The Existential Nature of Infinity | Library of Babel

Transcript

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I pray to the unknown gods that a man, just one, even though it were thousands of years ago, may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let your enormous library be justified. The Library of Babel is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. I have it here as a part of Borges' collected works. It's narrated by an old man at the end of his life. He lives in a never-ending library. The library is made up of endless hexagonal rooms with shelves on the walls. Each book in the library has the exact same physical format. Every volume is 410 pages long. Every page has forty lines, with each line containing about 80 characters. The text is printed in black. The library was thought to be infinite. No one knew why or how the library existed, or why it was as it was and did not exist in another form. Idealists among them have argued that the hexagon rooms are a necessary form of absolute space. A triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. The mystics claimed that their ecstasy revealed to them a circular chamber somewhere in the vast library that contained a circular book. That book was God according to them. Of course, there was no evidence of such a room or such a book. It is not the only God myth in the library. The quote I opened this video with makes reference to a compendium containing all other books. According to myth, one man has read that book. That man was said to be God. Five hundred years ago, a chief of an upper hexagon found a book that had two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed it to a decoder. The language was eventually established within a century. Three hundred years ago, someone discovered a book full of seemingly random letters, with the penultimate page declaring, O time thy pyramids. It was believed for a significant duration that these volumes might correspond to defunct languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak. It is true that a few miles to the right, the tongue is dialectical, and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. These examples eventually made it possible for one librarian to discover a fundamental fact about the books. All books, no matter how diverse, are made up of the same elements. The space, the period, the comma, twenty-two letters. No two books are identical. All that can be expressed in all languages is inside of these books. Not infinite, but an inconceivably vast number. And none of it was nonsense. All of it made sense in some way. In the Library of Babel, the vast majority of books appear to be pure gibberish, random verbal jumbles. Meaningful, readable human text is a rare find in this sea of noise. However, the story introduces a kind of unsettling philosophical concept. Absolute nonsense does not exist. Since the library holds every conceivable string of characters, it also contained every possible key, cipher, dictionary, and secret language. Crucially, none of the content is pure nonsense. Every arrangement makes sense in some way. I cannot combine some characters. D H C M R L C H T D J, which the Divine Library has not foreseen, and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not in one of these languages the powerful name of God. To speak is to fall into tautology. This means that any page that looks like random noise could, in theory, be deciphered into a coherent message using some system whose description is also hidden within the library. But it doesn't really matter because without the ability to reliably locate and verify the correct decoding system, this potential meaning is for all practical purposes identical to gibberish. So essentially, seeking meaning within books is basically comparable to seeking meaning within dreams. But this did not stop people from searching once it was realized that the books in the library contained every possibility. This led to the vindications. Vindications are the books that supposedly justify a person's entire life. In the story, they are described as books of apology and prophecy. Volumes that would explain your actions, defend your choices, and reveal what your future means in the cleanest, most complete way possible. Once people believe that the library contains every possible book, the vindications become inevitable. Because if every arrangement of letters exist, then there must be a book that contains the final perfect account of you. And so for people inside of the library, this idea becomes kind of a private religion. The idea that somewhere there is a text that makes you make sense. But the thing is, even if your vindication exists, which in theory it does, it is buried among countless near duplicates and misleading variations, and the chance of actually finding the exact one that you need can be computed to essentially zero. People inside of the library wasted their lives chasing their vindications, leaving their native hexagons and wandering for years through galleries and endless spiral staircases, convinced that somewhere there was a book that would finally justify them. The book describes them scrambling through corridors and fighting over scraps of hope and dying in the process, strangling each other on stairways, throwing deceptive books down air shafts. People vanished into the library's endless vertical distances. As time goes on, the inquisitors appear. The story describes them arriving worn out from travel, talking about stairways that nearly killed them. They pick up volumes of books and look for infamous words, but in truth, no one really expects to discover anything. And then there's the era of the purifiers, the people who decide that the library's problem wasn't that it hid the right books, but it was that it contained too many worthless books. They moved from hexagon to hexagon, leafing through volumes with displeasure and then condemning entire shelves to the flame. They destroyed millions of books during this era, and their name became hated by history. The curious thing is, though, even with their callous destruction of the books, in the grand scheme of things, the effect was minuscule. For no matter how unique the book is, there was always another copy. Different in some way. In the library, there are always volumes identical except for a single letter or a single comma, and then others differ by just a word or two symbols, and so on, outward into endless variations. So the purifiers can burn millions and millions of books and still not meaningfully clean the library. It's also mentioned that the population of the library was decreasing. A depression followed the vindications once people realized that they would never find their own books, no matter how hard they searched. Suicide was seemingly common. Once there was a man for every three hexagons, this was no longer the case. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into bandagery have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species, the unique species, is about to be extinguished. But the library will endure, illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. The story's point is that everything exists does not mean anything is reachable, and doesn't mean that truth is necessarily usable. The library contains all combinations of its symbols, but that number, however vast, is not actually infinite. An impossible book cannot exist, which means the totality is complete, but it is still indifferent to human needs. The library is unending, yet it is not simply without limit, because while the corridors go on and on, the possible books are bounded. The narrator in the end proposes that the library is unlimited and cyclical, with the same volumes repeating in the same disorder over immense time. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder, which, thus repeated, would be an order. The order. My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope. This is a very short story, but something about it stays with you. It's quite existential. The library is, of course, a metaphor for the universe. The librarians are us searching for answers in this vast world. A universe too large to be ever fully comprehended. The Library of Babel is a really interesting philosophical, speculative fiction story, and it's exactly the kind of thing that I like analyzing. If you want more of that kind of stuff with sci-fi and philosophy-driven stories, you'll find even more of my work on Nebula. My videos go up on Nebula as Nebula First, which means they are available there early before they hit YouTube. And those versions are ad-free. And I'm also doing one Nebula Plus video each month, meaning an extra video that's exclusive to Nebula, it won't be on YouTube. 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