the library of babel contains every possible text within certain arbitrary const
raints defined by character set and text length. jonathan basiles online impleme
ntation attempts to obfuscate the completeness by using a clever mapping algorit
hm to present every page of text in random order so that you do not know which p
age comes next in order, i suppose to give the thrill of the search. his idea is
 that the project is deep and profound and raises questions about meaning and si
gnificance.          i have long thought that a better way to construct a librar
y of babel is to organise the pages in alphabetical order, so that each page dif
fers from the next page only by the final character of that page being increment
ed by one alphabet position. that way you could instantly find the text you want
ed the room, shelf, volume and page references would be simply the appropriate e
xtract from the text on the page. you lose the thrill of the random hunt but you
 gain a clarity of the structure of the entire collection.          i suppose on
e of the points of this kind of complete collection of possible texts is that th
ere is no meaning in the texts. it is pointless saying that this text i am writi
ng now exists in the library. the text only exists when you go to the library an
d search for it and find it. the text in the library has no meaning, until the r
eader finds and reads the text.          i think this is connected to the idea o
f the death of the author, where it is the reader of a text who generates the me
aning in their own brain. a lot of the argument about this idea seems to center 
around the obvious problem that the author also has a brain and is thinking abou
t stuff as they write though one could also analyse the process of writing as in
volving simultaneous readingback of the text as it is being written.          an
 ai written text is really on a technical level not that different from a page i
n the library of babel, in that the machine spits out a text or selects from a m
ultitude of possible texts but it only becomes meaningful if and when a reader r
eads it and creates meaning and understanding from it. the algorithm in the libr
ary of babel does not seem to create understanding of the texts it curates, it j
ust generates them according to a quasirandom algorithm. my alphabetical library
 is simpler and the alphabetical algorithm is easier to understand, but basiles 
deliberately obfuscating algorithm does not seem to be understanding every possi
ble text either. and so the ai proposed here the large language models i presume
 does not seem to be reading and understanding any of the texts it generates fin
ds from possibility space either.          maybe the ultimate conclusion then is
 that human readers also do not understand anything, it is all an illusion.pocml
oc, jul  edit, delete