Lines of Meaning Amid Cacophony
Monday, September 23
Today, an excerpt from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel, a short story about an infinite library filled with every conceivable string of text, coherent and incoherent — as told by the librarians who live among this collection.
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
I’ve always been part-disturbed and part-fascinated by the suggestion that the number Pi, if truly infinite and non-repeating, contains within it a string of binary digits that would render an ebook describing my entire life in perfect detail — and not just an ebook, but an MP4 film, and indeed a big-budget playable video game, and all other possible forms of media. Of course, it does this for everyone else’s life too. In fact, it does this for all possible lives in all possible worlds.
And this isn’t just “it contains it in theory.” No, if Pi is the sort of number many mathematicians believe it to be, it literally contains this information. Look far enough, and the ebook of your life, too, is somewhere to be found.
One of the suggestions in Greg Egan’s Permutation City is that the universe we live in arose along these lines. Suppose there exists any truly infinite source of randomness — leave a computer on forever, its transistors malfunctioning and twitching randomly — and it will eventually stumble across a perfect simulation of our universe, from the Big Bang til now. Or, perhaps more intuitively, small slices of that universe (in time and space) that just so happen to contain us. Perhaps even just our brains, hallucinating the external world.
Of course, if truly infinite, our twitching computer will run all of these simulations and more.
There are many things I find terrifying about this theory, but the quality of Borges’ depiction, and the relationship his librarian has to the library, brings me some strange comfort.
There’s something sacred, and ultimately real, about the library. We are just catching ourselves in its occasional reflection.