The Library of the Adjacent Possible

The writer Jorges Luis Borges describes The Library of Babel, a vast collection of books 410 pages in length which contain every possible permutation and combination of letters, numbers and punctuation. In this library is every book ever written and every book that will be written. In addition, all volumes which differ by one character, one word, one paragraph or one chapter from legitimate works. Some volumes contain a single character followed by blank pages and some have no vowels.

The Library of Babel.

My personal favorites are "Gravity's Rainbow" by Ernest Hemmingway, "A Farewell to Arms" by Mark Twain and "Huckleberry Finn" by Thomas Pynchon. The same narrative in a different style occurs for every book ever written and all books not yet written.

Several other such libraries are described by Dan Dennett among others. The Library of Mendel has every possible combination of DNA base pairs (and therefore every gene). The Library of Boltzmann has a description of every neuron and neuronal connection in every brain imaginable in addition to many brains that cannot exist. The Library of Hubble contains a description of every galaxy and star.

In the prevailing model of the Multiverse, all these libraries exist in every possible combination and permutation. There is a star like our sun with a third planet devoid of life in one instance and another with 7 billion dinosauroid sapiens with the same names and habits of our own. By Bell's Theorem, I am entangled with the fermions and bosons of all near possible variants of this present phenotypes. I am multitudes.