Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hello, Hello, this is Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind audiologue. This is Robert Lamb and this is
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. This is day thirteen of our descent into
Speaker 1: the famed Library of Babble. We've been exploring this infinite
Speaker 1: sprawl of interconnected hexagonal rooms and the twenty bookshelves contained
Speaker 1: within each one. Joe, how many rooms have we explored
Speaker 1: since last log entry? Oh, let me find it here.
Speaker 1: Let's see. Well, we're up to a hundred and twelve,
Speaker 1: and that brings the grand total of rooms we have
Speaker 1: explored to date up to one thousand, five hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty one. And of course that is not counting the
Speaker 1: rooms to the library that we could tell had already
Speaker 1: been explored. So we just skipped over with books pulled
Speaker 1: out all over the place, or some just said empty shelves,
Speaker 1: smoke lines on the ceiling, and these ancient piles of
Speaker 1: cold black coal in the middle of the floor we
Speaker 1: can presume from some long ago book burnings. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: That I mean that the library is at least indefinite,
Speaker 1: if not infinite, So it falls to inquisitors such as
Speaker 1: ourselves to steadily work our way out from charted portions
Speaker 1: of the library and into uncharted regions. And it really
Speaker 1: is a room by room, book by book procedures. Now, fortunately,
Speaker 1: most of the books are nonsense, and you can spot
Speaker 1: that right away, because I mean real nonsense, total typographical gibberish.
Speaker 1: And that's not even counting the ones that have been
Speaker 1: totally or partially burned by the purifiers. I hear footsteps
Speaker 1: sometimes in the rooms directly above us, and I keep
Speaker 1: wondering if it's them. It could be, but you know,
Speaker 1: it could be the bookman, I know that's superstition joke.
Speaker 1: We I mean, we might as well hope to find
Speaker 1: that with the Crimson hexagon. Now, come on, Robert, wouldn't
Speaker 1: you love to find the one hexagonal room in this
Speaker 1: entire place that contains something truly precious apart from all
Speaker 1: this gibberish, maybe even real functional books of magic spells well,
Speaker 1: of course, but that doesn't mean it actually exists, even
Speaker 1: in the Library of Babel. Now, remember, Robert, these rooms
Speaker 1: contain not only all books, but all possible books. Those
Speaker 1: books have got to be out there, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean they're actually magical. Yeah, I guess you're right, But
Speaker 1: sometimes I like to think that Crimson Hexagon is out there.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe the purifiers haven't found it yet because
Speaker 1: it moves. Have you thought about that? Like in the
Speaker 1: movie Cube rooms move around while we're asleep? Who are
Speaker 1: like the the the Castle and Krawl. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: glad you mentioned Krull because I found a copy of
Speaker 1: Alan Dean Foresters three novelization of the screenplay of Krall.
Speaker 1: That's a real book. Yeah, but I also found a
Speaker 1: Krull novel by Stanford Sherman, the guy who wrote the screenplay,
Speaker 1: and he never actually wrote a novel version, right, Oh no,
Speaker 1: not in our reality, but of course it could exist,
Speaker 1: which means the library has it. And that's why I
Speaker 1: was also able to find a copy of a Christmas Carol.
Speaker 1: You might want to see this where instead of saying
Speaker 1: God bless us everyone, tiny Tim gives an invocation of
Speaker 1: Mala Collored of destruction. What about you check this out
Speaker 1: Frank Herbert's complete seven book done series. Yeah, not not
Speaker 1: just the six he actually wrote in our reality, all
Speaker 1: seven as well as look at this, an alternate Herbert
Speaker 1: Dune trilogy that's only three books. Long, but a lot
Speaker 1: more irotic. Yeah, yeah, you've got to read this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's on my list. But hey, guess what I've got
Speaker 1: the final two books of the Game of Thrones series,
Speaker 1: the Song of Ice and Fire spoiler they were on
Speaker 1: Earth all along, and West Ros is actually in rural
Speaker 1: North Florida. But also, Robert, I have your complete biography,
Speaker 1: including the end, and as per our agreement, I didn't
Speaker 1: read it. Well good, well, cool, here's yours, then just
Speaker 1: swap thank you. Uh, there we go. We're good. Wait,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, did you hear that? It's probably just
Speaker 1: other inquisitors or you know, our pilgrims looking for deposits
Speaker 1: of alternate Gospels or book worshippers or the Purifiers or
Speaker 1: the Book miss none of that. Let's let's keep moving
Speaker 1: this Hexa gone up ahead, looks pretty promised me. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Land, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
Speaker 1: to be talking about the Library of Babel. So the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel is both uh it's a short story,
Speaker 1: but it's also the concept at the core of the
Speaker 1: short story. And we're really going to be focusing on
Speaker 1: the concept uh and it's broader implications today. Not just
Speaker 1: the story itself, but the concept of the Library of
Speaker 1: Babel comes from a short story of the same name
Speaker 1: by Jorge Louis Borges, first published in the collection The
Speaker 1: Garden of Forking Paths in nineteen forty one. So. Borges
Speaker 1: was a twentieth century Argentine author. He lived from eighteen
Speaker 1: to nineteen eighty six, and in his lifetime, especially later
Speaker 1: in his life, he became famous for poetry essays, but
Speaker 1: especially short stories and short stories. A lot of them
Speaker 1: are kind of like this story. Yeah, I mean, like
Speaker 1: like a lot of his tales. Uh. The Library of
Speaker 1: Babble was not really a narrative experience. It's not very
Speaker 1: plot heavy, right. It's kind of a sort of scholarly
Speaker 1: missive about a fantastic idea. So he he choose on
Speaker 1: this fantastic idea, gets all of these philosophic juices going,
Speaker 1: and we're just we're fortunate enough to experience it with him.
Speaker 1: Uh and his his stories. There there are a number
Speaker 1: of different themes that often pop up, such as knives, mirrors, dreams, oh, dreams.
Speaker 1: There's some fabulous dream stories, um and and they're all
Speaker 1: pretty short. Like That's one of the wonderful things about
Speaker 1: a collection of Borhe's short fiction is you can just
Speaker 1: pick it up. You can pretty pretty much pick any
Speaker 1: story and just in a few pages and just mind
Speaker 1: blowing concept is presented to you. That just expands the
Speaker 1: limits of your imagination. Yeah. You ever know those like
Speaker 1: fantasy writers who are better at world building than they
Speaker 1: are at character and plot. Yeah, I'd say Bores is
Speaker 1: like that, except he writes what would probably be considered
Speaker 1: now literary fiction. It's you know, respectable intellectual fiction. Uh
Speaker 1: that that's treated without any hint of a sneer by
Speaker 1: the Academy as far as I can tell. But but
Speaker 1: it's fascinating stuff through and through. Yeah, it reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of some of the short fiction that Philip K.
Speaker 1: Dick would later do. And now, certainly Philip K. Dick
Speaker 1: was was capable of producing novel after novel after novel
Speaker 1: as well. Uh you know, he was pretty adapted it
Speaker 1: longer works, But some of his short stories remind me
Speaker 1: of Boes in their ability to without getting too bogged
Speaker 1: down in story or character, just presenting in a nugget
Speaker 1: like a really easy mind warping idea. Yeah, so we
Speaker 1: should probably start with a quote from the beginning of
Speaker 1: the Library of Babel the story to give you a
Speaker 1: sense of what is being talked about here. So this
Speaker 1: is a quote from the beginning of the story, with
Speaker 1: some editorial illusions for brevity. Quote. The universe, which others
Speaker 1: call the library, is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite
Speaker 1: number of hexagonal galleries. The arrangement of the galleries is
Speaker 1: always the same, twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line
Speaker 1: four of the hexagon's six sides. One of the hexagon's
Speaker 1: free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which
Speaker 1: 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, or two tiny compartments. One is for
Speaker 1: sleeping upright, the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through
Speaker 1: this space to 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 hexagon, 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, et cetera,
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 we'll discussed, there seems to be
Speaker 1: a lack of a lack of laws and policy in
Speaker 1: place in the Library of Babble. Yeah, so in the
Speaker 1: Library of Babble. We're going to talk about the philosophical
Speaker 1: and scientific implications of this thought experiment and later on
Speaker 1: in the episode, but first we just want to kind
Speaker 1: of explore what this this concept entails. And there are
Speaker 1: definitely a lot of ironies and absurdities in Borge's story.
Speaker 1: So I don't think he was trying to create something
Speaker 1: that 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: sport Hase writes, each book in this library contains four
Speaker 1: hundred and ten pages. Each page has forty lines, and
Speaker 1: each line has approximately eighty black letters, just printed letters.
Speaker 1: And you can actually work out the math from this.
Speaker 1: So all the books consists of the same twenty five
Speaker 1: elements 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, aren't 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 a d 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 Shakespeare. 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 ShakespeRe. 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 aim 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, that maybe have a
Speaker 1: few different typos in the in it, a few different
Speaker 1: character changes. Then there are versions of it that are
Speaker 1: even better. There's even like an ideal version of it,
Speaker 1: a perfect version. There is a version of your favorite
Speaker 1: book that you yourself would perhaps love even more because
Speaker 1: it's a little more in tune with your expectations. Right,
Speaker 1: And all that fan fiction you write that's already in
Speaker 1: the library, it's there, plus all the changes you could
Speaker 1: have made to make it you know, less of a travesty.
Speaker 1: But is it all on the same shelf? No, it's
Speaker 1: all on the same hexagon. Probably not, because it's arranged
Speaker 1: in random or to making it even more frustrating to
Speaker 1: try to find anything, though not necessarily even more frustrating,
Speaker 1: because if you try to imagine what navigating the library
Speaker 1: of Babel would be if it were organized in some
Speaker 1: alphabetical fashion, you might be trapped in the A A
Speaker 1: A A A A A section of the library. Your
Speaker 1: entire life yeah, and you would just be physically unable
Speaker 1: to traverse that area and get to the sensible books. Right.
Speaker 1: So I'd actually prefer a randomized library to being stuck
Speaker 1: in a sea of a's that I could never escape
Speaker 1: from no matter how long I walked, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: of course this has been such a highly influential book.
Speaker 1: It's referenced in a number of different works, umming the
Speaker 1: Library of the Library Battle, so like a lot of
Speaker 1: people probably recognize it from umberto Eco's masterful Name of
Speaker 1: the Rose, where an actual library and an Italian monastery
Speaker 1: is is modeled on this. There are aspects of it
Speaker 1: that I believe are utilized in the House of Leaves.
Speaker 1: But then there's also a Stephen King short story. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've read this one titled Er that
Speaker 1: came out It was only for Kindle, I don't think. So.
Speaker 1: It's about a man who obtains a pink kindle and
Speaker 1: it turns out to be a kindle from another no
Speaker 1: I haven't, and it gives him access not only to
Speaker 1: the kindle store in our universe, but also to kindle
Speaker 1: stores in alternate universe, so he's able to access books
Speaker 1: by authors he loves. That have not yet been written,
Speaker 1: 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 Babbel and
Speaker 1: just start pulling books off the shelf, there is a
Speaker 1: tool you can use. A Brooklyn author named Jonathan Vassil
Speaker 1: has created a virtual version. You can go to it
Speaker 1: Library of Babbel 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 healf of the library
Speaker 1: by name which I guess it generates the text that
Speaker 1: would be under that randomized section of the library, and
Speaker 1: you can pull out some books and look at what's
Speaker 1: inside them. Huh. And are there any MPCs here? No,
Speaker 1: not that I know of. I don't know I have.
Speaker 1: I haven't played with it long enough. It wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be great if some purifiers come by and start trying
Speaker 1: to burn the books you're reading. Now, now that reminds
Speaker 1: me we should say a little bit more about the story.
Speaker 1: Who were the characters who occupied this library? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and this is this is tremendous fun um. So
Speaker 1: a first and foremost, Uh, there are the librarians and
Speaker 1: the the narrator. The main character, if you can even
Speaker 1: call them that in the story, is a librarian. So
Speaker 1: they're given the impossible task of caring for the library
Speaker 1: exploring it, and they're generally an overworked and just suicidal lot.
Speaker 1: Plus they have to contend with all the other weird
Speaker 1: wanderers that are out there and ned the hexagons, such
Speaker 1: as Oh well, there are the inquisitors, and these are
Speaker 1: official searchers, but they don't really seem to make much progress.
Speaker 1: It's kind of vague in the story exactly what they're doing.
Speaker 1: I assume they are somehow searching for books that make
Speaker 1: sense or books of some kind of value which are
Speaker 1: just impossible to come by. And I believe there's a
Speaker 1: sense to that they're they're separate from the librarians. It's
Speaker 1: almost like an academic versus a governmental body. So the
Speaker 1: libraries and inquisitors are kind of They seems like their
Speaker 1: jobs should be similar, but they have different philosophical aims.
Speaker 1: What else, then we have the Purifiers, who we alluded
Speaker 1: to already, and these is a sect that traversed the
Speaker 1: library and they destroy any book that they deem nonsensical.
Speaker 1: So that would be pretty much all books, yes, but
Speaker 1: it could also mean I mean, I wondered if it's
Speaker 1: it's alluded to as well that then maybe they're not
Speaker 1: the ones to judge. How are Maybe a book that
Speaker 1: seems like nonsense is not nonsense. Maybe they're burning a
Speaker 1: bunch of sous any comings and they don't even realize.
Speaker 1: But mainly they are in search of something known as
Speaker 1: the Crimson Hexagon. Yea, And now we alluded to this
Speaker 1: to 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 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: the factors into another Borhees story. Uh, you would find
Speaker 1: just all these books of power and meaning, books that
Speaker 1: answer our big questions like this is this is like
Speaker 1: a mythological center for the library, a place of order
Speaker 1: and answer, and it gives many people in the library
Speaker 1: hope when they're traversing an otherwise unbroken sea of nonsense
Speaker 1: and gibberish. And I'll tell you one book that might
Speaker 1: be in the Crimson hexagon if it exists or might
Speaker 1: be elsewhere. Is this okay? So since the Library of
Speaker 1: b Apple contains all possible books, that means it must
Speaker 1: contain a book or 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, like a tourist guide. So even
Speaker 1: though that book has not been found, it is rumored
Speaker 1: that there must exist someone known as the Bookman, that
Speaker 1: the Bookman has actually found that book. That is quote,
Speaker 1: the cipher and perfect compendium of all possible books, the
Speaker 1: Bookman has read this book and wanders the library as
Speaker 1: a godlike librarian, worshiped, quested after, and perhaps even prayed to.
Speaker 1: So this is a god figure, a really kind of
Speaker 1: a Christ figure that wanders the Library of Babble, and
Speaker 1: everyone wants to find this gentleman and meet him so
Speaker 1: that they might too know where they can find their answers.
Speaker 1: In a way, it in a way, it's like the
Speaker 1: perfect holy Man, right, like the the the order of
Speaker 1: the Library of Babbel is beyond us. We cannot relate
Speaker 1: to it, but we can relate to an individual. So
Speaker 1: if there's an individual who can grasp this vastness, then
Speaker 1: let us speak to him right now. It probably won't
Speaker 1: be lost on all the parallels to religious figures and
Speaker 1: profits like like you were mentioning that 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 that's 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 you're looking for, and then
Speaker 1: you have to contend with young people who wander into
Speaker 1: worship and kiss the books, various heretics, pilgrims again, like
Speaker 1: people looking for alternate gospels, brigands, suicides. All of this
Speaker 1: going on and you're just a simple librarian trying to
Speaker 1: do your job is just too much. Now. The fact
Speaker 1: that I found interesting when I was reading about borges
Speaker 1: life was that Bores was himself a librarian at multiple
Speaker 1: different times in his life for almost a decade, beginning
Speaker 1: in around nineteen seven or nineteen thirty eight, Borhes worked
Speaker 1: in a small library in Buenos Aires, and this time
Speaker 1: in the library would include the time of publication for
Speaker 1: the Library of Babble, which he first published in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty one. I figured out which library it was, by
Speaker 1: the way, and I looked it up, and and the
Speaker 1: scale is not what you would expect. I think I
Speaker 1: might have mentioned that earlier, but given the story, it's
Speaker 1: a very small, quaint, little library with a modest collection
Speaker 1: of books. But also in nineteen thirty eight Borhes read
Speaker 1: experienced to head wound which led to blood poisoning, which
Speaker 1: in turn made him very feeble, and he feared losing
Speaker 1: his sanity, and so Borees was eventually dismissed from his
Speaker 1: library position. When Juan Perone came to power in Argentina
Speaker 1: and I think nineteen forty five or forty six, and
Speaker 1: he Borrees 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, Perrone
Speaker 1: demoted Borhees to the job title of pult re Inspector.
Speaker 1: Borre His was not a fan of this move, but
Speaker 1: later he was again given a library position as director
Speaker 1: of the Argentine National Library in nineteen fifty five. But
Speaker 1: I do wonder to what extent his experiences among the books,
Speaker 1: even if it was truly a modest collection of books,
Speaker 1: led 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 via a library system
Speaker 1: or Amazon. Uh 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 is a true
Speaker 1: of roth books as as Borges you know, definitely was.
Speaker 1: But of course the Library of Babbel 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 are going to learn
Speaker 1: more about the implications of the Library of Babel as
Speaker 1: a thought experiment. So the characters in the Library of Babbel,
Speaker 1: they all seem to be searching 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 child too, 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 them
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. One of the
Speaker 1: key factors here, and that that's not depending on what
Speaker 1: the work is, like Shakespeare or whatever. They could be
Speaker 1: trying to create the complete works of Anne Rice, and
Speaker 1: that the infinite time parameter is crucial because in reality,
Speaker 1: such a scenario would probably not produce a single page
Speaker 1: of grammatically meaningful English within the total age of the universe.
Speaker 1: It's just, you know, random combinatrix are not very forgiving.
Speaker 1: But in the Borhey story, there's this blasphemous sect he
Speaker 1: talks about who wants to try to create precious and
Speaker 1: meaningful books by randomly generating volumes with something kind of
Speaker 1: like a Wegia board and a pair of dice, almost
Speaker 1: like a like a code cracking program, right, But it
Speaker 1: doesn't fundamentally alter our predicament in search for meaning, only
Speaker 1: the observer's level of personal activity within it. So the
Speaker 1: librarians in the library of Babbel are like the observer
Speaker 1: watching the monkeys type, waiting for them to produce Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: They're passively receiving all of this random information, waiting for
Speaker 1: something of significance to come out. The blasphemous sect, the
Speaker 1: people rolling the dice with the Wegi board, they're just
Speaker 1: more like being the monkey sitting at the typewriter randomly
Speaker 1: typing text. It doesn't change the odds that you'll come
Speaker 1: across something of significance. But maybe it does make a
Speaker 1: psychological difference if you yourself are the creator versus passively
Speaker 1: receiving what already exists around you. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's really like the members of the Blastmouths sect are
Speaker 1: playing God. They're doing the work of God. Uh, of
Speaker 1: of of a creator entity in this scenario. But um,
Speaker 1: they're bound by mortal or semi mortal experience. So uh
Speaker 1: it really amounts to the same thing. They're just as
Speaker 1: lost in the in the library, except to say, a
Speaker 1: library of their their own creation. Well, in the cosmological sense,
Speaker 1: how similar is the library of Babel to the universe
Speaker 1: we actually inhabit? And what what what similarities and differences
Speaker 1: could we observe? Well, if we look at the library
Speaker 1: as a metaphor for cosmos, and and it seems one
Speaker 1: of one of borhe is intense. I mean, he says
Speaker 1: in the first line that universes the library. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: 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 a 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
Speaker 1: hexagonal in the Crimson hexagon. 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 Babble are within
Speaker 1: the Library of Babble. 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, Dungeon 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: quest is they might to understand the shape and nature
Speaker 1: of the library. They cannot step beyond the library for
Speaker 1: an outside outside understanding of what they're in. They cannot
Speaker 1: step beyond the borders of cosmos. I mean, we can
Speaker 1: barely step beyond the borders of the human experience. We
Speaker 1: have this huge problem just trying to to comprehend consciousness
Speaker 1: and the and and the functionality of the human mind.
Speaker 1: It's 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. Um. And of course,
Speaker 1: in all of this, I can't help but think of
Speaker 1: a subject we've discussed in the past here on the show,
Speaker 1: Plato's theory of forms, Right, the idea that that there's
Speaker 1: an ideal version of everything that exists beyond our grasp,
Speaker 1: according to Plato, like essentially in another realm. So there
Speaker 1: would be in theory an ideal form of every book
Speaker 1: that's ever been written in the Library of Babble. Right,
Speaker 1: But we can spend an eternity, encounter an 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: and 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 who could recognize a precious book also generate that
Speaker 1: same precious book? I don't know, but it kind of
Speaker 1: makes me wonder. Like the Library of Babble brings up
Speaker 1: these quite So you're searching through all the shelves and
Speaker 1: you you eventually come across a book that you know
Speaker 1: is a meaningful and significant book that's full of true things,
Speaker 1: full of great creativity, full of beauty and insight. It's
Speaker 1: a good thing that you found it. If you know
Speaker 1: that thing when you see it, would you be able
Speaker 1: to create that thing if there were no constraints on
Speaker 1: you whatsoever? It's like it to come back to say
Speaker 1: something like done right, Like how would would I be
Speaker 1: able to tell if I found a copy of doone
Speaker 1: in the library? That is that that exceeds the original?
Speaker 1: All I have is the version that we have in
Speaker 1: our reality. And uh, and I'm a big fan of that.
Speaker 1: But who's to say that that's anywhere close to the
Speaker 1: ideal version of it? You know what? Who who can
Speaker 1: make that judgment? And and then it also gets into
Speaker 1: sort of the privilege, like we we're gonna have a
Speaker 1: bias towards what we already know, what we already have,
Speaker 1: which is which gets involved in in cosmology again, because
Speaker 1: 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 is ofvolved 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. Shay alude 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, alright. So, as the Library of Babel is
Speaker 1: essentially all about vast quantities of randomized information and the
Speaker 1: occasional emergence of books from that data. See, it should
Speaker 1: come as no surprise that borhees fantastic library is of
Speaker 1: 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 Dennett.
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 or what application
Speaker 1: does the Library of Babbel have to the genes that
Speaker 1: build our bodies? Well, let me read a quick quote
Speaker 1: here from from Dinnet that I think helps to eliminate
Speaker 1: this quote. The actual genomes that have ever existed are
Speaker 1: a vanished, only small subset of the combinatorially possible genomes,
Speaker 1: just as the actual books in the world's libraries are
Speaker 1: a vanishingly small subset of the books in the imaginary
Speaker 1: Library of Babbel. Yeah, so din It actually puts together
Speaker 1: an alternate version 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. Uh, and again we're
Speaker 1: gonna throw some numbers that 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 Babbel. Since it's just estimated that there are only
Speaker 1: one d to give or take a few particles, protons, neutrons,
Speaker 1: and electrons in the region of the universe, we can
Speaker 1: observe the Library of Babbel is not remotely a physically
Speaker 1: possible object. But thanks to the strict rules with which
Speaker 1: Borhe has constructed in his imagination, we can think about
Speaker 1: it clearly. So I I like, I like how he
Speaker 1: sort of reins it, why he doesn't rein it in,
Speaker 1: but how well he crunches the numbers of it and
Speaker 1: and just lays out the fact that this could not
Speaker 1: exist in the physical universe. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there
Speaker 1: is not space in the universe for it, and yet
Speaker 1: it is still arguably a finite object. Oh, not arguably,
Speaker 1: it's definitely finite. But well, but that's the thing. It's
Speaker 1: finite in a way like there and certainly this is
Speaker 1: a subject we've covered in other episodes on the nature
Speaker 1: of infinity. But there of course different types of infinity.
Speaker 1: And so it's physically fine, it's physically finite, but it
Speaker 1: is from a human perspective it might as well be infinite. Well,
Speaker 1: you can make the case that while it is physically finite,
Speaker 1: and that there are a limited number of books, however vast,
Speaker 1: you know, impossibly vast to contain in the real universe.
Speaker 1: There there are a actually limited number of books, but
Speaker 1: there might not be a limited amount of information because
Speaker 1: if you follow this, uh, the same strategy we mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier of allowing one book's contents to spill over into
Speaker 1: another volume, and given the fact that all volumes possible
Speaker 1: to represent our present, meaning all unfinished ideas will be
Speaker 1: continued into other ideas, there is potentially limitless information in
Speaker 1: the limited library of babble. Well, yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: can't help but think of the infinity hotel analogy like
Speaker 1: I did it, like an infinite number of people show
Speaker 1: up to a hotel and then another infinite number shop
Speaker 1: on another bus. Um what I mean, what what do
Speaker 1: you do about books that themselves are infinite? What do
Speaker 1: you do about Borhees the Book of Sands, which is
Speaker 1: a book that is that that is endless? How many
Speaker 1: books then does that contain? Like trying to shelve the
Speaker 1: Book of sand uh In. The Library of Babble is
Speaker 1: kind of like a busload of infinite hotel guests show
Speaker 1: going up to the infinity hotel. Well, I would say
Speaker 1: that the Library of Babel itself is sort of an
Speaker 1: argument that there could not be such a thing as
Speaker 1: an infinite book. That there there there are books that
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: Mendel 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 write not not the molecules themselves,
Speaker 1: but it the the coding that would represent what is
Speaker 1: contained in your recipes. Um. If that's the case, then
Speaker 1: you could you could argue that well, they're actually already
Speaker 1: part of the Library of Babel, as the standard code
Speaker 1: for DNA descriptions consists of the characters A, C, G
Speaker 1: and T for adanine, setosin squanine, and thymine uh. These
Speaker 1: are the four nucleotides that compose the letters of the
Speaker 1: DNA alphabet, right, so if you're going to spell out
Speaker 1: a representation of your genome, you'd use those four letters.
Speaker 1: So since those are letters that are already part of
Speaker 1: the alphabet, that makes the Library of Babel the Library
Speaker 1: of Mendel is a subset of the Library of Babel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and according to Dinnet, you needed to vote three thousand
Speaker 1: of the five page volumes in the Library of Babbel
Speaker 1: just to cover the human genome, which really library of Babble.
Speaker 1: That's not really a problem. They're right, as we've discussed UM. However,
Speaker 1: I hope that the purifiers in this case haven't been
Speaker 1: destroying these copies. You just think they would, like they
Speaker 1: come across a book that's just a bunch of A C, E,
Speaker 1: T and G. What what what use is this? It
Speaker 1: looks like more gibberish, but really just burning the Library
Speaker 1: of Mendel volume after volume, and who knows we might
Speaker 1: need those someday. Well, that sort of highlights another thing
Speaker 1: about the Library of Babel, which is, uh, how do
Speaker 1: you necessarily know when you've come across something of significance,
Speaker 1: Like we've been assuming that you would know a book
Speaker 1: of significance or preciousness when you found it, but it
Speaker 1: might be encoding something for the code for which you
Speaker 1: cannot read. So if if we're we're lining up the
Speaker 1: Library of Mendel with the Library of Babbel or within it, UM,
Speaker 1: this means that not only would the Library of Mendel
Speaker 1: have all genomes, and it would also have all possible
Speaker 1: genomes within its frame of reference. UM says, then it
Speaker 1: puts it we're forced to quote start in the middle,
Speaker 1: and we have only the current state of evolved biology
Speaker 1: to consider as well as the terrestrial model. But then
Speaker 1: they're gonna be all these other possibilities as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what what happens on Earth is not that you
Speaker 1: look around and you find all possible variations on all
Speaker 1: possible genes in uh or actually with the library of
Speaker 1: mental would be all possible sequences of nucleotides and even
Speaker 1: more minute than genes. Um, you don't see that in nature.
Speaker 1: In fact, the nature that exists as a very tiny
Speaker 1: subset of the library of mental. That's right. And then
Speaker 1: there there's so much in the Library of Mental that,
Speaker 1: like the Library of babble, would just be nonsense. Um,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of it is gonna be just blueprint
Speaker 1: blueprints for lifelessness. In quoting Richard Dawkins, he says, quote,
Speaker 1: there are many more ways of being dead or not
Speaker 1: alive than ways of being alive. I think that's a
Speaker 1: good quote, and that makes sense. I mean, most recipes
Speaker 1: you could come up with for building a building are
Speaker 1: not actually going to be structurally viable. Most recipes you
Speaker 1: could come up with for you know, if you're just
Speaker 1: combining random chemicals to make food. Most of it would
Speaker 1: not be edible. Oh my goodness. Yet imagine like we
Speaker 1: haven't even talked about this, and I hadn't really thought
Speaker 1: about it to now, But imagine cookbooks in the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel, the baking cookbooks specifically, So many of these recipes,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of the recipes are just gonna be
Speaker 1: garbage creating, like creating not even like the bread doesn't rise,
Speaker 1: the dough just just goops there at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the pan. But what about the ones that are perfectly
Speaker 1: excellent cookbooks except they all tell you to add one
Speaker 1: bucket of cigarette butts to your recipe every time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or everything is delicious but also poisoned. But like many
Speaker 1: of the books in the Library of Babel, I digress. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so the library of Mendel as then it understands it
Speaker 1: is sort of what he would call universal design space,
Speaker 1: which is this multidimensional space that is how would you
Speaker 1: describe it? Um? And this is my understanding, So I
Speaker 1: might have it wrong, but the way I keep thinking
Speaker 1: of it as that black bed on the light bright, okay,
Speaker 1: in which you put the pegs and stuff against the
Speaker 1: light up and and essentially if you took a light
Speaker 1: bright and you made the tree of life on it. Um,
Speaker 1: that's what the universal design space is, well, right, it's
Speaker 1: the possible design space for things made out of DNA
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 eights,
Speaker 1: jokes about eights, 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,
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 Adnit 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: dinn'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 and uh making something without any previous precedent,
Speaker 1: whereas cranes are things that build from the ground up,
Speaker 1: and they can become higher and higher based on bases
Speaker 1: that have already been built standing on the backbone on
Speaker 1: the backs of giants. Yeah, exactly so. So natural selection
Speaker 1: is a crane algorithm, as he would describe it as
Speaker 1: something that builds from the ground up. So thinking of
Speaker 1: the Library of Babbel or the Library of Mental as
Speaker 1: spaces of possibility that are different than the spaces of
Speaker 1: what can actually be achieved in terms of living organisms.
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting that dinn 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 possibilities like a Venn diagram, but
Speaker 1: each circles inside the bigger one. So the smallest circle
Speaker 1: in the middle is what's actually true. So the example
Speaker 1: he gives his President Clinton, there has been a real
Speaker 1: President Clinton that actually happened. It's true. We might even
Speaker 1: get another one maybe. So but then there is historical possibility,
Speaker 1: right President Goldwater could have happened, but given historical circumstances,
Speaker 1: it didn't. All of the all of the pieces were
Speaker 1: there that it seemed like it could have happened. It's
Speaker 1: just not how the universe went, Uh, then there is
Speaker 1: biological possibility. That's a bigger circle which the example he
Speaker 1: gives his striped giraffe could have happened, given what's possible
Speaker 1: with life on Earth. It didn't. Now, technically we do
Speaker 1: have copies which which are not striped giraffes, but they
Speaker 1: are kind of that they're related to giraffes and are
Speaker 1: kind of like a forest giraffe with some zebra esque stripes. Well,
Speaker 1: you know that that's a danger we always play with
Speaker 1: when we entered the realm of talking about what's possible,
Speaker 1: we don't even always know what's really happened. But then
Speaker 1: bigger than biological possibility is physical possibility. With the example
Speaker 1: he gives is a flying horse so doesn't violate the
Speaker 1: laws of physics, is just you know, it's not something
Speaker 1: that you're going to see in the biological world. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like getting into our flying fish episode where
Speaker 1: we talked about, you know, the problem with first of
Speaker 1: all recognizing the fact that there could be a fish
Speaker 1: biologically with wings that could fly and not just glide
Speaker 1: across the water, and yet it does not exist. And
Speaker 1: 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 the mean uh and that's uh the work of
Speaker 1: the American philosopher and logician W. V. O. Quine. So
Speaker 1: Quine wrote a very short piece on the Library of
Speaker 1: Babel called the Universal Library Essay, and I recommend you
Speaker 1: can check this out yourself because it's incredibly short, very concise,
Speaker 1: so I want to read a quote from it. Where
Speaker 1: Quine also he sort of reformulates the library in the
Speaker 1: same way Dennett did, just playing around with some numbers
Speaker 1: to get different numbers, but the same principle. Quin says,
Speaker 1: at two thousand characters to the page, we get five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand to the two hundred and fifty page volume.
Speaker 1: So with say eight 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 eighty as the total number of
Speaker 1: books in the library. I gather that there is not
Speaker 1: room in the present phase of our expanding universe on
Speaker 1: present estimates for more than a negligible fraction of the collection.
Speaker 1: Numbers are cheap, so he's arrived at the same conclusion
Speaker 1: as other before. This wouldn't fit in the universe, and
Speaker 1: I like the expression numbers are cheap, especially when you
Speaker 1: have notation like exponential notation. You can write out a
Speaker 1: number like twenty five to the one million, three hundred
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 or not mythical,
Speaker 1: but at least an elusive book or series of books
Speaker 1: that that outline the location of all the books in
Speaker 1: the Library of Battle. But then there are all possible
Speaker 1: inferior 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 Borg's book at all. How what's the
Speaker 1: plumbing life? But it is covered in some book in
Speaker 1: the library. Yeah, there is a book in the library
Speaker 1: that just deals exhaustively explains where the plumbing goes, does it?
Speaker 1: I wonder where it goes. If there's an end to
Speaker 1: the Library of Apple, then there is an end to
Speaker 1: those interconnected pipes that carry all the the fecal matter
Speaker 1: and urine A way right, and of course the watered
Speaker 1: up pieces of of nonsense books that are being used
Speaker 1: for to all of the sewage plumbing goes directly to
Speaker 1: the hexagon housing unauthorized biographies of celebrities who recently passed away.
Speaker 1: While you say that, Joe, but remember in the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel there is an unauthorized autobiography of say Heath
Speaker 1: Ledger that is not that is not only good, but
Speaker 1: it is great. An unauthorized autobiography would be the biography.
Speaker 1: But but that's the thing. Any mistake I make in
Speaker 1: speaking the Library of Babbel has me covered. It exists,
Speaker 1: is it factful. Is it is there truth in it?
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it could still be entertaining. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's unauthorized by the heath Ledger of our universe, that
Speaker 1: it was, but it is authorized by the heath Ledger
Speaker 1: of an alternate universe. Yeah, well that would be there,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it. Okay, So I got to bring it back
Speaker 1: to Quine. So back to Quine. We we've mentioned a
Speaker 1: couple of times now that there's this principle that, well,
Speaker 1: what if a book takes more than pages to express,
Speaker 1: you know, that can't be in the library. But it
Speaker 1: can be because it gets picked up right where it
Speaker 1: left off in a second volume, and a third if necessary,
Speaker 1: and so on, and all those volumes are in the library.
Speaker 1: You have like Showgun volume one, Shogun volume two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it never ends. But given this principle that messages can
Speaker 1: be spread across multiple volumes, Quine realizes that you can
Speaker 1: use a form of Morse code to massively downsize the
Speaker 1: library to exactly two books with one page each. One
Speaker 1: book is a single page with a dash, and the
Speaker 1: other is a single page with a dot. And by
Speaker 1: reading these books back and forth in various orders, you
Speaker 1: can code any alphabetic sequence in a simplified form of
Speaker 1: Morse code. Now the library has massively shrunken size, but
Speaker 1: it has the exact same encoding power if you were to,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're to actually map out the combinations
Speaker 1: and do all of the same possible combinations. Huh. But
Speaker 1: let's think about it in another way. You can replace
Speaker 1: the dot and the dash with a zero and a one,
Speaker 1: or of course, and on an off switch. In other words,
Speaker 1: binary code and your universal library has become the same
Speaker 1: type of information storage system that exists inside your computer.
Speaker 1: And this illuminates a principle that Alan Turing and others
Speaker 1: observed about the binary computer. It's universal, like any information
Speaker 1: or operation that can be represented in code, which potentially
Speaker 1: is all information or operations depending on you know, your
Speaker 1: philosophical orientation to that question, it can be represented by
Speaker 1: universal binary machine. So, on one hand, this seems to
Speaker 1: sort of violate the allure of the library. Right in
Speaker 1: the library of Babel, there are already in existence, the
Speaker 1: precious books. They're already out there, the books of ultimate potential,
Speaker 1: beauty and truth physically exist. We just have to find them.
Speaker 1: But in the binary universal library, we'd have to encode
Speaker 1: those books ourselves. But maybe this disconnects sort of highlights
Speaker 1: and inherent irony in the mathematics of the Library of Babel.
Speaker 1: Those books exist in the Library of Babel, but for
Speaker 1: any individual librarian, they will never ever be found. We
Speaker 1: would be, as we said, extremely lucky to discover a
Speaker 1: book with one tin word long sentence that makes sense.
Speaker 1: And so we're sort of back to the monkeys with
Speaker 1: typewriters in the library of Babel. You're watching the monkeys
Speaker 1: type at random and hoping they give you the complete
Speaker 1: works of Shakespeare, but they're never gonna do it. In
Speaker 1: quines to volume library, you yourself are the monkey typing
Speaker 1: at random. It makes no difference in terms of the
Speaker 1: knowledge discovered, just how it feels to be a part
Speaker 1: of the discovery system. So what you need is an
Speaker 1: interface on top of client system, such such as say
Speaker 1: a pink Kindle, instantly search out the books you want
Speaker 1: um from all the possible books out there in the
Speaker 1: library right now. This is of course, a very different
Speaker 1: way than the way we actually generate books in reality,
Speaker 1: which is, in reality we use heuristic shortcuts of intelligence,
Speaker 1: human brain power, creativity to try to limit the size
Speaker 1: of the total number of possible books and only generate
Speaker 1: books that more or less makes sense, at least hopefully
Speaker 1: in the author's mind. Yeah, generally you're you're the author's
Speaker 1: only writing, you know, six to eight versions of that book, right,
Speaker 1: But when when limiting the noise like that, we are
Speaker 1: also limiting the signal, So there's a given take. So
Speaker 1: by by cutting out all of the nonsense books, we
Speaker 1: massively reduce start searching for significance project, but we also
Speaker 1: eliminate possibly the most precious books out there because we
Speaker 1: just didn't think to create them. Yeah, we thought to
Speaker 1: create them, and then that's time right, right. Isn't that
Speaker 1: funny that the Library of Babbel makes me feel even
Speaker 1: worse about about all of the books I want to
Speaker 1: read and don't get around to reading because we don't
Speaker 1: live in the Library of Babel. We live in Uh well,
Speaker 1: you could say we live in a version of the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel that is the universe. But in terms
Speaker 1: of the readable library of books available to us, it's
Speaker 1: not the Library of Babel. It's mostly books that just
Speaker 1: makes sense, and I still don't get to all the
Speaker 1: books that I should be reading. Not only does it
Speaker 1: contain all the books you should be reading, all the
Speaker 1: books you want to read. It contains all the books
Speaker 1: you could have written, all the books you could write
Speaker 1: in your life, which is it's kind of a very
Speaker 1: heartbreaking thing to think of as a writer, Like when
Speaker 1: you didn't have time to write last week, Well, that
Speaker 1: story that you would have written, it's in that collection, somewhere,
Speaker 1: somewhere loft in the the the the seemingly infinite but
Speaker 1: ultimately finite honeycomb of books set ablaze by a purifier.
Speaker 1: Another idea that this made me think about is if
Speaker 1: a world contains all possible combinations of code of information
Speaker 1: signaling code, so all possible information, is it in fact
Speaker 1: no different than something that contains no information whatsoever? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really does, doesn't it. It's um it's like saying that, however,
Speaker 1: I put all possible colors into this paint, can look
Speaker 1: at this wonderful color I have, No, you just have
Speaker 1: black at this point, you just have or some weird brown. Um.
Speaker 1: It's not the same as saying that it actually encompasses
Speaker 1: all of these uh, these these pure elements. On a
Speaker 1: much smaller scale. This makes me think back on you know,
Speaker 1: not too long ago. I was watching Oh it is
Speaker 1: something on YouTube. Is a c SPAN event from the
Speaker 1: early two thousands or late nineties, I think, And it
Speaker 1: was some journalists talking. I wish I could remember who, uh,
Speaker 1: but some journalists talking about the impact of the Internet
Speaker 1: on the spread of information. And I remember hearing the
Speaker 1: sentiment that, you know, they were saying, well, the Internet
Speaker 1: is great because it opens up all these uh you know,
Speaker 1: new channel. Anybody can start a blog and share their
Speaker 1: perspective and stuff like that. And I think about the
Speaker 1: cacaphony of of information or should we call it information,
Speaker 1: the cacophony of voices that we live in now. You know,
Speaker 1: I can't say that I would prefer to live in
Speaker 1: a 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 enriched by the quantity of perspective and opinion
Speaker 1: being shared on the internet. You know, yeah, yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: Now here's a question for you, Uh, As long as
Speaker 1: we're playing with the ideas that spiral out endlessly from
Speaker 1: the library of babble, here, imagine a future in which
Speaker 1: you know, we have we all have virtual worlds that
Speaker 1: we've built, and someone creates not only not something far
Speaker 1: beyond our current online version of the Library of Babble.
Speaker 1: Imagine a functional virtual library of babbel world. You put
Speaker 1: on your headset, you climb into your tank, turn on
Speaker 1: your you know, your drip, and then you're in there,
Speaker 1: and the computer is actually creating each room as you go.
Speaker 1: The nonsense books. It would have to be procedurally generated
Speaker 1: because a computer storage system could not store the entire library.
Speaker 1: Have to create as as you go, and and so.
Speaker 1: But as you go, it is actually writing non existent books,
Speaker 1: is writing um different versions of books that already exist.
Speaker 1: It seems feasible, and certainly when we start to start
Speaker 1: considering the end of the possibility of of of AI
Speaker 1: writers AI artists, could we reach a point where the
Speaker 1: Library of Babble exists in in in in in actually
Speaker 1: trying to come up with new ideas for non existent books.
Speaker 1: Instead of dreaming them up ourselves, we are actually questioning
Speaker 1: through the library and forcing this randomized artificial intelligence to
Speaker 1: create them. No, I think that would never work. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: because the library is too vast. Like we've said, you
Speaker 1: would come across just pure nonsense. You could wander through
Speaker 1: this virtual library, your whole life and find almost nothing
Speaker 1: but complete nonsense. Maybe one day you'd find three words
Speaker 1: in a row that made some kind of grammatical sense.
Speaker 1: Would that be worth it? I feel like it might
Speaker 1: be worth it to wander this library if the library
Speaker 1: was made real in a virtual setting. Can you imagine,
Speaker 1: like the the excitement you would feel when you actually
Speaker 1: found something readable? Uh? I can imagine actual plans of
Speaker 1: purifiers and other sex that would be wandering ring. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I Well, so here's one thing. Maybe we
Speaker 1: could uh massively narrow the size of the library still
Speaker 1: be astronomical and impossible, but impossible to find something all
Speaker 1: that valuable. But what if you limited it to words
Speaker 1: in a dictionary, So a procedurally generated library of babble that,
Speaker 1: instead of all possible combinations of characters, was all possible
Speaker 1: combinations of words that exist in a dictionary in your language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess that would narrow it somewhat, but it's still
Speaker 1: mostly be gibberish, wouldn't it Huh? I guess I can't
Speaker 1: help but think of it, because I um I recently
Speaker 1: read Ready Player one. Are familiar with this book? I've
Speaker 1: heard 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 Babble 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 U,
Speaker 1: a Crimson exagon of a sort in that book. So
Speaker 1: you know, I can't help but think about the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel as an analogy to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaker 1: You know the vast scale of the universe and are
Speaker 1: the only difference is that the Library of Babel you
Speaker 1: can know how much there is and you can sort
Speaker 1: of say, well, here are the types of things we'd
Speaker 1: be looking for for books that makes sense. But we're
Speaker 1: still looking for books that makes sense from our perspective, right,
Speaker 1: based on our model of sensical books. And maybe in
Speaker 1: reality we're no better than the purifiers running around setting
Speaker 1: things a light because they don't just dismissing things because
Speaker 1: they don't line up with our expectations of order and sense. Robert,
Speaker 1: it is your kind of lawlessness and anarchy that has
Speaker 1: led to the library being the kind of place it
Speaker 1: is today. We need someone with a strong hand to
Speaker 1: set the library right, a new head librarian. Yes, all right,
Speaker 1: well we could obviously we could go on and on
Speaker 1: here doing a various thought experiments about the Library of Babel.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you guys and gals can as well.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's some spin on it that's come to your mind.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a cool spin on it that you've encountered
Speaker 1: in other works. Uh. If so, we would love to
Speaker 1: hear about it. We would love to have any number
Speaker 1: of discussions, um dare I say almost infinite number of
Speaker 1: discussions about the Library of Babble. You can get in
Speaker 1: touch with this the usual places sucal media where stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind or blow the mind at a
Speaker 1: number of those stuff to blow your mind dot Com
Speaker 1: is the mothership. And then of course there is always
Speaker 1: email where you can email your favorite selection from the
Speaker 1: Library of Babel to us at Blow the Mind? Is
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com? Well more on this and
Speaker 1: basons of other pathics. Is it how stuff works? Upcombe
Speaker 1: starts f