Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to venture into the vault. But appears that this
Speaker 1: time the vault is pretty much infinite. That's right, we
Speaker 1: may get lost in there. This is our episode on
Speaker 1: the Library of Babel. This originally aired Tuesday, August second,
Speaker 1: and this is one of my favorite episodes we ever did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we get to talk about infinity, we get to talk
Speaker 1: about Bogyes, we get to talk a little bit. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think I end up referencing, uh, the Name of
Speaker 1: the Rose by m Berto Eco, which is timely because
Speaker 1: I just found out that they are producing another adaptation
Speaker 1: of the Name of the Rose. It's going to be
Speaker 1: like an eight part TV movie with John to Truro
Speaker 1: starring as William of Baskerville. Yeah. I thought you were
Speaker 1: going to say that a grown up Christian Slater would
Speaker 1: now be That would make perfect sense in a way,
Speaker 1: but not in any acting sense. I think here's my recast. Okay,
Speaker 1: Burt Reynolds, that's Baskerville. What do you think he's too old?
Speaker 1: You'd have to play brother Jr. Hey, Okay, well, anyway,
Speaker 1: this is the Library of Babel episode. Let's go straight
Speaker 1: into Oh Time Ny Pyramids. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, Hello,
Speaker 1: this is Stuff to Blow Your Mind audiologue. This is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. This is day
Speaker 1: of our descent into the famed Library of Babel. We've
Speaker 1: been exploring this infinite sprawl of interconnected hexagonal rooms and
Speaker 1: the twenty bookshelves contained with eat each one, Joe, how
Speaker 1: many rooms have we explored since last log entry? Oh,
Speaker 1: let me find it here. Let's see. Well, we're up
Speaker 1: to a hundred and twelve in that brings the grand
Speaker 1: total of rooms we have explored to date up to
Speaker 1: one thousand, five hundred and sixty one. And of course
Speaker 1: that is not counting the rooms to the library that
Speaker 1: we could tell had already been explored. So we just
Speaker 1: skipped over with books pulled out all over the place,
Speaker 1: or some just had empty shelves, smoke lines on the ceiling,
Speaker 1: and these ancient piles of cold black coal in the
Speaker 1: middle of the floor we can presume from some long
Speaker 1: ago book burnings. Yeah, that's right. The I mean that
Speaker 1: the library is at least indefinite, if not infinite. So
Speaker 1: it falls to inquisitors such as ourselves to steadily work
Speaker 1: our way out from charted portions of the library and
Speaker 1: into uncharted regions. And it really is a room by room,
Speaker 1: book by book procedures. Now, fortunately, most of the books
Speaker 1: are nonsense, and you can spot that right away, because
Speaker 1: I mean real nonsense, total typographical gibberish. And that's not
Speaker 1: even counting the ones that have been totally or partially
Speaker 1: burned by the purifiers. I hear footsteps sometimes in the
Speaker 1: room was directly above us, and I keep wondering if
Speaker 1: it's them. It could be, but you know, it could
Speaker 1: be the bookman. I know that's superstition, Joe we I mean,
Speaker 1: we might as well hope to find that the Crimson hexagon. Now,
Speaker 1: come on, Robert, wouldn't you love to find the one
Speaker 1: hexagonal room in this entire place that contains something truly
Speaker 1: precious apart from all this gibberish, maybe even real functional
Speaker 1: books of magic spells. Well, of course I would, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean it actually exists even in the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel. Now, remember, Robert, these rooms contain not only
Speaker 1: all books, but all possible books. Those books have got
Speaker 1: to be out there, but that doesn't mean they're actually magical. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess you're right, But sometimes I like to think
Speaker 1: the Crimson Hexagon is out there. You know, maybe the
Speaker 1: purifiers haven't found it yet because it moves. Have you
Speaker 1: thought about that? Like in the movie Cube rooms move
Speaker 1: around while we're asleep. Who are like the the the
Speaker 1: Castle and Krawl? You know. I'm glad you mentioned Krull
Speaker 1: because I found a copy of Alan Dean Foresters three
Speaker 1: novelization of the screenplay of Krall. That's a real book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I also found a Krull novel by Stanford Sherman,
Speaker 1: the guy who wrote the screenplay, and he never actually
Speaker 1: wrote a novel version, right, Oh no, not in our reality,
Speaker 1: but of course it could exist, which means the library
Speaker 1: has it. And that's why I was also able to
Speaker 1: find a copy of a Christmas Carol. You might want
Speaker 1: to see this where instead of saying God bless us everyone,
Speaker 1: tiny Tim gives an invocation of Mala Collord of destruction.
Speaker 1: What about you check this out? Frank Herbert's complete seven
Speaker 1: book Dune series. Yeah, not not just the six he
Speaker 1: actually wrote in our reality all seven as well as
Speaker 1: look at this, an alternate Herbert Dune trilogy that's only
Speaker 1: three books long, but a lot more erotic. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got to read this. Yeah, it's on my list.
Speaker 1: But hey, guess what, I've got the final two books
Speaker 1: of the Game of Thrones series, the Song of Ice
Speaker 1: and Fire spoiler they were on Earth all along, and
Speaker 1: west Ros is actually in rural North Florida. But also, Robert,
Speaker 1: I have your complete biography, including the end, and as
Speaker 1: per our agreement, I didn't read it. Well good, well cool,
Speaker 1: here's yours. Then you just swap thank you. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: we go. We're good. Wait, wait a minute, did you
Speaker 1: hear that? It's probably just other inquisitors or you know,
Speaker 1: our pilgrims looking for deposits of alternate Gospels or book
Speaker 1: worshippers or the Purifiers or the Book miss none of that.
Speaker 1: Let's let's keep moving. This hexagon up ahead looks pretty promised. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick. In today we're going
Speaker 1: to be talking about the Library of Babel. So the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel is both it's a short story, but
Speaker 1: it's also the concept at the core of this short story,
Speaker 1: and we're really going to be focusing on the concept
Speaker 1: and it's broader implications today, not just the story itself,
Speaker 1: but the concept of the Library of Babel comes from
Speaker 1: a short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges,
Speaker 1: first published in the collection The Garden of Forking Paths
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty one. So. Borges was a twentieth century
Speaker 1: Argentine author. He lived from eighteen to nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: and in his lifetime, especially later in his life, he
Speaker 1: became famous for poetry essays, but especially short stories and
Speaker 1: short stories. A lot of them are kind of like
Speaker 1: this story. Yeah, I mean, like like a lot of
Speaker 1: his tales. Uh. The Library of Babel was not really
Speaker 1: a narrative experience. It's not very plot heavy, right, It's
Speaker 1: kind of a sort of scholarly missive about a fantastic idea.
Speaker 1: So he he choose on this fantastic idea, gets all
Speaker 1: of these philosophic juices going, and we're just we're fortunate
Speaker 1: enough to experience it with him. Uh. In his his stories,
Speaker 1: there there are a number of different themes that offer
Speaker 1: pop up, such as knives mirrors, dreams, Oh, dreams. There's
Speaker 1: some fabulous dream stories. Um, and and they're all pretty short.
Speaker 1: Like That's one of the wonderful things about a collection
Speaker 1: of Bores short fiction is you can just pick it up.
Speaker 1: You can pretty much pick any story and just in
Speaker 1: a few pages and just mind blowing concept is presented
Speaker 1: to you. That just expands the limits of your imagination. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You ever know those like fantasy writers who are better
Speaker 1: at world building than they are at character and plot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd say Bores is like that, except he writes what
Speaker 1: would probably be considered now literary fiction. It's you know,
Speaker 1: respectable intellectual fiction. Uh that that's treated without any hint
Speaker 1: of a sneer by the Academy as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell. But but it's fascinating stuff through and through. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it reminds me a lot of some of the short
Speaker 1: fiction that Philip K. Dick would later do. And now,
Speaker 1: certainly Philip K. Dick was was capable of producing novel
Speaker 1: after novel after novel as well. Uh, you know, he
Speaker 1: was pretty adapted. It longer works, But some of his
Speaker 1: short stories remind me of Borges in their ability to
Speaker 1: without getting too bogged down in story or character just
Speaker 1: presenting in a nugget like a really crazy mind warping idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we should probably start with a quote from the
Speaker 1: beginning of the Library of Babel the story to give
Speaker 1: you a sense of what is being talked about here.
Speaker 1: So this is a quote from the beginning of the story,
Speaker 1: with some editorial illusions for brevity. Quote. The universe, which
Speaker 1: others call the library, is composed of an indefinite, perhaps
Speaker 1: infinite number of hexagonal galleries. The arrangement of the galleries
Speaker 1: is always the same, twenty bookshelves, five to each side,
Speaker 1: line four of the hexagon's six sides. One of the
Speaker 1: hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule,
Speaker 1: which in turn opens onto another gallery identical to the first,
Speaker 1: identical in fact to all. To the right and left
Speaker 1: of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for
Speaker 1: sleeping upright, the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through
Speaker 1: this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase which winds
Speaker 1: upward and downward into the remote distance. In the vestibule,
Speaker 1: there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates appearances. Uh, and
Speaker 1: he goes on to explain how the implications of having
Speaker 1: a mirror in a library that may or may not
Speaker 1: be infinite as far as the characters disclosed that they
Speaker 1: know at first at least. Yeah, so this is the
Speaker 1: basic setup. This is the basic HexaCon, and then that
Speaker 1: hexagon is cloned out. Yeah, it's a six sided room.
Speaker 1: There are shelves of books in each room, and the
Speaker 1: rooms seem to go on forever, and in a honeycomb
Speaker 1: where no one has ever discovered the forest boundary. That
Speaker 1: there are places, as we mentioned, for wanderers, librarians, etcetera,
Speaker 1: to use the bathroom and to sleep upright, it does
Speaker 1: make me wonder if like Barnes and Noble, there is
Speaker 1: a policy against bringing books into the bathroom, or if
Speaker 1: I mean maybe that you have to maybe you just
Speaker 1: have to pick a gibberish book. You know. The question
Speaker 1: is who enforces the policy. Well, that's that's one of
Speaker 1: the things that as Well discussed. There seems to be
Speaker 1: a lack of a lack of laws and policy in
Speaker 1: place in the Library of Babbel. Yeah, so in the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel, we're going to talk about the philosophical
Speaker 1: and scientific implications of this thought experiment. Later on in
Speaker 1: the episode, but first we just want to kind of
Speaker 1: explore what this this concept entails. And there are definitely
Speaker 1: a lot of ironies and absurdities in Borge's story. So
Speaker 1: I don't think he was trying to create something that
Speaker 1: was I mean, I feel kind of absurd saying this,
Speaker 1: but I don't think he was trying to create something realistic. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, and really you run into a
Speaker 1: lot of problems trying to even fathom it as a
Speaker 1: real place because it is so vast. Because, as we
Speaker 1: we discussed in our you know, hopefully entertaining intro here,
Speaker 1: it contains not only all books, but all possible books. Right,
Speaker 1: so let's get into the actual numbers of what this
Speaker 1: library would entail as described in the story. So, as
Speaker 1: Borges writes, each book in this library contains four hundred
Speaker 1: and ten pages. Each page has forty lines, and each
Speaker 1: line has approximately eighty black letters, just printed letters. And
Speaker 1: you can actually work out the math from this. So
Speaker 1: all the books consists of the same twenty five elements
Speaker 1: for characters. They've got a space, a period, a comma,
Speaker 1: and twenty two letters of the alphabet. The only variation
Speaker 1: is in the arrangement of these twenty five characters. Now
Speaker 1: you might be saying, wait a minute, that there you
Speaker 1: know less than the total number of letters in our alphabet. Well,
Speaker 1: you know some letters are kind of redundant, are they?
Speaker 1: Why do we need to see? Why? Not just a
Speaker 1: K in an S. But no, two books in the
Speaker 1: library are exactly the same. So if the books don't
Speaker 1: duplicate one another, and we know the starting conditions, we
Speaker 1: can actually calculate the number of books that would be
Speaker 1: in the library. So if there's eighty characters per line,
Speaker 1: forty lines per page, times four hundred and ten pages
Speaker 1: per book, that's one million, three hundred and twelve thousand
Speaker 1: characters per book. And with twenty five possible characters and
Speaker 1: and one million, three hundred and twelve thousand characters per book,
Speaker 1: we know that there have to be twenty five to
Speaker 1: the one million, three hundred and twelve power books. That
Speaker 1: is a number that is so big that if you
Speaker 1: can count to it, you automatically become the god of
Speaker 1: your local galaxy cluster. So so the basic idea here,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure there's another metaphor a little nonsensical story
Speaker 1: that often comes to mind, and that is the idea
Speaker 1: of the monkeys banging on type. Right. I'm going to
Speaker 1: get into that in a bit, creating gibberish and eventually
Speaker 1: recreating the works of Expeaire. Right now, it's sort of analogous.
Speaker 1: If the monkeys could only pound out one book length
Speaker 1: work of gibberish at a time and avoid complete repetition, right,
Speaker 1: and never do the same thing twice, eventually they'd get
Speaker 1: to Shakespeare. But so, the library contains all books there
Speaker 1: could possibly be, so, in addition to just trying to
Speaker 1: imagine what this is like, in addition to the indefinite
Speaker 1: numbers of books full of random gibberish, which would be
Speaker 1: almost all the books, there are also perfect copies of
Speaker 1: all books that already exist in reality. So there's a
Speaker 1: perfect copy of all the books in the Twilight series. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're worrying, wait a minute, I know of some
Speaker 1: books that are more than four ten pages too long
Speaker 1: to be reproduced. Not so, actually, because there's a book
Speaker 1: that contains its exact first four ten pages, and then
Speaker 1: another book that contains whatever happens after that, stretching into
Speaker 1: as many volumes as you need. Plus all books that
Speaker 1: exist in reality would be there with every possible combination
Speaker 1: of typographical errors that there could be. So there's a
Speaker 1: book that's a perfect copy of Jane Eyre, except every
Speaker 1: instance of Mr Rochester's name is replaced with the words
Speaker 1: a crocodile of immense girth. There is also a copy
Speaker 1: of Hamlet that reads normally except for the one line
Speaker 1: one change. There are more things in heaven and Earth
Speaker 1: ratio than are dreamt of in your vaping newsletter. It
Speaker 1: also contains a perfectly accurate autobiography of your life, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned, including all the events that haven't happened yet.
Speaker 1: It contains lots of almost perfect autobiographies of your life,
Speaker 1: but containing a few lies. It contains all books explaining
Speaker 1: the perfect solutions to all the world's most vexing problems.
Speaker 1: If we can only find those books and know them
Speaker 1: when we see them, then we'd have the solutions to
Speaker 1: all those problems in the story. All these books exist
Speaker 1: in the library, but they represent such a tiny fraction
Speaker 1: of the total possible combinations of symbols that you could
Speaker 1: wander your whole life through the library and probably not
Speaker 1: expect to find any lengthy combination of words that made
Speaker 1: any grammatical sense. Yeah, I mean it. I mean it's
Speaker 1: easy for all of us to to just really go
Speaker 1: wild imagining this. I mean, just think of think of
Speaker 1: your favorite book in the world, and just imagine then
Speaker 1: that there are so many different versions of it that
Speaker 1: are a little bit less good and maybe have a
Speaker 1: few different typos in in it, a few different character changes.
Speaker 1: Then there are versions of it that are even better.
Speaker 1: There's even like an ideal version of it, a perfect version.
Speaker 1: There is a version of your favorite book that you
Speaker 1: yourself would perhaps love even more because it's a little
Speaker 1: more in tune with your expectations. Right, And all that
Speaker 1: fan fiction you write that's already in the library, it's there,
Speaker 1: plus all the changes you could have made to make it,
Speaker 1: you know, less of a travesty. But it all on
Speaker 1: the same shelf. No, it's all on the same hexagon.
Speaker 1: Probably not, because it's arranged in random rtary, making it
Speaker 1: even more frustrating to try to find anything, though not
Speaker 1: necessarily even more frustrating, because if you try to imagine
Speaker 1: what navigating the library of Babble would be like if
Speaker 1: it were organized in some alphabetical fashion, you might be
Speaker 1: trapped in the A A A A A A A
Speaker 1: section of the library your entire life, and you would
Speaker 1: just be physically unable to traverse that area and get
Speaker 1: to the sensible books. Right. So I'd actually prefer a
Speaker 1: randomized library to being stuck in a sea of a's
Speaker 1: that I could never escape from no matter how long
Speaker 1: I walked, you know. Um, of course this has been
Speaker 1: such a highly influential book. It's referenced in a number
Speaker 1: of different works. Um, I mean the Library of the
Speaker 1: Library babble, so like a lot of people probably recognize
Speaker 1: it from umberto Eco's masterful Name of the Rose, where
Speaker 1: an actual library and an Italian monastery is is modeled
Speaker 1: on this. Um. There are aspects of it that I
Speaker 1: believe are utilized in a House of Leaves. But then
Speaker 1: there's also a Stephen King short story. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've read this one titled Er that came out
Speaker 1: It was only for kindle, I don't think so. It's
Speaker 1: about a man who obtains a pink kindle and it
Speaker 1: turns out to be a kindle from another No, I
Speaker 1: haven't read this, and it gives him access not only
Speaker 1: to the kindle store in our universe, but also to
Speaker 1: kindle stores in alternate universes, so he's able to access
Speaker 1: books by authors he loves that have not yet been
Speaker 1: written or that that just were not written in our world.
Speaker 1: So in a sense, it's a it's an interesting play
Speaker 1: on the Library of Babble. You know, if you want
Speaker 1: to get a sense of what it would be like
Speaker 1: to actually inhabit this universe the Library of Babel and
Speaker 1: just start pulling books off the shelf. There is a
Speaker 1: tool you can use. A Brooklyn author named Jonathan Basil
Speaker 1: has created a virtual version. You can go to it
Speaker 1: Library of Babble dot info. You can go explore this
Speaker 1: at any time and it's great fun for a few
Speaker 1: minutes until you get just buried under the noise of
Speaker 1: nonsense hiding all potential information. So you're you're able to
Speaker 1: pull up titles of books hypothetical, Yeah, you can. You
Speaker 1: can go pull up a shelf of the library by name,
Speaker 1: which I guess it generates the text that would be
Speaker 1: under that randomized section of the library, and you can
Speaker 1: pull out some books and look at what's inside them. Huh.
Speaker 1: And are there any MPCs here? No, not that I
Speaker 1: know of. I don't know. I haven't I haven't played
Speaker 1: with it long enough, it wouldn't it be great if
Speaker 1: some purifiers come by and start trying to burn the
Speaker 1: books you're reading. Now, now that reminds me we should
Speaker 1: say a little bit more about the story. Who were
Speaker 1: the characters who occupied this library? Oh? Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: this is this is tremendous fun um. So a first
Speaker 1: and foremost, Uh, there are the librarians and the the narrator.
Speaker 1: The main character, if you can even call them that
Speaker 1: in the story, is a librarian. Right, So they're given
Speaker 1: the impossible task of caring for the library exploring it,
Speaker 1: and they're generally an overworked and just suicidal lot. Plus
Speaker 1: they have to contend with all the other weird wanderers
Speaker 1: that are out there amid the hexagons, such as Oh well,
Speaker 1: there are the inquisitors, and these are official searchers, but
Speaker 1: they don't really seem to make much progress. It's kind
Speaker 1: of vague in the story exactly what they're doing. I
Speaker 1: assume they are somehow searching for books that make sense
Speaker 1: or books of some kind of value which are just
Speaker 1: impossible to come by. And I believe there's a sense
Speaker 1: to that they're they're separate from the librarians. It's almost
Speaker 1: like an academic versus a governmental body. So the libraries
Speaker 1: and inquisitors are kind of it seems like their jobs
Speaker 1: should be similar, but they have different philosophical aims. What else,
Speaker 1: then we have the Purifiers, who we alluded to already,
Speaker 1: and these this is a sect that traversed the library
Speaker 1: and they destroy any book that they deem nonsensical. So
Speaker 1: that would be pretty much all books, yes, but it
Speaker 1: could also mean I mean, I wondered if it's it's
Speaker 1: alluded to as well that that maybe they're not the
Speaker 1: ones to judge, how are Maybe a book that seems
Speaker 1: like nonsense is not nonsense. Maybe they're burning a bunch
Speaker 1: of sous any comings and they don't even realize it.
Speaker 1: But mainly they are in search of something known as
Speaker 1: the Crimson Hexagon. Ye, and now we alluded to this
Speaker 1: at the beginning. But Robert, what is the Crimson hexagon
Speaker 1: because it sounds alluring. Oh, yes, it is a Crimson room,
Speaker 1: the Crimson Hexagon within the library, rumored to exist. Yes, no,
Speaker 1: nobody has actually seen it that we know of, uh.
Speaker 1: And it contains quote books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated,
Speaker 1: and magical. So in other words, this is where you'd
Speaker 1: find the real functional copies of various grimoires, including the
Speaker 1: real Necronomicon. Uh, the real Book of Sand, which is
Speaker 1: by the way, is it is an infinite book of
Speaker 1: that of put factors into another Borhes story. Uh. You
Speaker 1: would find just all these books of power and meaning,
Speaker 1: books that answer are big questions like this. Is this
Speaker 1: is like a mythological center for the library, a place
Speaker 1: of order and answer. Yeah. And it gives many people
Speaker 1: in the library hope when they're traversing an otherwise unbroken
Speaker 1: sea of nonsense and gibberish. And I'll tell you one
Speaker 1: book that might be in the Crimson Hexagon if it
Speaker 1: exists or might be elsewhere. Is this okay? So since
Speaker 1: the Library Babble contains all possible books, that means it
Speaker 1: must contain a book books about the library itself. It
Speaker 1: must contain a book that tells the reader how to
Speaker 1: find what you want. It lays it autologue or guide
Speaker 1: for the library itself. Yeah, like yeah, a tourist guide.
Speaker 1: So even though that book has not been found, it
Speaker 1: is rumored that there must exist someone known as the Bookman,
Speaker 1: that the Bookman has actually uh found that book. That
Speaker 1: is quote the Cipher and perfect compendium of all possible books.
Speaker 1: The Bookman has read this book and wanders the library
Speaker 1: as a godlike librarian, worshiped, quested after, and perhaps even
Speaker 1: prayed to. So this is a god figure, a really
Speaker 1: kind of a Christ figure that wanders the Library of Babel,
Speaker 1: and everyone wants to find this gentleman and meet him
Speaker 1: so that they might too know where they can find
Speaker 1: their answers. In a way, it in a way, it's
Speaker 1: like the perfect Holy Man, right like the the the
Speaker 1: order of the Library of Babel is beyond us. We
Speaker 1: cannot relate to it, but we can relate to an individual.
Speaker 1: So if there's an individual who can grasp this vastness,
Speaker 1: then let us speak to him right now. It probably
Speaker 1: won't be lost on all the parallels to religious figures
Speaker 1: and profits like like you were mentioning, you know, this
Speaker 1: Christ figure. But I would say also that the bookman
Speaker 1: not need not necessarily be a man. I would suspect
Speaker 1: that it's more likely a book woman because the men
Speaker 1: of this library are way too caught up in suicides
Speaker 1: and murders, and uh, man, it just seems like it
Speaker 1: is not a nice thing to be uh to be
Speaker 1: a soul male wandering this library. Yeah, it makes me
Speaker 1: think of the the back in the days when you
Speaker 1: had the big bookstores everywhere, you would have like the
Speaker 1: the kind of sketchy dudes who would hang out in
Speaker 1: the photography books section. Um, that is not a sect
Speaker 1: that is mentioned by Borges, but I can only imagine
Speaker 1: that they're out there picking up various books and trying
Speaker 1: to sneak off to the bathroom with them. Though. There
Speaker 1: is a sense of pervasive suicidal melancholy throughout the library,
Speaker 1: because after a while it just seems to grind on
Speaker 1: you that you can't find the answers you're looking for,
Speaker 1: you can't find the books that you're looking for, and
Speaker 1: then you have to contend with young people who wander
Speaker 1: into worship and kiss the books, various heretics, pilgrims again,
Speaker 1: like people looking for alternate gospels, brigands, suicides, all of
Speaker 1: this going on and you're just a simple librarian trying
Speaker 1: to do your job is just too much. Now. A
Speaker 1: fact that I found interesting when I was reading about
Speaker 1: bores life was that Borges was himself a librarian at
Speaker 1: multiple different times in his life for almost a decade
Speaker 1: beginning In around nineteen thirty seven or nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: Borhes worked in a small library in Buenos Aires, and
Speaker 1: this time in the library would include the time of
Speaker 1: publication for the Library of Babble, which he first published
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty one. I figured out which library it was,
Speaker 1: by the way, and I looked it up, and and
Speaker 1: the scale is not what you would expect. I think
Speaker 1: I might have mentioned that earlier, but given the story,
Speaker 1: it's a very small, quaint, little library with a modest
Speaker 1: collection of books. But also in nineteen thirty eight Borges
Speaker 1: read experienced to head wound which led to blood poisoning,
Speaker 1: which in turn made him very feeble, and he feared
Speaker 1: losing his sanity, and so Borees was eventually dismissed from
Speaker 1: his library position. When Juan Perone came to power in
Speaker 1: Argentina and I think nineteen forty five or forty six,
Speaker 1: and he Bores had supported the Allies during World War Two.
Speaker 1: He opposed Nazi Germany, and he was also at the
Speaker 1: time opposed to Peron's authoritarian sympathies. So in retaliation, Perron
Speaker 1: demoted Borhes to the job title of poultry inspector. Bores
Speaker 1: was not a fan of this move, but later he
Speaker 1: was again given a library position as director of the
Speaker 1: Argentine National Library in nineteen fifty five. But I do
Speaker 1: wonder to what extent his experiences among the books, even
Speaker 1: if it was truly a modest collection of books, led
Speaker 1: to his his dreaming of the Library of Babel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: perhaps a lot of it too came from him not
Speaker 1: only you know, not only encountering books in this bookstore,
Speaker 1: in the libraries and his personal collection, but also reading
Speaker 1: about other books, seeing the names of these other books.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's hard, you know, just looking through a
Speaker 1: card catalog. Um. Yeah, I guess today we get a
Speaker 1: sense of such a vassal library just when we're going
Speaker 1: through an online database of books, be it a library
Speaker 1: system or Amazon. And uh, and I can I can
Speaker 1: see even with it with older catalog systems, where one
Speaker 1: might have that experience, especially if one of the true
Speaker 1: lover of books, as as Bores you know, definitely was.
Speaker 1: But of course, the Library of Babel is more than
Speaker 1: just an interesting short story, right, It's become this door
Speaker 1: that we can walk through to think about the nature
Speaker 1: of information and scale, numerical scale, and the universe infinity,
Speaker 1: the relationship between information and physicality, and a very useful
Speaker 1: model for philosophers, scientists, and thinkers of all kinds. So
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, and when we
Speaker 1: come back from the break, we're going to learn more
Speaker 1: about the implications of the Library of Babel as a
Speaker 1: thought experiment. So the characters in the Library of Babel,
Speaker 1: they all seem to be searched for meaning, right, They're
Speaker 1: living in this vast library of nonsense, is full of
Speaker 1: gibberish everywhere, and they want to find books that have
Speaker 1: some kind of significance. So I think it's quite clear
Speaker 1: that in many ways this story is an analogy for
Speaker 1: the search of meaning, the search for meanings. Sorry, imagine
Speaker 1: that feeling of knowing that there were already in existence
Speaker 1: books that explained the true origin and purpose of the universe,
Speaker 1: if there is such a thing, of course, and the
Speaker 1: origin and purpose of everything in the universe, including your
Speaker 1: own existence. And I want to read another quote from
Speaker 1: the story, quote that unbridled hopefulness was succeeded naturally enough
Speaker 1: by a similarly disproportionate depression, the certainty that some bookshelf
Speaker 1: in some hexagon contained precious books yet that those precious
Speaker 1: books were forever out of reach was almost unbearable. One
Speaker 1: blasphemous sect proposed that the searches be discontinued and that
Speaker 1: all men shuffle letters and symbols until those canonical books,
Speaker 1: through some improbable stroke of chance, had been constructed. The
Speaker 1: authorities were forced to issue strict orders. The sect disappeared.
Speaker 1: But in my childhood I have seen old men who,
Speaker 1: for long periods would hide in the latrines with metal
Speaker 1: discs and a forbidden dice cup, feebly mimicking the divine order.
Speaker 1: I love something about this little section of the story
Speaker 1: because notice here the similarity with something you already brought
Speaker 1: up Robert the infinite monkey theorem, right, the idea that
Speaker 1: you've got a gang of monkeys, and you put him
Speaker 1: in front of typewriters, and they just hit keys on
Speaker 1: the typewriters at random. Now, given infinite time, it's all
Speaker 1: often said that these monkeys will produce specified works of literature,
Speaker 1: such as the complete works of Shakespeare, or of course
Speaker 1: they would need vast periods of time. The key factors here,
Speaker 1: and that that's not depending on what the work is,
Speaker 1: like Shakespeare or whatever. They could be trying to create
Speaker 1: the complete works of Anne Rice, and that the infinite
Speaker 1: time parameter is crucial because in reality, such a scenario
Speaker 1: would probably not produce a single page of grammatically meaningful
Speaker 1: English within the total age of the universe. It's just,
Speaker 1: you know, random combinatrix are not very forgiving. But in
Speaker 1: the Borhe story, there's this blasphemous sect he talks about
Speaker 1: who wants to try to create precious and meaningful books
Speaker 1: by randomly generating volumes with something kind of like a
Speaker 1: Wegia board and a pair of dice, almost like a
Speaker 1: like a code cracking program. Right, But it doesn't fundamentally
Speaker 1: alter our predicament in the search for meaning, only the
Speaker 1: observer's level of personal activity within it. So the librarians
Speaker 1: in the library of Babel are like the observer watching
Speaker 1: the monkeys type, waiting for them to produce Shakespeare. They're
Speaker 1: passively receiving all of this random information, waiting for something
Speaker 1: of significance to come out. The blasphemous sect, the people
Speaker 1: rolling the dice with Luigia board, they're just more like
Speaker 1: being the monkey sitting at the typewriter randomly typing text.
Speaker 1: It doesn't change the odds that you'll come across something
Speaker 1: of significance. But maybe it does make a psychological difference
Speaker 1: if you yourself are the creator versus passively receiving what
Speaker 1: already exists around you. Yeah, I mean, it's it's really
Speaker 1: like the members of the Blastmouths sect are playing God.
Speaker 1: They're doing the work of God. Uh, of of of
Speaker 1: a creator entity in this scenario. But um, they're bound
Speaker 1: by mortal or semi mortal experience. So uh, it really
Speaker 1: amounts to the same thing. They're just as lost in
Speaker 1: the in the library, except to say, a library of
Speaker 1: their their own creation. Well, in the cosmological sense, how
Speaker 1: similar is the library of Babel to the universe we
Speaker 1: actually inhabit? And what what what similarities and differences could
Speaker 1: we observe? Well, if we look at the library as
Speaker 1: a metaphor for cosmos, and and it seems one of
Speaker 1: one of Borhe's intense I mean, he says in the
Speaker 1: first line that the universe, universe is the library. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you could argue that it is his central intent. Uh, certainly. Uh.
Speaker 1: In this case, it lines up rather nicely with the
Speaker 1: cosmological principle the idea that matter in the universe is
Speaker 1: homogeneous and isotropic when averaged out over very large scales
Speaker 1: as a major principle that speaks to the composition of
Speaker 1: the universe, and it helps us serve as the basis
Speaker 1: for the Big Bang theory. Here, it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: to imagine living on Earth as we do and not
Speaker 1: seeing really anywhere else in the universe that's as hospitable
Speaker 1: as Earth, that the universe is homogeneous, you know. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's talking about scale there. Over scale, you
Speaker 1: could say it is homogeneous even if we're sort of
Speaker 1: living in the book that makes sense, right, like we
Speaker 1: you could almost say that, like we are living. It's
Speaker 1: it's difficult, right, because it's like we are we are
Speaker 1: the book that makes sense. We are the book that
Speaker 1: we can understand, and we just according to us, according
Speaker 1: to us, and and by by amazing fortune, we are
Speaker 1: in the hexagon that contains of that book. And then
Speaker 1: so it's easy to think it's and certainly we've from
Speaker 1: a cosmological perspective, we've fallen into this trap many times
Speaker 1: where we think, well, this is the center, this is
Speaker 1: we are living in the Crimson hexagon, and there's a
Speaker 1: you know, there's a whole discipline and cosmologies is about
Speaker 1: just reminding everyone and we do not live in the hexagonal,
Speaker 1: in the Crimson hexagon. Yeah, not every hexagon that contains
Speaker 1: a basically sensical operation manual for a VCR is the
Speaker 1: Crimson hexagon. Yeah, there's not. There's nothing privileged about the
Speaker 1: human condition, about and about the conditions of Earth um
Speaker 1: like the universe. To all the characters that in this
Speaker 1: story that are considering the Library of Babbel are within
Speaker 1: the Library of Babbel. They don't step outside of it.
Speaker 1: They don't. They don't wander back to the surface of
Speaker 1: some you know, dungeons and Dragons type realm and then
Speaker 1: think about it again and then go back in. It's
Speaker 1: not like in say the novel House of Leaves, where
Speaker 1: they're they're venturing from this house into this realm of
Speaker 1: infinite corridors. There is no house to return to. So
Speaker 1: quests they might to understand the shape and nature of
Speaker 1: the library. They cannot step beyond the library for an
Speaker 1: outside outside understanding of what they're in. They cannot step
Speaker 1: beyond the borders of cosmos. I mean, we can barely
Speaker 1: step beyond the borders of the human experience. We have
Speaker 1: this huge problem just trying to to comprehend consciousness in
Speaker 1: the and and the functionality of the human mind. It's
Speaker 1: you're trapped within the form you're trying to understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the Library of Babel also seems like it has
Speaker 1: some metaphorical significance in our quest for knowledge. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the idea here the complete knowledge seems impossible. You
Speaker 1: can believe in the Bookman and the Crimson Hexagon all
Speaker 1: you want, but they remain ever outside your grasp. There's
Speaker 1: no center, there's no privileged area or privileged knowledge. The
Speaker 1: story also, according to writer Marcello Glycer, uh, seems a
Speaker 1: commentary on reductionism. So we can know all the characters
Speaker 1: that comprise the works and the books, like identifying the
Speaker 1: building blocks of nature, right, but does that bring us
Speaker 1: any closer to understanding the fundamental nature of the universe
Speaker 1: or the library? No? No, not really yeah. Um. And
Speaker 1: of course in all of this, I can't help but
Speaker 1: think of a subject we've discussed in the past here
Speaker 1: on the show, Plato's theory of forms, Right, the idea
Speaker 1: that that there's an ideal version of everything that exists
Speaker 1: beyond our grasp according to Plato, like essentially in another realm.
Speaker 1: So there would be, in theory, an ideal form of
Speaker 1: every book that's ever been written in the Library of Babble. Right,
Speaker 1: But we can spend an eternity encounter and eternity of
Speaker 1: alternate versions and never happen upon the perfect form. It
Speaker 1: doesn't quite exist outside the Library of Babble. However, though,
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could sort of cobble that idea
Speaker 1: together with the Crimson hexicon. Maybe that's what the Crimson
Speaker 1: hexicon also encompasses, the idea that there's a place where
Speaker 1: all the ideals are represented. Well, this brings up something
Speaker 1: that I wanted to talk about, which is the difference
Speaker 1: between being able to generate a precious or significant book
Speaker 1: in the ability to recognize it when you see. Uh.
Speaker 1: This sort of goes back to our P versus NP discussion,
Speaker 1: you know, the search for algorithms, like there are certain
Speaker 1: problem solving techniques that you can check to see if
Speaker 1: you got the right answer, but you can't as quickly
Speaker 1: generate the right answer. And I, you know, I wonder
Speaker 1: if our books the same way, Like, what is the
Speaker 1: relationship between insight and time? Given infinite time, could any
Speaker 1: person and who could recognize a precious book also generate
Speaker 1: that same precious book. I don't know, but uh, it
Speaker 1: kind of makes me wonder. Like the Library of Babble
Speaker 1: brings up these questions. So you're searching through all the
Speaker 1: shelves and you you eventually come across a book that
Speaker 1: you know is a meaningful and significant book that's full
Speaker 1: of true things, full of great creativity, full of beauty
Speaker 1: and insight. It's a good thing that you found it.
Speaker 1: If you know that thing when you see it, would
Speaker 1: you be able to create that thing? If there were
Speaker 1: no constraints on you whatsoever. It's like it to come
Speaker 1: back to say something like Dune, right, like, how would
Speaker 1: would I be able to tell if I found a
Speaker 1: copy of Doone in the library? That is that that
Speaker 1: exceeds the original? All I have is the version that
Speaker 1: we have in our reality. And uh, and I'm a
Speaker 1: big fan of that. But who's to say that that's
Speaker 1: anywhere close to the ideal version of it? You know what?
Speaker 1: Who who can make that judgment? And and then it
Speaker 1: also gets into sort of the privilege, like were gonna
Speaker 1: have a bias towards what we already know, what we
Speaker 1: already have, which is which gets involved in the cosmology again,
Speaker 1: because we're basing everything on this one model of of life,
Speaker 1: this one model of that we have an Earth and
Speaker 1: all the life that has evolved here. Uh, we have
Speaker 1: nothing else to base it on. We only have this
Speaker 1: copy of doone alas alas that we have but one
Speaker 1: reality of doone to draw from. Shy elude be praise.
Speaker 1: All right, we need to take another really quick break.
Speaker 1: But when we come back, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the Library of Babel as applied to biology and genetics. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, all right. So, as the Library of Babel
Speaker 1: is essentially all about vast quantities of randomized information and
Speaker 1: the occasional emergence of books from that data. See, it
Speaker 1: should come as no surprise that Borges fantastic library is
Speaker 1: of use in fathoming the complexity of biology and genetics. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I've read about this idea in a couple of different
Speaker 1: books by the the American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dinnett.
Speaker 1: He wrote about this in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which came
Speaker 1: out in the nineties, and he also wrote a chapter
Speaker 1: about it in his book Intuition, Pumps and other tools
Speaker 1: for thinking. And I always found this comparison very interesting.
Speaker 1: But maybe maybe you can illuminate us. But what application
Speaker 1: does the Library of Babel have to the genes that
Speaker 1: build our bodies? Well, let me read a quick quote
Speaker 1: here from from Dinnett that I think helps to eliminate
Speaker 1: this quote. The actual genomes that have ever existed are
Speaker 1: a vanishingly small subset of the combinatorially possible genomes, just
Speaker 1: as the actual books in the world's libraries are a
Speaker 1: vanishingly small subset of the books in the imaginary Library
Speaker 1: of Babel. Yeah, so din It actually puts together an
Speaker 1: alternate verse shin of the library. He just substitutes in
Speaker 1: some alternate numbers and does some number crunching. But I
Speaker 1: think it's actually interesting what he comes up with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: look for starters. He he does some some fun number
Speaker 1: crunching on the Library of Babbel itself. Um, here, here's
Speaker 1: just a quick quote from this h And again we're
Speaker 1: gonna throw some numbers at you here, but I think
Speaker 1: it's worth it. So suppose that each book is five
Speaker 1: hundred pages long, and each page consists of forty lines
Speaker 1: of fifty spaces, So there are two thousand characters spaces
Speaker 1: per page. Each space is either is blank or has
Speaker 1: a character printed on it, chosen from a set of
Speaker 1: one hundred Somewhere in the Library of Babble as a
Speaker 1: volume consisting entirely of blank pages, and another volume is
Speaker 1: all question marks, but the vast majority consists of type
Speaker 1: of graphical gibberish. No rules of spelling or grammar, to
Speaker 1: say nothing of sense prohibit the inclusion of a volume.
Speaker 1: Five hundred pages times two thousand characters per page gives
Speaker 1: one million character spaces per book. So there are one
Speaker 1: hundred to the one million power books in the Library
Speaker 1: of Babble. Since it's it estimated that there are only one,
Speaker 1: give or take a few particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons
Speaker 1: in the region of the universe, we can observe the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object.
Speaker 1: But thanks to the strict rules with which Borhe is
Speaker 1: constructed it in his imagination, we can think about it clearly.
Speaker 1: So I I like, I like how he sort of
Speaker 1: reins it when he doesn't rein it in. But well,
Speaker 1: he crunches the numbers of it and and just lays
Speaker 1: out the fact that this could not exist in the
Speaker 1: physical universe. Yeah, yeah, I mean there is not space
Speaker 1: in the universe for it. And yet it is still
Speaker 1: arguably a finite object. Oh, not arguably, it's definitely finite.
Speaker 1: But well, but that's the thing. It's finite in a
Speaker 1: way like there and certainly this is a subject we've
Speaker 1: covered in other episodes on on the nature of infinity.
Speaker 1: But there, of course different types of infinity. And so
Speaker 1: it's physically fine, it's physically finite, but it is from
Speaker 1: a human perspective it might as well be infinite. Well,
Speaker 1: you can make the case that while it is physically
Speaker 1: finite in that there are a limited number of books
Speaker 1: however vast, you know, impossibly vast to contain in the
Speaker 1: real universe. There there are a actually limited number of books,
Speaker 1: but there might not be a limited amount of information
Speaker 1: because if you follow this, uh, the same strategy we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier of allowing one book's contents to spill over
Speaker 1: into another volume, and given the fact that all volumes
Speaker 1: possible to represent our present, meaning all unfinished ideas will
Speaker 1: be continued into other ideas, there is potentially limitless information
Speaker 1: in the limited library of Babel. Well, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't help but think of the infinity hotel analogy
Speaker 1: like I did it, Like an infinite number of people
Speaker 1: show up to a hotel and then another infinite number
Speaker 1: shop on another bus. Um what I mean, what what
Speaker 1: do you do about books that themselves are infinite? What
Speaker 1: do you do about Bore Hayes the Book of Sands,
Speaker 1: which is a book that is that that is endless?
Speaker 1: How many books then does that contain? Like trying to
Speaker 1: shelve the Book of sand uh in the Library of
Speaker 1: Babbel is kind of like a busload of infinite hotel
Speaker 1: guests showing up at the infinity Hotel. Well, I would
Speaker 1: say that the Library of Babel itself is sort of
Speaker 1: an argument that there could not be such a thing
Speaker 1: as an infinite book. That there there there are books
Speaker 1: that are so vast as to, you know, stifle our comprehension.
Speaker 1: But if you think of the Library of Babel itself
Speaker 1: as one book that you can just move the pages
Speaker 1: around as much as you want, all possible representations of
Speaker 1: all possible characters are there, but the book is finite.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's a good point. But let's let's bring
Speaker 1: it back to Dinnett So Dinnett proposes a variation on
Speaker 1: the Library of Babel that he calls the Library of Mendel,
Speaker 1: named after Men, the Mendel, famous of men Dalian genetics,
Speaker 1: and it's a library that contains all possible genomes. So
Speaker 1: if we assume that the Library of Mendel is composed
Speaker 1: of descriptions of genomes, then not not the molecules themselves,
Speaker 1: but the the coding that would represent what is contained
Speaker 1: in your gene recipes. Um that's the case, then you
Speaker 1: could you could argue that, well, they're actually already part
Speaker 1: of the Library of Babel, as the standard code for
Speaker 1: DNA descriptions consists of the characters A, C, G and
Speaker 1: T for addanine, setosine, guanine, and thymine. Uh. These are
Speaker 1: the four nucleotides that compose the letters of the DNA alphabet, right,
Speaker 1: so if you're going to spell out a representation of
Speaker 1: your genome, you'd use those four letters. So since those
Speaker 1: are letters that are already part of the alphabet, that
Speaker 1: makes the Library of Babel, the Library of Mendel is
Speaker 1: a subset of the Library of Babel. Yeah, and according
Speaker 1: to Dennet, you need to vote three thousand of the
Speaker 1: five page volumes in the Library of Babbel just to
Speaker 1: cover the human genome. Truly, Library Babble. That's not really
Speaker 1: a problem, as we've discussed UM. However, I hope that
Speaker 1: the purifiers in this case haven't been destroying these copies
Speaker 1: you think they would, like they come across a book
Speaker 1: that's just a bunch of A C, T and G
Speaker 1: what what what use is this? It looks like more gibberish,
Speaker 1: But they're really just burning the Library of Mendel volume
Speaker 1: after volume, and who knows we might need those someday. Well,
Speaker 1: that sort of highlights another thing about the Library of Babel,
Speaker 1: which is, uh, how do you necessarily know when you've
Speaker 1: come across something of significance, Like we've been assuming that
Speaker 1: you would know a book of significance or preciousness when
Speaker 1: you found it, but it might be encoding something for
Speaker 1: the code for which you cannot read. So if if
Speaker 1: we're we're lining up the Library of Mendel with the
Speaker 1: Library of Babble or within it, UM, this means that
Speaker 1: not only would the Library of Mendel have all genomes,
Speaker 1: and it would also have all possible genomes within its
Speaker 1: frame of reference. UM says, then it puts it we're
Speaker 1: forced to quote start in the middle, and we have
Speaker 1: only the current state of evolved biology to consider as
Speaker 1: well as the terrestrial model. But then they're gonna be
Speaker 1: all these other possibilities as well. Yeah, So what what
Speaker 1: happens on Earth is not that you look around and
Speaker 1: you find all possible variations on all possible genes in
Speaker 1: uh or actually with the library of mental would be
Speaker 1: all possible sequences of nucleotides and even more minute than genes. Um,
Speaker 1: you don't see that in nature. In fact, the nature
Speaker 1: that exists as a very tiny subset of the library
Speaker 1: of mental. That's right. And then there there's so much
Speaker 1: in the Library of mental that, like the Library of babble,
Speaker 1: would just be nonsense. Um, the vast majority of it
Speaker 1: is gonna be just blueprint blueprints for lifelessness. In quoting
Speaker 1: Richard Dawkins, he says, quote, there are many more ways
Speaker 1: of being dead or not alive than ways of being alive.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good quote, and that makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, most recipes you could come up with for
Speaker 1: building a building are not actually going to be structurally viable.
Speaker 1: Most recipes you could come up with for you know,
Speaker 1: if you're just combining random chemicals to make food, most
Speaker 1: of it would not be edible. Oh my goodness. Yet imagine,
Speaker 1: like we haven't even talked about this, and I hadn't
Speaker 1: really thought about it till now, but imagine cookbooks in
Speaker 1: the Library of Babel, the baking cookbooks specifically, So many
Speaker 1: of these recipes, the vast majority of the recipes are
Speaker 1: just gonna be garbage creating, like creating not even like
Speaker 1: the bread doesn't rise, the gough just just goops there
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the pan. But what about the
Speaker 1: ones that are perfectly excellent cookbooks except they all tell
Speaker 1: you to add one bucket of cigarette butts to your
Speaker 1: recipe every time. Yeah, or everything is delicious but also poisoned.
Speaker 1: But like many of the books in the Library of Babbel,
Speaker 1: I digress. Yeah, well, so the library of Mendel, as
Speaker 1: didn't understand, is it is sort of what he would
Speaker 1: call universal design space, which is this multidimensional space that
Speaker 1: is how would you describe it, Robert Um? And this
Speaker 1: is my understanding. So I might have it wrong, but
Speaker 1: the way I keep thinking of it as it's that
Speaker 1: black bed on the light bright Okay, in which you
Speaker 1: put the pegs and stuff against the light up and
Speaker 1: and essentially if you took a light bright and you
Speaker 1: made the tree of life on it. Um, that's what
Speaker 1: the universal design space is. Well, right, it's the possible
Speaker 1: design space for things made out of d N a
Speaker 1: in the way we understand DNA, and like we said,
Speaker 1: that contains tons and tons of possible combinations that don't
Speaker 1: lead to anything like what we would call life for
Speaker 1: successful life. Right. And also this universal design space would
Speaker 1: contain all actual complex phenomena, both biological designs and cultural designs,
Speaker 1: so it would contain bacteria, apes, humans, books about apes,
Speaker 1: jokes about apes, Great eight movies, Bad eight movies, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love the way that this connects information at all levels.
Speaker 1: So within the Library of Babel, you have both the
Speaker 1: recipe for making my genome, so you could say, uh uh,
Speaker 1: physical information in a way, the information contained in the molecules,
Speaker 1: but also every story I've ever written, which you could
Speaker 1: consider part of my genetic phenotype. Right, it's the molecules
Speaker 1: in my DNA have, in combination with external circumstances, ultimately
Speaker 1: led to the creation of every bit of intellectual work
Speaker 1: I've ever done, and this is the same for all
Speaker 1: of us, and both are subsets of the library of Babel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read another quick quote from the identity here.
Speaker 1: According to Darwin's dangerous idea, all possible explorations of design
Speaker 1: space are connected not only all your children and your
Speaker 1: children's children, but all your brain children and your brain
Speaker 1: children's brain children must grow from the common stock of
Speaker 1: design elements, genes and memes that have so far been
Speaker 1: accumulated and conserved by the inexorable lifting algorithms, the ramps
Speaker 1: and cranes, and cranes the top cranes of natural selection
Speaker 1: and its products. And just to explain really quick, there
Speaker 1: didn't when he talks about cranes. He has this idea
Speaker 1: of design being the difference between the metaphors of cranes
Speaker 1: and the metaphors of sky hooks. Sky Hooks are these
Speaker 1: ideas that he thinks about design coming from the top down,
Speaker 1: reaching in and making something without any previous precedent, whereas
Speaker 1: cranes are things that build from the ground up, and
Speaker 1: they can become higher and higher based on bases that
Speaker 1: have already been built. The whole standing on the backbone,
Speaker 1: on the backs of giants. Yeah, exactly. So, so natural
Speaker 1: selection is a crane algorithm, as he would describe it,
Speaker 1: as something that builds from the ground up. So thinking
Speaker 1: of the Library of Babbel or the Library of Mental
Speaker 1: as spaces of possibility that are different than the spaces
Speaker 1: of what can actually be achieved in terms of living organisms.
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting that then it goes on to
Speaker 1: he puts together this diagram that's concentric circles of different
Speaker 1: types of possibility that the Library of Babel and the
Speaker 1: Library of Mental help us think about. And I like
Speaker 1: this because I think possibility is a word that very
Speaker 1: often gets equivocated on in our conversation. So think about
Speaker 1: these concentric circles of possibility. It's like a Venn diagram,
Speaker 1: but each circles inside the bigger one. So the smallest
Speaker 1: circle in the middle is what's actually true. So the
Speaker 1: example he gives his President Clinton, there has been a
Speaker 1: real President Clinton that actually happened. It's true. We might
Speaker 1: even get another one maybe, so, but then there is
Speaker 1: historical possibility, right, President gold Water could have happened, but
Speaker 1: given historical circumstances, it didn't. All of the all of
Speaker 1: the pieces where the air that it seemed like it
Speaker 1: could have happened. It's just not how the universe went. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then there is biological possibility that's a bigger circle, which
Speaker 1: the example he gives his striped giraffe could have happened
Speaker 1: given what's possible with life on Earth, but it didn't. Now,
Speaker 1: technically we do have copies which which are not striped giraffes,
Speaker 1: but they are kind of the related to giraffes and
Speaker 1: are kind of like a forest giraffe with some zebra
Speaker 1: esque stripes. Well, you know that that's a danger we
Speaker 1: always play with when we entered the realm of talking
Speaker 1: about what's possible, we don't even always know what's really happened.
Speaker 1: But then bigger than biological possibility is physical possibility. With
Speaker 1: the example he gives is a flying horse, so doesn't
Speaker 1: violate the laws of physics, is just you know, it's
Speaker 1: not something that you're going to see in the biological world.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like getting into our flying fish episode
Speaker 1: where we talked about, you know, the problem with first
Speaker 1: of all, recognizing the fact that there could be a
Speaker 1: fish biologically with wings that could fly and not just
Speaker 1: glide across the water, and yet it does not exist. Right.
Speaker 1: And then finally, the biggest circle of possibility is logical possibility,
Speaker 1: which is Superman. So Superman is also not physically possible.
Speaker 1: It violates the laws of physics, but it's not logically
Speaker 1: impossible because it doesn't entail a logical contradiction. It doesn't
Speaker 1: entail both A and not A. So you could say
Speaker 1: it's possible. And I think that it's interesting because everything
Speaker 1: that is logically possible is in the Library of Babel, right,
Speaker 1: All descriptions that are logically possible are in the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel. And and as a subset, every description that's
Speaker 1: physically possible in terms of the the nucleotides listed is
Speaker 1: in the Library of Mendel. But then the subset of that,
Speaker 1: everything that's biologically possible, is the biology that we actually
Speaker 1: see or that could actually evolve from the tree of
Speaker 1: life as it exists today. But I want to move
Speaker 1: on to another application of the Library of Babel, and
Speaker 1: because I think we were about about to get lost
Speaker 1: with UH, and that's UH the work of the American
Speaker 1: philosopher and logician W. V. O. Quine. So Quine wrote
Speaker 1: a very short piece on the Library of Babel called
Speaker 1: the Universal Library essay, and I recommend you can check
Speaker 1: this out yourself because it's incredibly short, very concise. So
Speaker 1: I want to read a quote from it where Quine
Speaker 1: also he sort of reformulates the library in the same
Speaker 1: way Dinnett did, just playing around with some numbers to
Speaker 1: get different numbers, but the same principle. Qin says, at
Speaker 1: two thousand characters to the page, we get five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand to the two hundred and fifty page volume. So
Speaker 1: with say a D capitals and smalls and other marks
Speaker 1: to choose from, I wonder what those other marks are,
Speaker 1: maybe a lot of hashtags. We arrive at the five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand power of a D as the total number
Speaker 1: of books in the library. I gather that there is
Speaker 1: not room in the present phase of our expanding universe
Speaker 1: on present estimates for more than a negligible fraction of
Speaker 1: the collection. Numbers are cheap, so he's arrived at the
Speaker 1: same conclusion as others before. This wouldn't fit in the universe,
Speaker 1: And I like the expression numbers are cheap, especially when
Speaker 1: you have notation like exponential notation. You can write out
Speaker 1: a number like five to the one million, three D
Speaker 1: and twelve power, but just writing that on the page.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of small marking notation, but it denotes
Speaker 1: something that could not possibly be contained in the universe.
Speaker 1: But Quine draws this back to something we've mentioned before.
Speaker 1: The number of books in the library, while bigger than
Speaker 1: could be contained, is not infinite. It's definitely finite. At
Speaker 1: a certain point, you could catalog every possible book in
Speaker 1: the Library of Babel, just not in this universe, and
Speaker 1: yet quote the entire and ultimate truth about everything is
Speaker 1: printed in full in that library. After all, insofar as
Speaker 1: it can be put into words at all, every true
Speaker 1: statement and every false statement you could possibly make are
Speaker 1: in the library. And yet the library is finite. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, there there is that mythical not mythical, but
Speaker 1: at least an elusive book or series of books that
Speaker 1: that outline the location of all the books in the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel. But then there are all possible inferior
Speaker 1: copies and misleading copies of that same series, long, long, long,
Speaker 1: long series of books. Uh that that that offered to
Speaker 1: show you where everything is, and don't there's the catalog
Speaker 1: that tells you to dive over the spiral staircase railing
Speaker 1: and and just fall until you come to the Crimson hexagon,
Speaker 1: and it's lying to you because the problem is you'll
Speaker 1: pretty much keep falling forever. Oh wow, and we haven't
Speaker 1: even gotten to how the toilets work here, Like, that's
Speaker 1: not covered in Borhess book all how what's the plumbing like?
Speaker 1: But it is covered in some book in the library. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is a book in the library that just deals
Speaker 1: exhaustively explains where the plumbing goes, does it? I wonder
Speaker 1: where it goes. If there's an end to the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel, then there is an end to those interconnected
Speaker 1: pipes that carrate all the the fecal matter and urine
Speaker 1: a way right, and of course the watered up pieces
Speaker 1: of of nonsense books that are being used for toilet paper.
Speaker 1: All of the sewage plumbing goes directly to the hexagon
Speaker 1: housing unauthorized biographies of celebrities who recently passed away. Well
Speaker 1: you say that, Joe, But remember in the Library of
Speaker 1: Babel there is an unauthorized autobiography of say, Heath Ledger
Speaker 1: that is not that is not only good, but it
Speaker 1: is great. An unauthorized autobiography would be there in the
Speaker 1: mean to say biography, but But that's the thing. Any
Speaker 1: mistake I make in speaking the Library of Babbel has
Speaker 1: me covered. It exists. Is it factual? Is it is
Speaker 1: their truth in it? I don't know, but it could
Speaker 1: still be entertaining. Maybe it's unauthorized by the heath Ledger
Speaker 1: of our universe that it was, but it is authorized
Speaker 1: by the heath Ledger of an alternate universe. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that would be there, wouldn't it. Okay, So I gotta
Speaker 1: bring it back to Quine. So back to Quine. We
Speaker 1: we mentioned a couple of times now that there's this
Speaker 1: principle that, well, what if a book takes more than
Speaker 1: pages to express, you know, that can't be in the library.
Speaker 1: But it can be because it gets picked up right
Speaker 1: where it left off in a second volume, and a
Speaker 1: third if necessary, and so on, and all those volumes
Speaker 1: are in the library. So you have like Showgun volume one,
Speaker 1: Showgun volume two. Yeah, it never ends. But given this
Speaker 1: principle that messages can be spread across multiple volumes, Quine
Speaker 1: realizes that you can use a form of Morse code
Speaker 1: to massively downsize the library to exactly two books with
Speaker 1: one page each. One book is a single page with
Speaker 1: a dash and the other is a single page with
Speaker 1: a dot. And by reading these books back and forth
Speaker 1: in various orders, you can code any alphabetic sequence in
Speaker 1: a simplified form of Morse code. Now the library has
Speaker 1: massively shrunken size, but it has the exact same encoding
Speaker 1: power if you were to, you know, if you're to
Speaker 1: actually map out the combinations and do all of the
Speaker 1: same possible combinations. But let's think about it in another way.
Speaker 1: You can replace the dot and the dash with a
Speaker 1: zero and a one, or of course, and on an
Speaker 1: off switch. In other words, binary code and your universal
Speaker 1: library has become the same type of information storage system
Speaker 1: that exists inside your computer. And this illuminates a principle
Speaker 1: that Alan Turing and others observed about the binary computer.
Speaker 1: It's universal. Like any information in our operation that can
Speaker 1: be represented in code, which potentially is all information or operations,
Speaker 1: depending on you know, your philosophical orientation to that question,
Speaker 1: it can be represented by a universal binary machine. So,
Speaker 1: on one hand, this seems to sort of violate the
Speaker 1: allure of the library. Right in the library of Babel,
Speaker 1: there are already in existence the precious books. They're already
Speaker 1: out there, the books of ultimate potential, beauty and truth
Speaker 1: physically exist, we just have to find them. But in
Speaker 1: the binary universal library, we'd have to encode those books ourselves.
Speaker 1: But maybe this disconnects sort of highlights and inherent irony
Speaker 1: in the mathematics of the Library of Babel. Those books
Speaker 1: exist in the Library of Babel, but for any individual librarian,
Speaker 1: they will never ever be found. Would be, as we said,
Speaker 1: extremely lucky to discover a book with one tin word
Speaker 1: long sentence that makes sense. And so we're sort of
Speaker 1: back to the monkeys with typewriters in the Library of Babel.
Speaker 1: You're watching the monkeys type at random and hoping they
Speaker 1: give you the complete works of Shakespeare. But they're never
Speaker 1: going to do it. In coins to volume library, you
Speaker 1: yourself are the monkey typing at random. It makes no
Speaker 1: difference in terms of the knowledge discovered, just how it
Speaker 1: feels to be a part of the discovery system. So
Speaker 1: what you need is an interface on top of quients system,
Speaker 1: such such as say a pink Kindle, instantly search out
Speaker 1: the books you want, um from all the possible um
Speaker 1: you know books out there in the library right now.
Speaker 1: This is, of course a very different way than the
Speaker 1: way we actually generate books in reality, which is, in
Speaker 1: reality we use heuristic shortcuts of intelligence, human brain power,
Speaker 1: creativity to try to limit the size of the total
Speaker 1: number of possible books and only generate books that more
Speaker 1: or less makes sense, at least hopefully in the author's mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: generally you're you're the author's only writing, you know, six
Speaker 1: to eight versions of that book, right, But when when
Speaker 1: limiting the noise like that, we are also limiting the signal,
Speaker 1: So there's a given take. So by by cutting out
Speaker 1: all of the nonsense books, we massively reduce our searching
Speaker 1: for significance project, But we also eliminate possibly the most
Speaker 1: precious books out there because we just didn't think to
Speaker 1: create them. Yeah, we thought to create them, and that's
Speaker 1: time right, right. Isn't that funny that the Library of
Speaker 1: Babbel makes me feel even worse about about all of
Speaker 1: the books I want to read and don't get around
Speaker 1: to reading because we don't live in the Library of Babel.
Speaker 1: We live in Uh, well, you could say we live
Speaker 1: in a version of the Library of Babel that is
Speaker 1: the universe, But in terms of the readable library of
Speaker 1: books available to us, it's not the Library of Babel.
Speaker 1: It's mostly books that just makes sense, and I still
Speaker 1: don't get to all the books that I should be reading. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not only does it contain all the books you should
Speaker 1: be reading, all the books you want to read, it
Speaker 1: contains all the books you could have written, all the
Speaker 1: books you could write in your life, which is it's
Speaker 1: kind of a very heartbreaking thing to think of as
Speaker 1: a writer, Like when you didn't have time to write
Speaker 1: last week, Well, that story that you would have written,
Speaker 1: it's in that collection, somewhere somewhere lost in the the
Speaker 1: the the seemingly infinite but ultimately finite honeycomb of books
Speaker 1: set ablaze by a purifier. Another idea that this made
Speaker 1: me think about is if a world contains all possible
Speaker 1: combinations of code of information signaling code, so all possible information,
Speaker 1: is it in fact no different than something that contains
Speaker 1: no information whatsoever? Yeah? Yeah, it really does, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It's um, it's like saying that, ohever, I put all
Speaker 1: possible colors into this paint. Can look at this wonderful
Speaker 1: color I have. No, you just have black at this point,
Speaker 1: you just have or I'm weird brown. Um. It's not
Speaker 1: the same as saying that it actually encompasses all of
Speaker 1: these uh, these these pure elements on a much smaller scale.
Speaker 1: This makes me think back on you know, not too
Speaker 1: long ago, I was watching, Oh it was something on YouTube.
Speaker 1: It was like a c SPAN event from the early
Speaker 1: two thousands or late nineties, I think, And it was
Speaker 1: some journalists talking. I wish I could remember who, but
Speaker 1: some journalists talking about the impact of the Internet on
Speaker 1: the spread of information. And I remember hearing the sentiment that,
Speaker 1: you know, they were saying, well, the Internet is great
Speaker 1: because it opens up all these uh you know, new channel.
Speaker 1: Anybody can start a blog and share their perspective and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And I think about the cacophony of
Speaker 1: of information or should we call it information, the cacophony
Speaker 1: of voices that we live in now. You know, I
Speaker 1: can't say that I would prefer to live in a
Speaker 1: world where where there were fewer people talking about things.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, I can't say that I
Speaker 1: feel really in pitched by the quantity of perspective and
Speaker 1: opinion being shared on the Internet. You know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. Now here's a question for you. Uh, as
Speaker 1: long as we're playing with the ideas that spiral out
Speaker 1: endlessly from the Library of Babbel. Here, imagine a future
Speaker 1: in which you know we have we all have virtual
Speaker 1: worlds that we've built, and someone creates not only not
Speaker 1: something far beyond our current online version of the Library
Speaker 1: of Babbel. Imagine a functional virtual library of Babbel world.
Speaker 1: You put on your headset, you climb into your tank,
Speaker 1: turn on your you know, your drip, and then you're
Speaker 1: in there, and the computer is actually creating each room
Speaker 1: as you go, the nonsense books. So it would have
Speaker 1: to be procedurally generated because the computer storage system could
Speaker 1: not store the entire library, would have to create as
Speaker 1: as you go, and and so. But as you go,
Speaker 1: it is actually right, non existent books is writing um
Speaker 1: different versions of books that already exist. It seems feasible.
Speaker 1: And certainly when we start to start considering the end
Speaker 1: of the possibility of of of AI writers AI artists,
Speaker 1: could we reach a point where the Library of Babble
Speaker 1: exists in in in in actually trying to come up
Speaker 1: with new ideas for non existent books. Instead of dreaming
Speaker 1: them up ourselves, we are actually questioning through the library
Speaker 1: and forcing this randomized artificial intelligence to create them. No,
Speaker 1: I think that would never work well because the library
Speaker 1: is too vast. Like we've said, you would come across
Speaker 1: just pure nonsense. You could wander through this virtual library
Speaker 1: your whole life and find almost nothing but complete nonsense.
Speaker 1: Maybe one day you'd find three words in a row
Speaker 1: that made some kind of grammatical sense. Would that be
Speaker 1: worth it? I feel like it might be worth it
Speaker 1: to wander this library. If a library was made real
Speaker 1: in a virtual setting. Can you imagine, like the the
Speaker 1: excitement you would feel when you actually found something readable? Uh?
Speaker 1: I can imagine actual plans of purifiers and other sex
Speaker 1: that would be wandering. I don't know. I Well, so
Speaker 1: here's one thing. Maybe we could uh massively narrow the
Speaker 1: size of the library, still be astronomical and impossible, but
Speaker 1: impossible to find something all that valuable. But what if
Speaker 1: you limited it to words in a dictionary, So a
Speaker 1: procedurally generated library of babbel that, instead of all possible
Speaker 1: combinations of characters, was all possible combinations of words that
Speaker 1: exist in a dictionary in your language. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: that would narrow it somewhat, but it's still mostly be gibberish,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it. Huh? I guess I can't help but think
Speaker 1: of it, because I um, I recently read Ready Player
Speaker 1: one or if you made with this book. I've heard
Speaker 1: of it, but I haven't read it. It's pretty fun,
Speaker 1: fun book about virtual worlds and recreations of things that
Speaker 1: exist in pop culture. Library of Apple does not come up,
Speaker 1: but I can't help but think about that, especially since
Speaker 1: that book deals with the virtual world that contains easter
Speaker 1: eggs that people are searching for, you know, these little
Speaker 1: nuggets of meaning, and essentially they're trying to find a
Speaker 1: uh a Crimson hexagon of a sort in that book.
Speaker 1: So you know, I can't help but think about the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel as an analogy to the search for
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence. You know the vast scale of the universe
Speaker 1: and are the only difference is that the Library of
Speaker 1: Babel you can know how much there is and you
Speaker 1: can sort of say, well, here are the types of
Speaker 1: things we'd be looking for for books that makes sense.
Speaker 1: But we're still looking for books that makes sense from
Speaker 1: our perspective, right, based on our model of sensical books.
Speaker 1: And maybe in reality we're no better than the purifiers
Speaker 1: running around setting things alight because they don't just dismissing
Speaker 1: things because they don't line up with our expectations of
Speaker 1: or her. And since Robert, it is your kind of
Speaker 1: lawlessness and anarchy that has led to the library being
Speaker 1: the kind of place it is today. We need someone
Speaker 1: with a strong hand to set the library right, a
Speaker 1: new head librarian. Yes, m all right, well we could
Speaker 1: obviously we could go on and on here doing a
Speaker 1: various thought experiments about the Library of Babel. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure you guys and gals can as well. Maybe there's
Speaker 1: some spin on it that's come to your mind. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's a cool spin on it that you've encountered in
Speaker 1: other works. Uh. If so, we would love to hear
Speaker 1: about it. We would love to have any number of discussions,
Speaker 1: um dare I say almost infinite number of discussions about
Speaker 1: the Library of Babble. You can get in touch with
Speaker 1: this the usual places sofal media where stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind or blow the mind on a number of
Speaker 1: those stuff to blow your mind. Dot com is the mothership.
Speaker 1: And then of course there is always email where you
Speaker 1: can email your favorite selection from the Library of Babel
Speaker 1: to us at Blow the Mind is how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other
Speaker 1: topics is that how stuff works. Dot com