Babel

Although The Library of Babel contrasts The Garden of the Forking Paths and The Form of the Sword in that it doesn’t really have a plot, I actually enjoyed this short story more than the others. On a level, the concept of The Library of Babel fascinates me. To have a resource that could predict the future, provide answers to unsolved mysteries, and answer life’s greatest questions would be indispensable to mankind. Think of the possibilities- a cure for all cancers, what happened to D.B. Cooper, an answer to the Fermi Paradox (are we alone in this universe?), all would exist in this Library. Yet, at the same time, many false answers and misleading books would exist, and many more books that are indecipherable gibberish. The task of searching through these books through countless hexagons is daunting. Although humankind will likely never see a true Library of Babel, I’m intrigued by the possibilities nonetheless.

Compared to Borge’s time, the computer processors we have today are much more powerful. Are computers the solution to finding the answers within the Library of Babel? With the power of a computer, we could generate billions of possibilities and have the computer search through them for comprehensible words. Like Alan Turing, are we about to crack the “enigma” that is the Library of Babel? However, if you think about how much digital storage required to store every single book, it would far exceed the amount of storage we have today. Yet, today we have the tool that is lossless digital compression. On a basic level, compression is very simple. Consider the text “AABAABAAB”. This could be rewritten as 3(AAB) so that it requires less bits of data, and when uncompressed would still output “AABAABAAB”. Consider the books like the one that was “MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last” (Borges 81). These could easily be compressed.

Compression could be taken even a step further however. Joshua Engel on Quora notes that the library of Babel is simply an algorithm, which “can fit it all on the back of a postcard” when compressed. In fact, you can look at randomly generated texts at the Library of Babel website where you can browse 410 page texts of mostly gibberish. Today, the power of Library of Babel is within our grasp. Computer processors have allowed us to do this. However the issue still remains of finding any significance in these texts. How are we supposed to know which book contains the true future? How are we supposed to determine which books tell truth, tell lies, partial truths, etc? The question isn't creating the Library of Babel, but finding any significance in its text. For any text that claims one argument, there exists another text that has the exact opposite argument. Distinguishing which is right is the challenge. For every positive, there exists a negative, for every yin, there exists a yang and everything in between. Lets say you stumble across a book on the Library of Babel website that entails the supposed future of the United States for the next 100 years. In the extremely unlikely event that you would find a text that actually makes sense, it is more likely for that future to be false, than to be real, as there would exist many false accounts of the future but only one true account. Probability is not on our side.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-bytes-of-storage-would-the-Library-of-Babel-take-if-it-was-stored-in-a-digital-format

https://libraryofbabel.info/