibule, or two tiny compartments. One is for
sleeping upright, the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through
this space to there passes a spiral staircase which winds

(08:03):
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

(08:23):
basic setup. This is the basic hexagon, 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, et cetera,

(08:45):
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 we'll discussed, there seems to be
a lack of a lack of laws and policy in

(09:08):
place in the Library of Babble. Yeah, so in the
Library of Babble. We're going to talk about the philosophical
and scientific implications of this thought experiment and 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

(09:30):
that 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,

(09:54):
So let's get into the actual numbers of what this
library would entail as described in the story. So, as
sport Hase 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.

(10:15):
So 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,

(10:36):
you know some letters are kind of redundant, aren't 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 a d characters per line,

(10:59):
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

(11:22):
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

(11:43):
recreating the works of Shakespeare. 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 ShakespeRe. But so the library contains all books there

(12:03):
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,

(12:24):
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

(12:46):
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 aim 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

(13:09):
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

(13:32):
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

(13:54):
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, that maybe have a

(14:15):
few different typos in the 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,

(14:36):
And all that 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 is it all on the same shelf? No, it's
all on the same hexagon. Probably not, because it's arranged
in random or to making it even more frustrating to
try to find anything, though not necessarily even more frustrating,

(14:56):
because if you try to imagine what navigating the library
of Babel would be 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 yeah, and you would just be physically unable
to traverse that area and get to the sensible books. Right.

(15:17):
So I'd actually prefer a 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, umming the
Library of the Library Battle, so like a lot of
people probably recognize it from umberto Eco's masterful Name of

(15:38):
the Rose, where an actual library and an Italian monastery
is is modeled on this. There are aspects of it
that I believe are utilized in the 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.

(15:58):
It's about a man who obtains a pink kindle and
it turns out to be a kindle from another no
I haven't, and it gives him access not only to
the kindle store in our universe, but also to kindle
stores in alternate universe, so he's able to access books
by authors he loves. That have not yet been written,

(16:19):
or that that just were not written in our world.
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 Babbel and
just start pulling books off the shelf, there is a
tool you can use. A Brooklyn author named Jonathan Vassil
has created a virtual version. You can go to it

(16:41):
Library of Babbel dot info. You can go explore this
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 healf of the library
by name which I guess it generates the text that

(17:05):
would be 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 have.
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.

(17:27):
Who were 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. So
they're given the impossible task of caring for the library

(17:48):
exploring it, 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 and ned 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.

(18:08):
I 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 They seems like their
jobs should be similar, but they have different philosophical aims.

(18:33):
What else, then we have the Purifiers, who we alluded
to already, and these 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 then maybe they're not
the ones to judge. How are Maybe a book that

(18:54):
seems like nonsense is not nonsense. Maybe they're burning a
bunch of sous any comings and they don't even realize.
But mainly they are in search of something known as
the Crimson Hexagon. Yea, And now we alluded to this
to 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 to exist. Yes, no,

(19:19):
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

(19:41):
by the way, is it is an infinite book of
the factors into another Borhees story. Uh, you would find
just all these books of power and meaning, books that
answer our big questions like this is this is like
a mythological center for the library, a place of order
and answer, and it gives many people in the library

(20:03):
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 of
b Apple contains all possible books, that means it must
contain a book or books about the library itself. It

(20:24):
must contain a book that tells the reader how to
find what you want. It lays it autologue or guide
for the library itself, like 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 found that book. That is quote,

(20:46):
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 Babble, and

(21:08):
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 Babbel 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, then

(21:30):
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 that 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

(21:50):
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

(22:12):
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 that's 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 you're looking for, and then
you have to contend with young people who wander into

(22:33):
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. The fact
that I found interesting when I was reading about borges
life was that Bores was himself a librarian at multiple

(22:54):
different times in his life for almost a decade, beginning
in around nineteen 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 I

(23:16):
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 Borhes 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 his

(23:38):
library position. When Juan Perone came to power in Argentina
and I think nineteen forty five or forty six, and
he Borrees 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, Perrone
demoted Borhees to the job title of pult re Inspector.

(24:01):
Borre His 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,

(24:24):
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

(24:48):
through an online database of books via a library system
or Amazon. Uh and uh and I can I can
see even with it with older catalog systems, where one
might have that experience, especially if one is a true
of roth books as as Borges you know, definitely was.
But of course the Library of Babbel is more than
just an interesting short story, right, It's become this door

(25:10):
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 are going to learn

(25:30):
more about the implications of the Library of Babel as
a thought experiment. So the characters in the Library of Babbel,
they all seem to be searching 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

(25:53):
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

(26:15):
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

(26:37):
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.

(26:59):
But in my child too, 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

(27:20):
you've got a gang of monkeys and you put them
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. One of the
key factors here, and that that's not depending on what

(27:42):
the work is, 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.

(28:03):
But in the Borhey 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 search for meaning, only

(28:25):
the observer's level of personal activity within it. So the
librarians in the library of Babbel 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 the Wegi board, they're just

(28:47):
more like 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

(29:08):
playing God. 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,

(29:32):
how 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 is intense. I mean, he says
in the first line that universes the library. Yeah, so

(29:53):
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

(30:15):
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

(30:39):
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 a certainly we've from

(31:01):
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. Not every hexagon that contains
a basically sensical operation manual for a VCR is the

(31:25):
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 Babble are within
the Library of Babble. They don't step outside of it.
They don't. They don't wander back to the surface of

(31:46):
some you know, Dungeon 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
quest is they might to understand the shape and nature
of the library. They cannot step beyond the library for

(32:07):
an 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
and the and and the functionality of the human mind.
It's you're trapped within the form you're trying to understand. Yeah,

(32:27):
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

(32:49):
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

(33:10):
or the library? No? No, not really. 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. So there

(33:34):
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 an 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

(33:54):
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
and the ability to recognize it when you see. Uh.
This sort of goes back to our P versus NP discussion,

(34:17):
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

(34:44):
person who could recognize a precious book also generate that
same precious book? I don't know, but it kind of
makes me wonder. Like the Library of Babble brings up
these quite 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 of true things,

(35:05):
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 done right, Like how would would I be
able to tell if I found a copy of doone
in the library? That is that that exceeds the original?

(35:28):
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 we we're gonna have a
bias towards what we already know, what we already have,

(35:48):
which is which gets involved in in 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 is ofvolved here. Uh, we have
nothing else to base it on. We only have this
copy of doone alas alas that we have but one

(36:09):
reality of doone to draw from. Shay alude 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, alright. So, as the Library of Babel is

(36:32):
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 borhees 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 Dennett.

(36:55):
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 or what application
does the Library of Babbel have to the genes that

(37:16):
build our bodies? Well, let me read a quick quote
here from from Dinnet that I think helps to eliminate
this quote. The actual genomes that have ever existed are
a vanished, only 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

(37:40):
Library of Babbel. Yeah, so din It actually puts together
an alternate version 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

(38:02):
just a quick quote from this. Uh, and again we're
gonna throw some numbers that 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

(38:24):
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

(38:44):
of Babbel. Since it's just estimated that there are only
one d to give or take a few particles, protons, neutrons,
and electrons in the region of the universe, we can
observe the Library of Babbel is not remotely a physically
possible object. But thanks to the strict rules with which
Borhe has constructed in his imagination, we can think about

(39:07):
it clearly. So I I like, I like how he
sort of reins it, why he doesn't rein it in,
but how 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,

(39:30):
it's definitely finite. 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 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,

(39:50):
you can make the case that while it is physically finite,
and 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

(40:13):
another volume, and given the fact that all volumes 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 babble. Well, yeah, I mean, I
can't help but think of the infinity hotel analogy like

(40:35):
I did it, like an infinite number of people 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 Borhees 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 Babble is

(40:56):
kind of like a busload of infinite hotel guests show
going up to 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

(41:18):
as one book that you can just move the pages
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

(41:38):
Mendel named after Men, the Mendel, famous of men Dalian genetics,
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 write not not the molecules themselves,
but it the the coding that would represent what is

(42:00):
contained in your recipes. Um. If that's the case, then
you 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 adanine, setosin squanine, and thymine uh. These
are the four nucleotides that compose the letters of the

(42:22):
DNA alphabet, right, so if you're going to spell out
a representation of 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 Dinnet, you needed to vote three thousand
of the five page volumes in the Library of Babbel

(42:43):
just to cover the human genome, which really library of Babble.
That's not really a problem. They're right, as we've discussed UM. However,
I hope that the purifiers in this case haven't been
destroying these copies. You just think they would, like they
come across a book that's just a bunch of A C, E,
T and G. What what what use is this? It

(43:03):
looks like more gibberish, but really just burning the Library
of Mendel volume 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

(43:24):
might be encoding something for the code for which you
cannot read. So if if we're we're lining up the
Library of Mendel with the Library of Babbel 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

(43:46):
puts it we're forced to quote start in the middle,
and we have only the current state of evolved biology
to consider as 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

(44:10):
mental would be all possible sequences of nucleotides and even
more minute than genes. Um, 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,

(44:30):
the vast majority of it is gonna be just blueprint
blueprints for lifelessness. In quoting Richard Dawkins, he says, quote,
there are many more ways of being dead or not
alive than ways of being alive. I think that's a
good quote, and that makes sense. I mean, most recipes
you could come up with for building a building are

(44:52):
not actually going to be structurally viable. Most recipes you
could come up with for you know, 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 to now, But imagine cookbooks in the Library
of Babel, the baking cookbooks specifically, So many of these recipes,

(45:14):
the vast majority of the recipes are just gonna be
garbage creating, like creating not even like the bread doesn't rise,
the dough 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

(45:37):
of the books in the Library of Babel, I digress. Yeah, well,
so the library of Mendel as then it understands it
is sort of what he would call universal design space,
which is this multidimensional space that is how would you
describe it? Um? And this is my understanding, So I
might have it wrong, but the way I keep thinking

(45:59):
of it as that black bed on the light bright, okay,
in which you 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 DNA
in the way we understand DNA, and like we said,

(46:22):
that contains tons and tons of possible combinations that don't
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 eights,

(46:43):
jokes about eights, great eight movies, bad eight movies, etcetera. Yeah,
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,
physical information in a way, the information contained in the molecules,

(47:05):
but also every story I've ever written, which you could
consider part of my genetic phenotype. Right, it's the molecules
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,

(47:28):
I'm going to read another quick quote from Adnit here.
According to Darwin's dangerous idea, all possible explorations of design
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

(47:49):
accumulated and conserved by the inexorable lifting algorithms, the ramps
and cranes and cranes the top cranes of natural selection
and its products. And just to explain really quick there,
dinn't when he talks about cranes. He has this idea
of design being the difference between the metaphors of cranes

(48:11):
and the metaphors of sky hooks. Sky Hooks are these
ideas that he thinks about design coming from the top down,
reaching in and and uh making something without any previous precedent,
whereas cranes are things that build from the ground up,
and they can become higher and higher based on bases
that have already been built standing on the backbone on

(48:33):
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 as
spaces of possibility that are different than the spaces of
what can actually be achieved in terms of living organisms.

(48:53):
I think it's interesting that dinn 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
this because I think possibility is a word that very
often gets equivocated on in our conversation. So think about

(49:13):
these concentric circles of possibilities 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 real
President Clinton that actually happened. It's true. We might even
get another one maybe. So but then there is historical possibility,

(49:36):
right President Goldwater could have happened, but given historical circumstances,
it didn't. All of the all of the pieces were
there that it seemed like it could have happened. It's
just not how the universe went, Uh, 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

(49:58):
with life on Earth. It didn't. Now, technically we do
have copies which which are not striped giraffes, but they
are kind of that they're related to giraffes and are
kind of like a forest giraffe with some zebra 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,

(50:20):
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 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

(50:43):
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. And
then finally, the biggest circle of possibility is logical possibility,
which is Superman. So Superman is also not physically possible.

(51:03):
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,
All descriptions that are logically possible are in the Library

(51:25):
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
see or that could actually evolve from the tree of

(51:47):
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 the mean uh and that's uh the work of
the American philosopher and logician W. V. O. Quine. So
Quine wrote a very short piece on the Library of

(52:08):
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 Dennett did, just playing around with some numbers
to get different numbers, but the same principle. Quin says,
at two thousand characters to the page, we get five

(52:30):
hundred thousand to the two hundred and fifty page volume.
So with say eight 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 eighty as the total number of
books in the library. I gather that there is not
room in the present phase of our expanding universe on

(52:52):
present estimates for more than a negligible fraction of the collection.
Numbers are cheap, so he's arrived at the same conclusion
as other 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 twenty five to the one million, three hundred
and twelve power, but just writing that on the page,

(53:16):
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
a certain point, you could catalog every possible book in

(53:38):
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
in the library. And yet the library is finite. So,

(54:03):
for instance, there there is that mythical or 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 Battle. But then there are all possible
inferior copies and misleading copies of that same series, long, long, long,

(54:23):
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 Borg's book at all. How what's the

(54:46):
plumbing life? 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 Apple, then there is an end to
those interconnected pipes that carry all the the fecal matter
and urine A way right, and of course the watered

(55:08):
up pieces of of nonsense books that are being used
for to all of the sewage plumbing goes directly to
the hexagon housing unauthorized biographies of celebrities who recently passed away.
While you say that, Joe, but remember in the Library
of Babel there is an unauthorized autobiography of say Heath

(55:31):
Ledger that is not that is not only good, but
it is great. An unauthorized autobiography would be the biography.
But but that's the thing. Any mistake I make in
speaking the Library of Babbel has me covered. It exists,
is it factful. Is it is there truth in it?
I don't know, but it could still be entertaining. Maybe

(55:55):
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 got to bring it back
to Quine. So back to Quine. We we've mentioned a
couple of times now that there's this principle that, well,
what if a book takes more than pages to express,

(56:17):
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.
You have like Showgun volume one, Shogun volume two. Yeah,
it never ends. But given this principle that messages can
be spread across multiple volumes, Quine realizes that you can

(56:40):
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 in various orders, you
can code any alphabetic sequence in a simplified form of

(57:02):
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. Huh. But
let's think about it in another way. You can replace
the dot and the dash with a zero and a one,

(57:25):
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. It's universal, like any information
or operation that can be represented in code, which potentially

(57:48):
is all information or operations depending on you know, your
philosophical orientation to that question, it can be represented by
universal binary machine. So, on one hand, this seems to
sort of violate the 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,

(58:11):
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 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. We

(58:35):
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. You're watching the monkeys
type at random and hoping they give you the complete
works of Shakespeare, but they're never gonna do it. In
quines to volume library, you yourself are the monkey typing

(58:58):
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 what you need is an
interface on top of client system, such such as say
a pink Kindle, instantly search out the books you want
um from all the possible books out there in the

(59:21):
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, 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

(59:43):
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, So there's a given take. So
by by cutting out all of the nonsense books, we
massively reduce start searching for significance project, but we also
eliminate possibly the most precious books out there because we

(01:00:07):
just didn't think to create them. Yeah, we thought to
create them, and then that's time right, right. Isn't that
funny that the Library of 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

(01:00:29):
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 don't get to all the
books that I should be reading. 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

(01:00:50):
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, it's in that collection, somewhere,
somewhere loft in the the the the seemingly infinite but
ultimately finite honeycomb of books set ablaze by a purifier.

(01:01:14):
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, 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, however,

(01:01:37):
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 some weird brown. Um.
It's not 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 is

(01:01:59):
something on YouTube. Is 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, uh,
but 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,

(01:02:19):
new channel. Anybody can start a blog and share their
perspective and stuff like that. And I think about the
cacaphony of of information or should we call it information,
the cacophony 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.

(01:02:40):
But at the same time, I can't say that I
feel really enriched by the quantity of perspective and opinion
being shared on the internet. You know, yeah, yeah, I agree.
Now here's a question for you, Uh, As long as
we're playing with the ideas that spiral out endlessly from

(01:03:03):
the library of babble, 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 of Babble.
Imagine a functional virtual library of babbel world. You put
on your headset, you climb into your tank, turn on

(01:03:25):
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. It would have to be procedurally generated
because a computer storage system could not store the entire library.
Have to create as as you go, and and so.
But as you go, it is actually writing non existent books,

(01:03:47):
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, could we reach a point where the
Library of Babble exists in in in in in actually

(01:04:07):
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. Yeah, well,
because the library is too vast. Like we've said, you
would come across just pure nonsense. You could wander through

(01:04:28):
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 the library
was made real in a virtual setting. Can you imagine,

(01:04:49):
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 ring. 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 impossible to find something all

(01:05:10):
that valuable. But what if you limited it to words
in a dictionary, So a procedurally generated library of babble 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, wouldn't it Huh? I guess I can't

(01:05:32):
help but think of it, because I um I recently
read Ready Player one. Are familiar 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 Babble does not come up,
But I can't help but think about that, especially since
that book deals with the virtual world that contains easter
eggs that people are searching for, you know, these little

(01:05:55):
nuggets of meaning, and essentially they're trying to find a U,
a Crimson exagon 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 and are

(01:06:16):
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 running around setting

(01:06:39):
things a light because they don't just dismissing things because
they don't line up with our expectations of order and sense. 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, all right,

(01:07:01):
well we could 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

(01:07:21):
of discussions, um dare I say almost infinite number of
discussions about the Library of Babble. You can get in
touch with this the usual places sucal media where stuff
to blow your mind or blow the mind at 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

(01:07:43):
Library of Babel to us at Blow the Mind? Is
how stuff works dot Com? Well more on this and
basons of other pathics. Is it how stuff works? Upcombe

(01:08:08):
starts f