In the “Library of Babel”, a short story by author Jorge Louis Borges (1941), a vast, astronomically large — though not infinite — collection of All Possible Books is imagined to exist. They are housed in a Library that is also inhabited by a people who have never found a corridor or a room that did not lead to other corridors and rooms all filled with books. They have always lived entirely inside this Library. They believe that it contains all the possible variations of their 22 letter alphabet along with the space, the comma and the period. Therefore, they also believe that it contains all their knowledge and everything that could possibly be known, including a perfect index of The Library of Babel’s contents. But where is it? There is no order to these books and as these people travel the overwhelmingly vast number of books they open contain pure gibberish.
Here a naturereligionconnection.org our organizational problems are less severe.
There is a new format that will keep different Series of Post and categories of topics separate and therefore more accessible. There will still be a general post category titled “The Connection.” All this will be accessible from the Home Page.
In the vein of the above Libraries, Dan Dennett has proposed a “Library of Mendel”. It contains all the possible varied assemblages of DNA composed of its amino acid “letters”: A,C,G and T, and therefore all potential organisms. Biologist R. Dawkins has then commented that there are surely ‘vastly more ways to be dead (not alive) than ways of being alive.’
Thanks for your patience and your readership. GregWW
Nature Religion Connection 