I have certain strange beliefs and neuroses. I thought I saw a way out of one of them, but I was wrong. I'm not very good at philosophy, nor am I well-read, but that's no excuse for not thinking about hard problems until I am good. I'm tired of that. Here's my thinking up to the point I got stuck.
[Infohazard: Justification for suicide.] Everything that can exist or could have existed does. In the fullness of time, we can assume a mirror-self will make the right decision where we made the wrong one (or vice versa) and absolve us of the need to act, to continue the work. All paths are traced, so nothing we do matters.0 This means you can kill yourself without consequence. You're so tired, but it's okay, you can rest. Another you will handle it.
This probably sounds very dumb to most beings.
I used to think that everything that could exist did. This followed from a few principles: 1) that there was some way to specify the conditions of a self-contained existence1 (e.g. our Universe, any Universe, the myriad things stranger than Universes that exist far beyond our placid island in realityspace); 2) these conditions can be encoded as numbers2; 3) a la Egan’s Permutation City, every possible encoding is represented in the digits of Pi, and to be encoded both as initial conditions and everything that follows after is to Exist; the virtual is manifest unto itself. You can also arrive here a few other ways: Boltzman brains slowly mapping possibilityspace or psychedelic insights (the only thing that can exist after nothing is something, ergo eternity exists, ergo all paths are traced eventually) are two I've taken. This is also probably an extrapolation of the ideas behind The Egg, loathe as I am to admit it.
Astute readers may also make the comparison to The Library of Babel. At first glance, the library appears to be complete. Every book is made of letters in a specific order. Given infinite monkeys and typewriters, every book will be written. There is nowhere for “another” book to hide.3 Borges wrote a much lesser known essay which refutes this simplistic reading. Entitled “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw,” it reads, in part:
Those who [make metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations] forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or a series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory… A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula “Everything flows” abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond Lully would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to methodical chance, that philosophy and many others… the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive of it in terms of Heraclitus.
I fear that I have made a grave mistake in my estimation of the possibilities for existence, but I am able to recognize it now. The problem is that I have terminal programmer brain. I must detour to talk about names, computers, and the invisible ways we are limited in what we are able to think.
“Can a name be all uppercase?”4 bell hooks’ name is all lowercase. What is a name? I thought of it as a series of characters.5 However, the US legal system has a different idea of what a “name” is, predating computers and the expectation of literacy. A name is something that exists in minds and mouths and it can be written, but the written forms (plural!) are derivative, not prime. The question is malformed, you mistake what it is to be a name. A name has no casing. It can be written all uppercase, and often is in legal settings (check your driver’s license), but this isn’t a quality of the name itself. It is easy now to think of names as “the thing you type into the ship-to field,” but this is the map superseding the territory. This is one of the bars of the Black Iron Prison, the things that you don’t notice constrain your thinking. It is remaking ourselves in the image of the machine. Seeing this crack from where two bars were imperfectly superimposed helped me discern the shape of the limitation. We cannot exhaust name-space because to be called Gertrude is an “axis of innumerable relationships,” it means something very different now than it used to. To mangle Borges, “if I were granted the possibility of being called any present-day name—my own, for example—as it would be called in the year three thousand, I would know what the names of the year three thousand will be like.”
We can’t exhaust names or books or other character streams, for each is not merely the thing itself, and certainly isn't its own encoding.6 To think we can is a failure to see the level above that connects all things. Apple pies and universes and all that. If a book is an axis of relationships, is not a person, a world?
And that's where this line of thought breaks down, when we get to the level of a Universe. A Universe, by definition, is self-contained. All the contingencies and context are either part of it or fully irrelevant. This means we haven't escaped the possibility of enumerating the possibilities for existence.
What I'm going with for now, because I need something, is that I exist here and now, and what I do matters in that limited context. The fullness of time is very far away and all my loved ones are here. There's also a more-than-good chance I'm wrong somewhere, and so it behooves oneself to behave as if the terrible thing weren't true. I think this is not a rigorous way out of the mind-trap, but it will serve for the purpose that I need it to, for now.