[TeMPOraL]

> If we can imagine a library with every book that can possibly be written in any language, would it contain all human knowledge lost in a sea of noise? Is there merit or value in creating a system that sifts through such a library to attune hidden truths, or are we dooming ourselves to finding meaning in nothingness?

The work that system would be required to find those "hidden truths" is equivalent to re-deriving those truths from scratch.

Similar argument: an image is just a number; if you take e.g. a 800x600 24bpp picture, that's a number 1 440 000 bytes long; you could hypothetically start from 0 and generate every 1 440 000-byte number, thus generating every possible 800x600 24bit image. In that set, you'd find every historical event, photographed at every moment from every angle, and even photos of every fragment of every book from the Library of Babel. But good luck finding anything particular in there.

Similar argument 2: any movie or song is contained somewhere within digital expansion of the number Pi. But again, it's worthless unless you know how to find such works, which basically requires you to have them in the first place.