Mindf*ck

Mel recently introduced me to a fascinating short story written by Jorge Luis Borges called The Library of Babel. The man is a genius and a dirty plagiarist all at once. I'll explain shortly.

The theory of language has always been fascinating to me, sometimes unendurably so. In that vein I dare you to read the story without coming away with at least one cosmically brain-bending thought. Mel and I were talking about it after I finished and she reminded me that we are all familiar with at least one Library of Babel—pi. Contained somewhere in pi, in plain, present-day English, (think binary or ASCII code, for example) is the story of your death. Somewhere in pi resides the secrets of flight, antibiotics, vehicular locomotion, computers, fission, and an infinitude of inventions that don't yet exist and concepts that don't exist here.

All of these secrets are also to be found there in Spanish, German, Latin, and Elvish. Don't believe me? It's mathematically provable. Pi is what happens when you put a hundred monkeys with typewriters in a room for all eternity. Sure, a lot of it will be gibberish to your understanding. The odds of a monkey randomly typing Hamlet word-for-word, the same as the original, is approximately 1 in 3.4*10^184,000. For reference, the number would take 40 pages just to display in a small-print book. But here's the thing.

There are an infinite number of possible languages, yes? In other words, there are an infinite number of ways to interpret anything given the right framing. Words, numbers; even the bird splat on the top of your car contains all the secrets of the universe! Surely your intuition must concede this to be true. Thus, everything each one of those monkeys types is literally Hamlet! The monkey typed a thousand characters? Then it could pass as a synopsis of Hamlet, depending on which language you use—how you interpret it. The monkey refuses to type at all? No worries; he is Hamlet in an unending array of ways.

How's this for cool? The first 'W' that comprises Hamlet contains the entirety of the work itself. It's only a matter of interpreting the 'W.' Molecular arrangement of the ink would surely work, as would a simple set of language-like rules based on the geometry of 'W' itself.

Thus, the story of your death is not merely to be found 'somewhere' in pi. It's not as though consecutive digits are the only way to convey it. It's not as though you have to search pi meticulously until you reach the 2,400,245,125,562,854,321,684,126,126,612,243,788,993,127th digit where your story suddenly begins. Maybe your story begins with the very first digit of pi if you skip every other digit. Maybe it is to be found by looking at every prime digit of pi. Maybe you can find a grammatically incorrect facsimile of your death story much sooner. Maybe you'd find one sooner if you switched to Spanish. Or sooner yet if you created your own language. If you thought about it longer, you'd probably arrive, as I have, at the conclusion that not only is your death story to be found somewhere in pi, but everywhere! You'd also probably arrive at the conclusion, as I have, that my death story is everyone's death story, because any meaning can be inferred from any thing.

Think on this—the story of my death is to be found in pi. I interpreted pi; my death story was the output. I can then use my death story as the object of interpretation and arrive at your death story. Then I can interpret that and arrive back at pi or any number of things. It's all cyclically and infinitely connected.

The implications of this are astonishing to me. Everything is encoded into everything. All the knowledge of existence.. every nuance that our language can't explain.. feelings broken down into symbols.. Scale seems to lose meaning. The alignment of the planets could just as well be my autobiography as the microscopic bumps on a single blade of grass. Scale itself would seem intuitively to follow a similar course—scale ultimately being relative to the point of unimportance. We could be residing in the spleen of a giant turtle, performing vital functions for it so that it doesn't die. You couldn't possibly prove me wrong, since I can just increase the size of the turtle until the identifiable aspects of a turtle aren't recognizable in the part of the universe we can see. It may be that we are in the spleen, but we can't see the intestines except outside of the observable universe. (The turtle idea was shamelessly stolen from A Wind in the Door, an excellent novel, whose author graciously took the idea from the universe and framed it for us.)

Likewise, we could be host to entire colonies of beings we really had no idea existed; entire universes too small for us to see or understand, but which are nevertheless there. Layers and layers and layers of existence and scale to the point that it all becomes rather meaningless. I kind of like thinking myself host to entire universes filled with savage little beings who endlessly war with each other and never seem to learn from it. It makes at least as much sense as each universe residing in its own little compartment, too far away from our own to matter. On second thought, I think the first idea makes a lot more sense, don't you?

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Why did I call Mr. Borges a 'dirty plagiarist' in my opening? If you hadn't guessed by now, we are all plagiarists. Everything we can possibly create or conceive is already literally everywhere. There really is no new idea under the sun!

However, in that way that it does, the universe enjoys its little paradoxes and oddities. Just because every piece of knowledge ever is encoded into everything doesn't mean we can make sense of it. Knowledge and Understanding are two very distinct concepts, and thus it remains hard work to encode and interpret knowledge in a way we can understand. Think about it: the entire infrastructure of the internet, from English itself to the cables and computers that allow us to share words is the latently optimal manifestation of what can be found all around us. All of that enormous amount of framing is designed to convey understanding to people fortunate enough to partake of the web.

Anyway, I think my brain is both a tad overworked and thoroughly enjoying the knowledge that it knows everything, even if it doesn't know it knows. I'll let you go now. Until next time. :)