O Time Thy Pyramids: The Library of Babel

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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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,

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 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 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, 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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.

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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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.

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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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, 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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? 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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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,

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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

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.

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 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, 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 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,

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 starts f