The Library of Babel

 You may have heard of this mythic place. There was an article in the same Philosophy Now magazine I referenced in my last post, titled World Wide Web or Library of Babel? By Marco Nuzzaco. Apparently, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote a short story, The Library of Babel in 1941. A little bit of research reveals there are layers of abstraction in this imaginary place, extrapolated upon by another book, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel, by Mathematical Professor, William Goldbloom Bloch, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press and receiving an ‘honourable mention’ in the 2009 PROSE Awards. I should point out that I haven’t read either of them, but the concept fascinates me, as I expound upon below.
 
The Philosophy Now article compares it with the Internet (as per the title), because the Internet is quickly becoming the most extensive collection of knowledge in the history of humanity. To quote the author, Nuzzarco:
 
The amount of information produced on the Internet in the span of 10 years from 2010 to 2020 is exponentially and incommensurably larger than all the information produced by humanity in the course of its previous history.
 
And yes, the irony is not lost on me that this blog is responsible for its own infinitesimal contribution. But another quote from the same article provides the context that I wish to explore.
 
The Library of Babel contains all the knowledge of the universe that we can possibly gain. It has always been there, and it always will be. In this sense, the knowledge of the library reflects the universe from a God’s eye perspective and the librarians’ relentless research is to decipher its secrets and its mysterious order and purpose – or maybe, as Borges wonders, the ultimate lack of any of these.
 
One can’t read this without contemplating the history of philosophy and science (at least, in the Western tradition) that has attempted to do exactly that. In fact, the whole enterprise has a distinctive Platonic flavour to it, because there is one sense in which the fictional Library of Babel is ‘real’, and it links back to my last post.
 
I haven’t read Borges’ or Bloch’s books, so I’m simply referring to the concept alluded to in that brief quote, that there is an abstract landscape or territory that humans have the unique capacity to explore. And anyone who has considered the philosophy of mathematics knows that it fulfills that criterion.
 
Mathematics has unlocked more secrets about the Universe than any other endeavour. There is a similarity here to Paul Davies’ metaphor of a ‘warehouse’ (which he expounds upon in this video) but I think a Library is an even more apposite allusion. We are like ‘librarians’ trying to decipher God’s view of the Universe that we inhabit, and to extend the metaphor, God left behind a code that only we can decipher (as far as we know) and that code is mathematics.
 
To quote Feynman (The Character of Physical Law, specifically in a chapter titled The Relation of Mathematics to Physics):
 
Physicists cannot make a conversation in any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form.
 
And if we have the knowledge of Gods then we also have the power of Gods, and that is what we’re witnessing, right now, in our current age. We have the power to destroy the world on which we live, either in a nuclear conflagration or runaway climate change (we are literally changing the weather). But we can also use the same knowledge to make the world a more inhabitable place, but to do that we need to be less human-centric.
 
If there is a God, then (he/she) has left us in charge. I think I’ve written about that before. So yes, we are the ‘Librarians’ who have access to extraordinary knowledge and with that knowledge comes extraordinary responsibilities.