©Copyright 01998. Fresh Ink. All rights reserved
In producing this artifact, we feel a strange indebtedness to a one Jorge Louis Borges, though we know very little about him. We first learned of the man through the mammoth tome Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly. Here we learned that Borges wrote of a library (the Library of Babel,1941) which contained every possible book, in the space of all possible books. While this was perhaps a novel idea at the time, according to Kelly, in 1993 a computer was able to take this idea even further to ‘create’ Art-space, the space of all art. The computer (the Connection Machine-5 at Thinking Machines, Cambridge Mass.) was able to ‘generate’ Art-space as a series of random images, in the space of all random images, as viewed through a computer screen or color monitor. By selecting an image from the series, a new series was generated. Through repeated selections you were able to navigate through a strange and wondrous terrain arriving upon works of art that might never be found again. And if 'Art-space' why not 'Music-space'? Imagine exploring 'Beetoven-space' and listening to Beethoven's next Nine Symphonies or 'Zappa-space' and discovering the Mothers of Re-Invention!
Such may be the stuff of tomorrow but here/now (delete whichever is inapplicable) the salient point is the archetypal nature of these ‘Hyperspaces’. Clearly they do not occupy Timespace in the traditional sense but instead seem to represent a realm of all Timespaces , a Timespace-space . What we are finding is that, far from being a mere fantasy, a product of mind, these spaces appear to represent a hidden reality accessible through mind.
Consider the ‘Shadow photons ’ which seem to interfere with a ‘single photon’ in the classic Double-Slit Experiment of Quantum Mechanics . According to David Deutsch in his book, The Fabric Of Reality, this interference provides conclusive evidence of the existence of Parallel Universes and it is the various paths of photons from Parallel Universes which account for the interference patterns in the now famous experiment. Furthermore, Engineers are well underway in developing Quantum Computers . According to Deutsch, these machines will be able to break today’s state of the art Public Key Encryption codes in minutes simply by collaborating with their counterparts in Parallel universes ! That is, while the space of all universes which do not contain Quantum Computers is vastly larger, the universes which do are by no means negligible and are easily capable of collaborating on such paltry stuff as the Factorization of Primes or the Hacking of codes.
But while these things here may or may not happen, have or have not happened, they will always be there, in the Space of all happenings . The supreme secret is that there are no secrets. In Borges’ library there are books in which all the futures have already been written. Yet far from being a depressing facet of existentialism, the discovery of Borges’ library, like the discovery of the multiverse, can be a transcendent moment of joy; the supreme bliss of Nirvana. Rather than lament the public display of life’s dark shadows, obscured as they might be endless permutations and possibilities, might we not rejoice in their source and inspiration instead? Might we not even discover Freshness?
This then is the origin of the Fresh Digest: in exploring this space and recording these ideas, we have amassed a sizable collection, the coordinates of hidden corridors and forgotten passageways in the vast library of Dugspace. To preserve their flavor and idiosyncrasy we present them here, forever now, in the Fresh Digest. Remember the words of Hassan i Sabbah when he said, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” For while he had a point, even if his existence was entirely fictional, it may also be true that everything is true and nothing is permitted.
One final note, we tried to select a preface that did not invoke ‘is’ but it was like removing the spine of what it ‘is’ we were trying to say. Like all species of Fascism, while ‘is’ would be the first to go, surely the nouns would be next, followed by our run-on sentences dragged screaming into the night.
©Copyright 03/04/01998. Fresh Ink. All rights reserved