I’ve been thinking about it over and over in my head and it still doesn’t make sense. How can it contain information, yet not contain information?
From Wikipedia: "In any case, it is clear that a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, is equivalent (as a source of information) to a library containing zero books."
Can an infinite set be equivaalent to an empty set? How can everything be equivalent to nothing?
Perhaps an infinite set is not the same as an empty set in mathematical terms, but I don’t believe Borges’ story was meant to be defined that way.
I had never heard of the Library of Babel till I read your question, and it sparked my curiosity. From the few minutes’ research I did, it appears that the Library didn’t include merely every book that could possibly be written in any possible language, but also every book holding every possible combination of letters, punctuation, and spaces that would fit within the size parameters. Many — the vast majority — would undoubtedly look like, and be, complete gibberish to readers, though some of what looked like gibberish would merely be in code. Given all that, you could theoretically start at the front door and look systematically at every page of every book as you came to it for your entire life, and never find even one page that you could recognize as having any meaning at all. Even if you weren’t looking for a particular piece of information, you would have gained no information at all.
I see no PRACTICAL difference between that situation and the library with no books, unless you also posit a race of people who never need any information for any reason whatsoever, who don’t care if what they read makes any sense to them, and who exist merely to look at all the books page by page.
because it would take the rest of a person’s life seeking through each random book to find a single fact
reference books need to be cataloged and arranged in some kind of system that makes it easy to find what you need to know as soon as possible
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I disagree.
You make the assumption that knowledge must be acquired in the readers chosen order. Instead of systematically book by book
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Perhaps an infinite set is not the same as an empty set in mathematical terms, but I don’t believe Borges’ story was meant to be defined that way.
I had never heard of the Library of Babel till I read your question, and it sparked my curiosity. From the few minutes’ research I did, it appears that the Library didn’t include merely every book that could possibly be written in any possible language, but also every book holding every possible combination of letters, punctuation, and spaces that would fit within the size parameters. Many — the vast majority — would undoubtedly look like, and be, complete gibberish to readers, though some of what looked like gibberish would merely be in code. Given all that, you could theoretically start at the front door and look systematically at every page of every book as you came to it for your entire life, and never find even one page that you could recognize as having any meaning at all. Even if you weren’t looking for a particular piece of information, you would have gained no information at all.
I see no PRACTICAL difference between that situation and the library with no books, unless you also posit a race of people who never need any information for any reason whatsoever, who don’t care if what they read makes any sense to them, and who exist merely to look at all the books page by page.
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