Barzakh, Bibliothetic Order & Borges's Library in Babel

Vivek Iyer
The books in Borges's Library of Babel are a random distribution of unique character strings of equal
length. One way to generate the Library would be to start with the book that consists entirely of the
letter a, then the one which is entirely a except that its last letter is b and so forth. This would generate
the lexical ordering of the Library in a time factorial to that of producing one book. The actual order
of books is random and we don't know where the Library starts and finishes. Still, we can just
arbitrarily choose an anchor book and say, this is in the right place and every other book must be
moved to correspond to the lexical ordering. More generally, for any bibliothetic ordering, two
variables arise for any given book- first, its vector distance from the anchor book, and second its
vector distance from its assigned place- both of which have polynomial form.
Thus catalogs of the Library have existential Second Order Complexity which,by Fagin's theorem, is
non deterministically computable. But, since we know the books have a lexical ordering such that
there is a least fixed point, it follows that algorithmic orderings are deterministically computable in
exponential time. Moreover, if the catalog of the Library must also be a book in the Library then,
since we know that there is no 'sparse language' in the one case which is not in the other we have no
grounds for hoping that some non deterministic computation would be shorter than exponential time.
This is one approach, a pessimistic one, to answering the question-
'Could there be a specified bibliothetic order for Borges's library that you or I could create and
describe in, say, a 100-page document? Not a complete cataloguing, obviously, but an algorithm that
sensibly placed the books in an order explainable to a bright and interested human? I don't think so
at least I wasn't able to dream anything up!but nor did I see any path to a proof that no such
ordering could be possible. And maybe I'm being redundant, but it wouldn't need to specify hexagon
and shelf for each possible book, but rather a compelling way that set the books so that were you to
find yourself in a particular hexagon, you'd have a good sense of what might be in nearby hexagons. I
got nuthin'.'

What happens if we abandon the idea of a universal descriptive language and replace it by something
arising out of the theory of co-evolution? Do we thereby escape the tyranny of Time hierarchy
theorems?
One reason to hope so is that co-evolution is stochastic, not deterministic, and generates 'advice
strings'.- i.e. an extra input becomes available- in a particularly useful manner. The Red Queen, in
Lewis Caroll's 'Through the looking glass', manages to run just as fast as the scenery- which is in 'state
space explosion'- thus staying in the same place.
How might this work in practice?
Suppose 'interesting books' in the Library of Babel are traded and used as a store of value and suppose
preferences are epigenetically canalized to not-too-much, not-too-little diversity (Graciella
Chichilnisky- an Argentine Mathematical Economist- did path-breaking work on this in the Seventies)
then over infinite time we are likely to see all sorts of bibliothetic orderings corresponding to all
possible Wealth distributions which would exhaust polynomial complexity. Now, if a steady state
obtains at any point, then we know from a result by Axtell, that this is also a Walrasian equilibrium-
which is an exponential time algorithm for fixed points. Under certain conditions- e.g. if we assume
that the race of Librarians have homothetic preferences and thus the same satiation point- this
corresponds to the notion that a bibliothetic ordering has been implemented.

My feeling, however, is that there is more to this. Essentially, the Economic evolution of biblothetic
ordering itself adds meaning and, what's more, the fitness landscape (assume guys more successful in
the book trade live longer or have more progeny) for hermeneutics now has a sort of built in 'Red
Queen' predator-prey type driver for complexity. I think this means that though any given bilateral
trade is still only of complexity class P, the co-evolved complexity of the system is much greater.
Indeed, Borges-the-writer-who-was-also-a-librarian's own sequential bibliothetic orderings of the
books that simultaneously created his precursors - which corresponds to a non computable real- could
have a representation. (This is because a few typos don't make much difference, so there can be a lot
of book sequences corresponding to how specific works stood in relation to each other on Borges's
mental book-case at different points of time)
Elsewhere in the library, variorum editions of Schelling focal 'interesting books' might themselves end
up with higher prices because of baked in hysteresis effects. Parallel to this is that 'important' book
dealers have epigenetic canalisation- i.e. they behave like each other even though they have different
origins and preferences. I think this means that a lot of the time we are going to see fractal patterns
with provincial 'collections' mimicking (mutatis mutandis) those of the 'metropolitan' Merchant
Princes. My guess, or particular brand of Economic Romanticism, is that this still wouldn't give us a
substantive 'catalog' except as a degenerate state.

Still the co-evolved descriptive complexity I am attributing to the librarians could, of course, be a
property of a discrete math simulation. We just need to tinker with the rules of the game till we get a
sufficiently rich steady state fractal. But would the result be something we would find humanly
cognizable or intuitive?
The problem is that, whereas librarians can have a canalised tropism to value 'interesting' books- a
guy running a simulation doesn't have that ability to pick out 'interesting books' in the same way. I
suppose one could breed genetic algorithms to do something which looks like Librarian Economics
but the only way of knowing if what they produce is something interesting is to look inside the thing.
But that's clearly illegitimate. I mean why not just put in a predator which goes through the lexical
order and either quarantines or eats anything that looks meaningless when compared to the Google
Books database?

Another approach, of whose legitimacy I'm not sure, is to appeal to Intutitionistic mathematics.
Suppose there is an ideal ordering such that the Expected value of the sum of randomly teleported
visitor bewilderment is minimized (i.e. some visitors, by reason of their lucky location, can quickly
work out the ideal order while some, who are stuck in low structure stacks, take a very long but finite
time to do so). Suppose further that the visitors are of a specific mathematical race such that Total
bewilderment is a function of the spread of choice sequences they construct in comparing adjacent
books. Muth rationality is the notion that one's choices or expectations conform to the prediction of
the correct theory. Since the best thing for the visitor race as a whole is that the library be ordered to
minimize total bewilderment, it makes sense if their choice functions reflect this (i.e. they choose to
be bewildered by any empirical deviation from the ideal order). So we know there is an ideal ordering
(albeit only for ideal visitors).
We also know there are better than random orderings- e.g. the lexical.
I am tempted to say that by the Brouwer's continuity principle (an illegitimate use in this context?)
this means there is a canonical bibliothetic ordering for all visitors who are the product of natural
selection. In other words, there is some way to extract phenomenological information about us- on the
assumption that we have evolved in a Darwinian manner- and make it available to Mathematics in the
same way that the Anthropic principle might yield information for Physics.
I also think, because of the nature of choice sequences, one can keep changing the genotype of the
visitors so that there is a trade-off between Total bewilderment minimization and other things we
value- e.g. the chance for a lucky few to quickly get to a 'good' book-stack.
But, can Brouwer's principle be used in this way?
Neither books nor information about ordering poses a difficulty. Everything is well defined and
therefore continuous. But is it legitimate to stipulate that choice sequences be constructively Muth
rational?- doesn't that make them impredicative?
On one horn of the dilemma- the Kantian horn- we can have a priori Muth rationality but no intuitive
idea of how the choice sequence is constructed, on the other horn- the Darwinian horn- we know that
choices are epigenetically canalised and thus something like ex poste Muth rationality obtains only we
can never be sure it is optimal, and therefore really 'rational', in any sense.
One way to resolve the dilemma is to embrace a peculiar sort of monadology in which whatever is
interstital is constantly populated by virtual particles which themselves spontaneously create choice
sequence bridges. This, I suppose, is the Ibn Arabi's concept of the barzakh- the incompossible,
phantasmal Limbo which unites what it separates- the world of the 'command', i.e. what is possible,
and the world of 'creation'- i.e. what exists- which is also the pure virtuality represented by the
'superficies of the Mirror' in the Library of Babel of which Khwaja Mir Dard was surely speaking
when he wrote-