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Somewhere, This Has Already Been Written


What I have written and am writing now already exists—this exact combination of letters, words and feeling—in a mathematical certainty. Hard to believe? 


The Library of Babel is a thought experiment by Jorge Luis Borges—an infinite library that is claimed to contain every possible combination of words and letters wherein it becomes inevitable that in the gibberish, somewhere exists the true story of your death, even the conception of the universe. But the problem lies in the fact that it is literally infinite, and no one can look for something unless they know it. 


This paradox reflects the implications of a block universe, a deterministic universe, where all that is to have occurred in the past and the future is set in time and we are merely puppets moving through a carved path. Every point in time, the existence of dinosaurs, the day of your birth and your death are just as present in this block as this second. Everything exists congenially. If such a universe were to exist, it makes time travel very much real but that is not what will be talking about in this essay.


The block universe implies that free will does not exist merely because future events are never in your control; the Library of Babel puts this into perspective.


If this very piece of writing exists as a mathematical probability, is writing it even meaningful? The knowledge of its vague existence is there, of course. But you don't know it exists until you write it down. Something in existence will always have existed before you have conceived the thought but call into question that your conception is a reiteration of something in existence it must be brought into existence by you in the first place.


Even if The Library of Babel contains the story of your fate, you cannot read it. Therefore, the experience of free will is indistinguishable from having free will. The "ignorance" of the future is what gives life its flavor, even if the structure is rigid. We are actors who haven't read the script, making the performance "real" to us.


But how do we define the system of justice in a predetermined society?  If a man is bound to commit a crime and imprisonment is the consequence of human nature, is the crime committed a defect of the human or of the creator of the block?  While we cannot explain the later perhaps it is in how we define justice during our time on earth. Prison is a consequence of committing harm to society or its citizens irrespective of the forces that conspired its occurrence.


Yet there is a certain dignity to understanding the architecture of our prison, so here's to that.

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