November 5th, 2019

The Experience

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Monkey the writer once famously said:

ms,dnf2woksdf,m2mnsd,vsdfs dlfkj32lkj13fjds0vdci[vsdf'RightHere!c;v,erf.s;lj;wef'scvj'erdv,we4i203r20f2fYouFool!0p3l;wdc,snvv3i0rfokdmv,dmcvn'el130eiksds xvcbajkshdq'opwd;wdjfkjerhgHahaYeahNowYouSeeIt!0243857tue'pdokdlvms,mcn.kjjh;I'mshakespeareFU3dkjjd40lgklkjsiowdf;r 'dcv,.dv,bmnyYjsdhp024;;sdmo34i875897y3p02[peijlkfjdkl.efe

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​If you do not know what is going on here, you should read about Library of Babel. It is an insanely large database of all possible words with all possible sentence configurations that can ever happen. Of course most of them seem, or indeed are, garbage. But the point is that any book, any poem, any play, any question ever asked, any answer wrong or right, in the past or in the future, any law written, any threatening email or love letter is in there! In Library of Babel.

Jonathan Basile created this intriguing masterpiece based on "The Library of Babel", one of Jorge Luis Borges's best-known and most loved pieces, from the 1941 collection The Garden of Branching Paths. It describes a version of a universal library, containing books with every possible combination of 410 pages of letters, thus containing every book that has ever been and every book that could ever be written, drowned out by an immense quantity of nonsense. Borges has set the rule for the universe en abyme (like a fractal): ​

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries…The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides…each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters."

​At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about \(10^{4677}\) books. Each book has been assigned its particular hexagon, wall, shelf, and volume code. Any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. In his website, Jonathan Basile has extensively explored the geometrical solutions as how to build the library to minimize the space and the distance to visit all the rooms.

Sometimes that I am more mentally unstable, I flip the pages in this library trying to find something, like the answers to the 6 million dollar problems posed by Hilbert in the beginning of the 20th century, or something as banal as who is going to win the world cup next time, or something as futile as my own epitaph, if there will be any. I know they are there, I just do not know where...yet.

Go to https://libraryofbabel.info/ And Browse->Chamber->Wall->Shelf->Volume->Page with any number you want. Stare at the page for a minute. See if you see things. Then hit "Anglishize". Now you might see some more odd, but legit, words. Even what the monkey is saying on top of this post is in Babel. To be exact, here

Title: vfnkeaxl Page: 264 Location: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?vfnkeaxl264
Volume 4 on Shelf 3 of Wall 3 of Hexagon [title too long to be inserted here]
​

And this is only one location out of \(29^{2961}\) possible matches. It seems the monkey's quote is pretty well recited. Or maybe it is only because what he has written is not special enough? How about something with more structure? Something more unique? Like this poem by Shakespeare:

O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify:
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie;

That is my home of love; if I have ranged,
Like him that travels, I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.

Never believe, though in my nature reign'd
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stain'd
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good:

For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose: in it thou art my all.

​Title: urwoxny mae.fbcshvyxoqr Page: 143 Location:​ https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?l_usgwpzvthbvmrndxu..pw110

There are about \(80281895\) more unique matches of this poem in Babel. Shakespeare's poem is considerably harder to find compared to the monkey's text. It is no surprise though; It is a longer text with a more organized structure and an extremely rare wording configuration. So rare that so far in the written history only one man has managed to put them together this way. Yet, compared to all possible word configurations we can get, it is not that unique after all.

The Lucky Pattern

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​​Most of the content of Library of Babel is seemingly garbage. 
​
But what is not garbage?
What does separate a meaningful coherent sentence from a nonsensical one?
Is it some sort of non-arbitrary order?
Can that order be temporary, adaptive or even accidental? 

[the following needs reordering]
To answer these questions we need to investigate the rules that define an order, and whether those rules are fundamental or just a set of constructs. But how those rules are set or discovered in the first place? One way to think about them is to consider them as a set of patterns persistent along the axis of observation: the pattern of changing seasons persisting along the time axis, the pattern of a falling object along the space-time axis, the pattern of words along the language axis, etc. 

The famous Infinite Monkey Theorem (monkeys accidentally producing Shakespearian masterpiece if randomly hitting the typewriter buttons for long enough time) was originally suggested to highlight the fact that any meaningful construct is a subset of a larger one. The one that is mostly meaningless. 

It is substantial to understand and accept the relationship between emerging patterns in subsets where the main set is mostly nonsensical. It is like trying to figure out how intelligence has emerged from chaos. Is it by design? Or is it a direct result of having an infinitely large space of arbitrary arrangements of atoms and just getting lucky? 

I am not suggesting an answer. But we should not easily discard the latter question because its answer is not as trivial as we tend to think it is.

​​Think about raindrops. If you were to guess where the raindrops hit the sidewalk surface you would think of a random pattern. But then if you were asked to draw that sort of pattern on paper, what you would draw would not be exactly random! You would try to spread the raindrops on the paper as much as you can, trying not to repeat yourself, because doing so feels random. In reality, a more statistically sound random pattern would also involve multiple raindrops hitting the same spot. Repetition is also part of randomness. By excluding it you would unintentionally introduce a pattern that breaks the randomness.

Repetition suggests pattern, even if there is really none. If every time you drop an apple and it goes straight downwards, you start to suspect a pattern. You assume there is a hidden order behind it that makes it non-random, or in fact, predictable. You theorize a law and test its accuracy of predictability. If the pattern persists in different scenarios and for long enough, you conclude there indeed exists an order. But how long is long enough? How do we know we have exhausted all falling scenarios? Have we tried it on other planets? Have we observed what happens when you drop the apple in a shuttle that travels at %99 of the speed of light? How about dropping it in a blackhole? Would it still fall down a straight line? 

The point is, a pattern, however powerful and persistent, is always subject to certain limitations. It can be generalized only as much as we can generalize our experiments. And we can not possibly experiment our believed pattern in the entire range of possible scenarios. A pattern is only as good as our limitations in observing what is NOT predicted by that pattern. Any pattern we pick in our world, remains local as long as we as the observer are local. And it can be nothing more than a temporary formation of a suspicious shape that we see in a small region of the wet sidewalk. 

I am not suggesting that every pattern, or oder, is necessarily and intrinsically local, but it is very easy to assume that there is something out there as an established pattern by merely seeing it for long enough. This is in fact what can easily lead to superstition where we mistake coincidence or correlation with causation.

What I am about to propose might seem to be an outlandish thought. Yet try to consider it as a conceivable thought with an open mind.

​What if what we believe to be a set of undisputed universal laws of physics, for example, are only as good as strong guesses that so far have passed all the experiments successfully, and they could well be seen as mere coincidental events had we observed the entire possible space-time continuum? In which case we would only call our theories extremely lucky patterns, and our experimental results crazy but true coincidences! However this might sound outrageous, we should admit its possibility. Just like Shakespeare's poem emerging from pure randomness. A highly complex structure that is the product of pure chance without any inherent meaning or fundamentally persistent order in the mind of its generator: The Monkey.

Let me give you one more example.

If you toss a coin 10 million times there is a good chance that you get a straight sequence of 5 heads. Now to a gambler that is not luck. It is order. And he will raise his bet for the 6th head to show up right after observing the lucky streak. That is what is known as The Gambler Fallacy. The same misconception is purported in Basketball as the "Hot Hand" where people think a successful streak of 3 points shots has a greater chance of success in the next attempt the longer the streak is. Of course we know mathematically it is a fallacy, but still gamblers take the repetition for order. They can not just accept that a lucky pattern, however interesting, is still just luck.

[Note to expand: If the size of the set of sequence of observations was small enough, it would have somewhat made sense to expect that more probable states dominate our observations, even if these are independent events. The catch is, the set size of all events is so large we can take it almost as infinite. So any odd repetition of patterns, and the connotation of such for a long time, however improbable, is still possible. This is how I perceive the current set of rules governing our universe. A very peculiar set of patterns that is quite improbable, but completely possible, given the very short lifetime of the universe so far compared to what is left in the extremely long future ahead of its existence. A source to the log-video of the universe lifespan can be helpful here. There is also the Veritasium video about the natural tendency of moving towards the average.]

Which one is more random? From Peter Coles's post

​The Constellations of the Astrological Zodiac
Click to enlarge

Ursa Major

​Sean Carroll, a writer, speaker and physicist at Caltech says:

Humans are not very good at generating random sequences; when asked to come up with a “random” sequence of coin flips from their heads, they inevitably include too few long strings of the same outcome. In other words, they think that randomness looks a lot more uniform and structureless than it really does. The flip side is that, when things really are random, they see patterns that aren’t really there. It might be in coin flips or distributions of points, or it might involve the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, or the insistence on assigning blame for random unfortunate events.

​​So are we acting like Hot Hand gamblers when it comes down to our understanding of universe?

The Stencil

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The thing is we seek and find and mistake a local repetition (as one of many ways of detecting structure and discovering laws of nature) with a global order. Our minds tend to extrapolate too often and too far. 

​It is comforting to assume the laws of physics that seemingly hold true for the first 14 billion years, will continue to hold true for the next trillion trillion trillion trillion years. But as with any overly local model, there comes the risk of overfitting in the presence and overshooting in the future. If not 100% certain to happen, it is still a matter that needs serious precaution in constructing a model for making sense of things. 

We construct meaning. We choose to. We seek meaning to make sense of things, and the relation between things, because our survival depends on them, perhaps the same way that the gambler's life is desperately biased by taking luck for order. 

But those constructs are not more meaningful, nor meaningless for that matter, than any of other trillions of other ones that are not useful or compatible with our brain circuitry. It is like cutting out a stencil the only way we know how to cut, and filtering what we see through those patterns on the stencil. What we see makes sense to us because the patterns we cut out make sense to us. What we see makes sense not more than how the patterns we cut out make sense. 

There is no way to put down the stencil and survive the complexity of the world. We are addicted to it. We depend on it. But the constant struggle and the certitude of failure of not always being right can be frustrating. It can mislead us to superstition, impotent science or at the very least to a stressful state of mind... a constant fear of not understanding.

That is why I particularly like what the the creator of Babel says:
​

Those who tire of being constantly thwarted looking for meaning among the library’s babble can use reading its jumbled texts as a form of meditation. Eventually your mind learns no longer to search for or expect significance.

P.S.
​​Even in the short burst of mumbling on top of this page the monkey has spoken. Anglishize your eyes to see it.