Special Defects: Transcending Infinity (Part 2 in Article Series)
By Mandela Shabazz
"The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal."
- The Library of Babel
In the first essay I encouraged people to consider insanity as a legitimate field of study and approach to understanding existence; in this essay I want to alert people to how unimaginably insane the concept of infinity actually is. I really just want to talk about a few ways that people have conceptualized definitions of infinity and then explain why I find these ideas to be incompatible with what we experience. Apart from some amusing ideas, the reason that I want to debunk infinity is that it is so frequently referenced with such an obvious lack of comprehension. I'm not just talking about when kids say "I'm smarter than you times infinity", I'm referring to astrophysicists and theologians. The universe is not infinite and believing so is just ignoring one of the most essential riddles of this existence.
Of the impending metaphors and thought experiments, the most commonly recognized is that of the chimpanzees and the typewriters. It posits that if given infinite time (and presumably infinite chimpanzees, or at least chimpanzees of infinite longevity) they would eventually type the exact words of Shakespeare. It's a fairly modest claim; that a random series of key presses (represented by chimps because of their capacity for pressing buttons and inability to understand human literature) would eventually coincide with words that carry complex and meaningful messages... eventually.
Think of a letter; if a chimpanzee were to press a key on a typewriter, there would be a 1/26 (discounting punctuation) chance of them hitting the same letter that you were thinking about. But that is just one letter and with each additional character the probability of the chimp pressing the correct keys diminishes exponentially. I'm not going to try to convince you with math but hopefully we can agree that the probability of chimpanzees randomly typing the exact sequence of the hundreds of thousands of letters that Shakespeare once wrote is unimaginably low. However, if you give a dimension the property of being infinite, every possible occurrence becomes inevitable.
Of course before the chimps successfully reached the exact works of Shakespeare, they probably would have countless versions of the same stories with all kinds of variations of typographical errors. In fact, by the time the chimps reached Shakespeare, they would probably have typo-ridden versions of most texts by most authors; actually, the probability is that the chimps would have unknowingly written their own original detective series (obviously ridden with typos). As hard as this may be to imagine, I have said nothing yet about the mind-boggling number of pages of gibberish that the chimps would have produced along the way.
I found a similar yet more elaborate metaphor in a story called the Library of Babel by Borges. I will not attempt to explain the story, only its premise and that is this: There is a library in the shape of a hexagonal tower; each floor has one room, stairways leading to the floors above and below, and a central pit that runs through all the floors. The books on the shelves of the library contain every possible combination of characters and punctuation. The vast majority of these books are gibberish but the other realization to make is that every story that could ever possibly be told is somewhere in that library. Not just every story that ever has been told, every story that could ever be told. That means every possible variation in the outcome of the events, every possible character in every possible situation or interaction with every other possible character. This line of thought leads me to imagine a lot of absurd meetings between characters from children's cartoons with characters from ancient myths and sci-fi/action movies. But beyond the absurd you find the surreal; I would describe these interactions as less of a postmodernist collage and more of a depiction of the complex and mysterious dealings of divine beings. Lastly, we have the abstract, which I use as a catch-all term for all the fragmented nonsense that still carries an air of poetry. Those are just some variables to consider in addition to all the common dramas and mundane plot possibilities.
Everyone in the library is searching for the book that serves as an index to the library; it would essentially be the explanation of their universe and like all other possible books, it theoretically must exist somewhere in the library. But the people in this tower are more likely to search for their entire lives and never find a book with anything other than jumbled letters and punctuation. One significant achievement that Borges' story accomplishes is that it gives a finite definition to infinity. With every possible combination of characters and punctuation, there would definitely be a book on everything, but there can't be a book on more than everything. While the total number of books is unimaginable, it would theoretically still be finite.
I came across this last one when I was a kid but I can't remember where. It was predicated on a series of equations that described a computer program that would generate configurations of randomly colored pixels on a 1024x1024 screen resolution. like the countless volumes of nonsense text in the library, this thought experiment asserts that the overwhelming majority of the images produced by this program would essentially be rainbow colored static. But somewhere in the series of images you could, for instance, find a picture of every one, at every age, from every angle, in every place, doing everything possible.
With this thought experiment I want to bridge these notions of infinity with their scientific analog. If I have not intrinsically misunderstood the concept, quantum superposition describes the same idea I've been talking about for the past several paragraphs. Like the books in the library and the pictures that the computer produced, imagine a series of alternate universes with every possible configuration of matter and energy. All the different elements in all different phases, creating all kinds of different forms down through the microscopic and up to the megascopic. As before, the majority of these universes will simply be static or gibberish, loose particles in a quantum mist. But as before there will eventually come a universe with a more complex structure to its composition; these will be the universes in which the stories are told and pictures are made. I think the best way to get a broader sense of the scope and scale of possibilities is to look to visionary artists for further demonstrations of possible existences; you will see that our cumulative imagination is far more vast than the physical universe. Although, I guess a more interesting way to look at it is that the universe is just that much more complex for being able to host sentient life that can dream up such peculiar alternatives.
I hope you haven't grown too attached to this concept of infinity because now I'm going to show you why it doesn't match up with what we can observe. While the number of conceivable configurations of matter and energy dwarfs the already unimaginable number of books in the library, it is still finite. But remember that as the possibilities increase, so too does the amount of possible gibberish and if this were truly the way our existence works, then consider how absurdly lucky we are to find ourselves in such an intricate and stable universe.
Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding and while I agree that it is growing, how can something become greater if it were already infinite? By definition there can be nothing beyond everything. I suppose that through infinite time the universe could be infinite, but time (and its relationship with space) is another topic that I believe is entirely misunderstood, so I find it hardly reasonable to assume that time is infinite. But for the sake of argument, lets say you did have infinite time for the universe to grow into all of its possibilities. Consider that if all outcomes are inevitable, then eventually someone would discover a method to destroy the universe. Now consider all the other possible ways that the universe could be destroyed; it's a shame that none of them beyond the first one would ever be realized. How would that ultimate apocalyptic event be selected out of so many applicants? Will it really be randomly stumbled upon as the universe tries out random configurations of matter and energy? No, that's just silly.
The universe is not simply a series of random key presses and pixels gifted to us by the divine chimpanzees and their magnificent computer. For nearly 14 billion years the universe has developed an elegant fractal motif and it continually defies entropy as it generates more and more complicated systems. Everything that exists comes from these systems. We do not see the absurd and abstract existences because most of them could only have been whimsically forced into existence by an insane demon god rather than have evolved gradually out of systems as ours has.
Let me talk for a moment on nothingness because it is the counterpoint of infinity and how can I claim that infinity is false if I do not destroy its opposite as well? We'll begin at the beginning. To say that the universe sprang forth from nothing is in error; true nothingness excludes the chance of anything. Using Occam's Razor it is more reasonable to assume that the universe sprang forth from ANYTHING rather than nothing. Some people imagine nothingness as a black void, but an empty void is a fiery inferno of sensory stimulation in comparison to true nothingness. But whatever, compare your view of nothingness to this view: if you could think, feel, and experience everything (all the "infinite" possibilities I spoke of earlier) simultaneously, you would have no context by which to derive anything from this perception. I put forth that nothingness is the only thing that is unlimited (because it is un-everything) and that infinity is also nothing (meaning non-existent). Once you acknowledge that the universe is somewhere between non-existent and infinite, you should then wonder what it is exactly. The most honest term that I have found would be indefinite and if it is only certain portions of the potential infinite that become manifest, you must wonder how these special defects are selected.
I'll leave you with this: Consider the Mandelbrot sequence of fractal mathematics; there are black areas that represent the numbers that fall between 1.0 and 0, and then there are all the other numbers that indefinitely grow outwards in reverberating cascades of natural patterns. Not even the rudimentary systems of unseen physics are of a grid like or otherwise ordinary structure. The universe is not simple, efficient, predictable, or even seemingly logical at any scope or scale that I am aware of. This is what I call the overwhelming character to existence. Many examples exist in nature; evolution (which is truly deserving of its own essay) can account for how some of it happens but there are many extravagant, unnecessary, and undeniably beautiful forms that life takes on this planet. A bachelor of the peacock species displays its tail and is judged by females based on some kind of criteria. Across the entire species all of the females have a single idea in mind for the ideal shapes and colors that they find attractive. It is certainly not a bland design but it is not the most marvelous imaginable either. How is it that such a pattern could be decided upon? And if only we exist out of all the potential beings that could have existed, does that make us divinely ordained or perhaps even holy?
