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Pursuit of Wonder

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0:11 Every sentence you've ever thought or

0:13 said.

0:13 Every visual you've ever seen,

0:15 photographed, filmed or animated in the

0:17 world or in your head in some very real

0:20 sense already existed.

0:22 The sentences were already there and the images were

0:25 already fixed.

0:26 Not only that, but every

0:28 sentence and image you've never thought

0:29 of or seen, but that have been by

0:31 someone else, these two already existed.

0:34 The most powerful lines ever written in

0:36 books, uttered in speeches, and thought

0:38 of in the most genius of minds.

0:39 The most remarkable all-striking photos,

0:42 artworks, and scenes in films.

0:44 The most world-changing ideas, blueprints, and

0:46 instructions.

0:47 These all existed prior to

0:48 their human origins.

0:50 In fact, everything that's never been said or seen, but can

0:53 or will exist right now.

0:56 the description and images of the first human.

0:58 Every moment of your life moving forward,

1:00 everything you or anyone will ever see

1:03 or say, the story and image of the

1:05 future of the planet, the solar system,

1:07 and the cosmos are all here right now.

1:11 If you're not already familiar with the

1:13 concepts and technologies behind these

1:14 claims, this all likely sounds

1:16 impossible, like a science fiction

1:18 premise.

1:19 But in a specific, albeit

1:20 limited sense, it is true.

1:23 There is an algorithm on a website right now that

1:25 through a fixed and predetermined set of

1:27 parameters contains every sentence and

1:29 image that has ever and could ever be

1:32 written and seen.

1:35 In 1941, the Argentine short story

1:37 writer and essaist Jorge Luis Bourhees

1:40 published a short story titled The

1:42 Library of Babel.

1:44 In the story, there is

1:45 a seemingly infinite library with

1:46 hexagonal floors going up and down

1:48 without any apparent end.

1:50 On each floor, there are shelves of books.

1:52 Inside all the books appears to be gibberish,

1:55 random letters and punctuations.

1:57 The characters in the story initially have

1:59 no idea what the books are or what they

2:00 mean.

2:01 To them, they mean nothing other

2:03 than perhaps confusion, intrigue, or

2:05 wasted space.

2:07 Eventually, however, the characters come to a realization.

2:10 The books contain every possible combination

2:12 of the letters of the alphabet, a space,

2:14 a comma, and a period.

2:16 Amidst all the gibberish is also every complete

2:18 comprehensible work that has ever and

2:21 could ever be written.

2:23 At first the characters are overjoyed.

2:25 The narrator of the story says all men felt

2:28 themselves the possessors of an intact

2:30 and secret treasure.

2:31 There was no personal problem, no world problem whose

2:34 eloquent solution did not exist

2:35 somewhere in some hexagon.

2:37 The universe was justified.

2:39 The universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited

2:41 width and breadth of humankind's hope.

2:45 Quickly, however, this joy turns to

2:47 madness and despair as the discovery

2:49 amounts to very little.

2:50 The characters soon realize they will likely never find

2:52 anything of meaning.

2:54 The narrator continues, "The certainty that some

2:56 bookshelf and some hexagon contain

2:58 precious books, yet that those precious

3:00 books were forever out of reach was

3:02 almost unbearable.

3:04 The library is simply too vast and

3:06 meaning too sparse.

3:08 And so, it becomes a

3:09 prison of certainty, forever guarded by

3:11 futility." Bourhees's short story is essentially a

3:16 literary expression of a thought

3:18 experiment in mathematical probability

3:20 that would come to be known as the

3:21 infinite monkey theorem.

3:23 Essentially, the thought experiment goes as follows.

3:25 If a monkey were given a typewriter and

3:27 an infinite amount of time, hitting keys

3:29 independently and at random, it would

3:31 almost certainly produce any and every

3:33 possible text from the Bible to the

3:35 Odyssey to the complete works of

3:37 Shakespeare.

3:38 From a philosophical point

3:39 of view, this mirrors a modal principle

3:41 where over an infinite time scale,

3:43 anything with a nonzero probability of

3:45 occurring will occur with certainty.

3:48 There are, of course, numerous critiques

3:50 of the infinite monkey theorem.

3:51 Most critiques, however, seem to miss the

3:53 point.

3:54 Firstly, it's a thought

3:55 experiment.

3:56 Secondly, it's a thought

3:57 experiment designed to demonstrate the

3:58 probability and concept of infinity, not

4:01 a way of making practical predictions.

4:03 Trying to map out intuitions or smaller

4:05 scale assessments and predictions onto

4:07 an infinite scale is a failing mission

4:09 from the start.

4:10 But of course, that

4:11 isn't to say people haven't tried.

4:13 In 2003 at Payton Zoo in England, six Makox

4:17 were given a computer with the keyboard.

4:18 The aim was to replicate a small scale

4:20 version of the infinite monkey theorem

4:22 and see what they would produce.

4:23 After about a month, the Makox generated five

4:26 pages in total.

4:27 Each page was mostly

4:29 filled with the letter S.

4:30 Then the Makox destroyed the computer.

4:33 In that same year, with the onset of more powerful

4:35 software programs, the thought

4:37 experiment was also attempted with

4:38 virtual monkeys through an independent

4:40 web project known as the monkey

4:42 Shakespeare simulator.

4:43 Running a program designed to simulate the same sort of

4:45 random typing of real monkeys.

4:47 The experiment generated a partial line from

4:49 Shakespeare's Henry IV part two.

4:52 In 2004, a separate program developed by

4:54 Dan Oliver generated a 19 character

4:57 sequence from Shakespeare's The Two

4:58 Gentlemen of Arona.

5:00 Estimation suggested that this sequence would have taken

5:02 somewhere around 4.2* 10 28th power in

5:06 years or 42 bill162,500,000

5:12 billion billion years to accomplish in

5:14 reality.

5:16 What these experiments seem to actually

5:18 reveal is that infinity cannot be tested

5:20 or experimented in a finite system with

5:22 finite constraints.

5:24 Nor can it be

5:24 fathomemed by the human mind.

5:26 This is important because it helps us make a

5:28 little bit better sense of the absurdity

5:30 of what was alluded to earlier.

5:32 The real world version of Bourhees's Library of

5:34 Babel.

5:36 In 2015, writer and programmer

5:38 Jonathan Basile created a website

5:40 directly inspired by Bourhees's story.

5:43 In Basile's words, the website is an

5:45 attempt to faithfully render Bourhees's

5:47 vision of the total library.

5:49 The website accomplishes this by using a

5:51 deterministic reversible algorithm that

5:54 generates, locates, and displays all

5:56 possible 3200 character combinations of

5:58 the 26 English letters, a space, a

6:01 period, and a comma.

6:03 In doing so, each

6:04 available page on the website replicates

6:06 a complete page of a book that might be

6:08 found in Bourhees's Library of Babel.

6:10 And just like in the story, every page

6:13 which is organized into books appears to

6:15 be random gibberish, but it isn't.

6:18 Everything is deterministically defined

6:20 within the algorithm encoded to ensure

6:22 that every possible combination exists

6:24 and that every page is tied to a unique

6:25 number, that the algorithm always

6:27 translates into a consistent string of

6:29 characters, guaranteeing the pages and

6:31 books never change.

6:32 And so also like in

6:34 the story, amidst all the nonsense is

6:36 also every complete comprehensible work

6:38 that has ever been and could ever be

6:40 written.

6:42 Of course, this doesn't mean the website

6:44 literally stores all these pages since

6:46 that would require more memory than the

6:47 entire universe can hold.

6:49 But the algorithm simply ensures that every

6:51 possible page is predetermined, fixed,

6:53 and retrievable on demand.

6:55 In an instant, by searching it directly, you

6:58 can find where the last sentence you

6:59 thought, said, read, or heard exists in

7:02 the library on its specific page,

7:04 volume, shelf, wall, and hexagon.

7:06 If that wasn't unsettling enough, there's

7:09 also another section of the website

7:10 known as the Babel Image Archives.

7:13 This section does a similar thing with the

7:14 comparable algorithm, but does it with

7:16 images.

7:17 It generates every combination

7:19 of 4,96 different color pixels in a 640x

7:22 416 pixel canvas.

7:24 The resulting archive contains 10^ the 961,755th

7:29 power images in total.

7:31 To get a better

7:32 sense of size, you could fit all of the

7:34 universe's atoms 10 to the 80th power

7:36 inside the Library of Babel roughly 10

7:39 to the 4597th power times over.

7:42 And you could fit the

7:43 entire library of Babel inside the Babel

7:45 image archives 10^ the 957,78th

7:49 power times.

7:51 In other words, it's very

7:53 big.

7:55 Together, this means that right now on

7:57 this website, not only are there literal

7:59 written descriptions of your birth and

8:01 death, the origins and end of humanity,

8:03 Earth and the cosmos, the answers to

8:06 life's greatest questions and paradoxes,

8:08 the cures to diseases and instructions

8:10 to build the most advanced technologies.

8:12 But there are also images of all these

8:14 things, technically just one click away.

8:17 In fact, there are images that if put

8:19 together in just the right order, would

8:21 produce videos of these moments of all

8:23 possible moments, past, present, and

8:26 future.

8:28 If every line that has ever been written

8:30 or could ever be written, and if every

8:32 visual that has or could ever be seen or

8:34 made by humans currently exists, what

8:36 does that mean for us?

8:38 What does it mean

8:39 about us?

8:41 If these things technically

8:42 already exist as potential before the

8:44 website and as literal instantiations

8:46 within the website.

8:47 Are we creating or

8:48 discovering these things when we think,

8:50 write, do, or perceive them for the

8:52 first time?

8:53 What does it mean to see,

8:55 experience, think, say, do, or create,

8:58 if not to simply come across a

9:00 particular pixel, image, sentence, or

9:02 page in the infinite library of the

9:04 universe, a predetermined pre-existing

9:06 realm of potentiality.

9:08 Of course, from our perspective, there

9:10 is a meaningful difference between

9:12 creation and discovery.

9:13 What we create feels different from what we discover.

9:17 This difference can vary, of course, as

9:18 both creation and discovery always exist

9:20 on a constantly shifting spectrum.

9:22 But there is no doubt that discovering a

9:24 great book or tool feels very different

9:26 from creating one.

9:27 And naturally, we treat these things differently, as we

9:30 should.

9:31 But if we zoom out, if the human

9:33 brain is merely a product of the

9:34 arbitrary ordering of material in the

9:36 universe interacting with other

9:38 material, creation is at bottom merely a

9:41 form of interaction of information

9:43 collection and discovery.

9:45 It is only that when this involves a conscious

9:47 sense of agency and internal

9:48 transmutation, we call it creation.

9:52 In a world that is now infused with

9:54 artificial intelligence, the implications of the Library of Babel are

9:57 more significant than ever.

9:59 The sorts of questions it raises about creativity,

10:01 discovery, potential, and algorithms

10:04 have never been more literal yet

10:05 uncertain.

10:06 If something else can create

10:08 what we create, faster or better, does

10:10 that change the meaning of what we

10:12 create?

10:13 Does it change the meaning of

10:14 creation itself?

10:16 Perhaps artificial intelligence is like

10:18 a hyper advanced robotic librarian in

10:20 Bourhees's library, able to scan the

10:22 floors, halls, and shelves faster than

10:24 any human ever could.

10:26 But speed is not

10:27 meaning.

10:27 Just because words or pixels

10:29 can be or have been put together does

10:31 not mean they are or have been put

10:32 together in a way that matters.

10:34 And just because they could be put together

10:36 faster or more vastly does not

10:38 necessarily mean they matter more.

10:40 In a universe of babble, perhaps what

10:42 matters, what's meaningful solely

10:45 depends on those who read, who can read.

10:49 Arguably, it will never not be

10:51 impressive when a human across the

10:52 entire infinite library of the cosmos

10:54 finds and shares a poignant phrase, a

10:57 moving visual, some detailed

10:58 instructions for an innovation, or a

11:00 paradigm shifting idea, whatever

11:02 creation or discovery might mean, and

11:04 however it might be carried out.

11:06 How we get to these intonations and moments

11:09 matters so much less than that we get to

11:11 them.

11:12 For whatever reason, our

11:14 consciousness seems uniquely able to

11:15 make the cosmic randomness and

11:17 impossibility accessible, ordered, and

11:19 intentional.

11:20 The chaos and irrationality

11:22 seem to us to be the exception.

11:24 But in truth, it is the norm.

11:26 Rationality, meaning, and order, we are the

11:30 exception.

11:31 Infidel's claim that the rule

11:32 in the library is not sense but nonsense

11:35 and that rationality even humble pure

11:38 coherence is an almost miraculous

11:40 exception writes Bourhees.

11:43 Maybe at true bottom everything in the

11:45 universe is babble and we merely get

11:47 better at turning it into meaning over

11:49 time.

11:49 A sort of alchemy of necessity.

11:52 We're like stranded librarians with

11:53 access to the library of everything but

11:55 no way of ever objectively penetrating

11:57 the sheath of infinity.

11:58 And so perhaps our best bet isn't to find everything,

12:02 but to make everything everything.

12:05 As humans, we find it hard to imagine

12:07 something like a monkey producing the

12:09 works of Shakespeare, even if given an

12:10 infinite amount of time.

12:12 But is it not

12:13 infinitely more impressive that any one

12:15 person could write all the works of

12:17 Shakespeare with awareness and intention

12:19 in just 52 years?

12:22 So many humans in

12:22 history, in the present, and surely in

12:25 the future, have and will accomplish

12:26 similar feats to Shakespeare that would

12:28 otherwise seem impossible across

12:30 infinite time scales for any other being

12:32 and any other scenario.

12:34 And yet, here we

12:35 are continually forging through the

12:37 babble.

12:39 In the words of the physicist

12:40 Brian Cox, "If the universe is infinite,

12:42 which it may well be, if it's in accord

12:44 with the laws of physics, then it can

12:46 happen.

12:47 And everything that can happen

12:48 in an infinite universe will happen.

12:51 I contend that even the most unlikely

12:53 possibility must happen.

12:55 In fact, formerly an infinite number of times.

12:58 So maybe Shakespeare was actually just

13:00 lucky.

13:02 Surely Shakespeare was lucky.

13:04 But in this sense, so were all of us.

13:07 The absurdity of our position in the archive

13:09 of the cosmos as a line on a page or a

13:11 pixel in an image that possesses not

13:13 only life but the capacity to know of

13:15 and realize itself.

13:16 To see the babble

13:17 and the meaning and know the difference.

13:19 To forge discovery or invention.

13:21 To consider or create concepts like

13:23 infinity and explore them through art,

13:25 thought, and technology.

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14:02 babel.

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15:28 [Music] [Music]

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