There is an old trope about language, computation, possibility (and impossibility) where one (and it is crucial to understand that this entire charade is fundamentally »hypothetical) assembles some arbitrarily vast number of primates and adds a commensurate quantity of typewriters to this arrangement, and by some artifice convinces the primates to type endlessly upon them ( this, for any organism, would be a literal definition of Hell ).

Yet this is not yet enough abject nonsense.

To this mix we add something resembling ‘infinite time’.

And then we await, so wrong-mindedly that we nearly define the term ‘unjustifiable’ by the mere formulation of such a desire, the emission, by said primates, of … the text of Hamlet.

Much is made of this thought-experiment. Just as will be made the digestive repercussions of my afternoon meal, later, upon a complex white ceramic object.

Problematically, however, there are two fundamental issues that raise their serpentine heads over the shadow of this dire cartoon.

The first is that Hamlet embodies qualities this other text can never acquire. And there are many. One is that Hamlet exists as the produce of humans in general, and a specific human in particular, known as Shakespeare. Hamlet actually exists, though the modes of its existence are complex, having ‘many dimensions’, where each dimension is ‘a quality or feature’. Even a specific instance of the text in some actual book, inherits many of these. They are the result of billions of human interactions, actions, intentions, and, the specific desires of the author in composing the play. The second problem is worse, however.

The thought-experiment is not a text. It is not a book. It does not ‘exist’ at all, except as a deranged cartoon in the mind of a madperson, granted that this mess is composed as a heuristic convenience—a kind of ‘toy universe’ where we can ask questions about… precisely these matters. Equivalence. Computation. Randomness in Time. And so on.

Yet if we agree to play with and, and further suppose that such an insipid arrangement could ‘generate’, accidentally, as it were, the precise text of Hamlet (abstracted, we suppose from all the other disposable mountains of text on paper produced by these tortured animals)… would they, themselves do the excerption, order the pages correctly, and bind them into a book?

For what purpose?

The lineage-history that produces a physical object matters. The text ‘Hamlet’s … is many of orders of magnitude more complex, dynamic, ‘alive’ and vital in terms of its embodiment of its origins, and the motivations of the author in composing it.

What is the lineage-history of the text produced by the primates? Nothing? Accidents? Randomness? ( not to mention torment ).

This is a case where both objects could be ‘the same’ in certain obvious ways, i.e. the structure of the text itself on paper, but so different in other ways as to primarily belong to two entirely different »categories. One, is a mechanically-produced representation that ‘happens to’ match the structure of the other, visually, linguistically, in writing.

The other is the dream of a human being who was driven to prodigy in their adoration of the spirits of language, irony, beauty, and humanity. And everything that led to the composition, and its reception.

Nothing can ‘arbitrarily’ produce »Hamlet.

The primate-text has precisely one dimension of similarity to all that is encompassed and generated by the existence of the play, and its authors, and the histories that gave birth to it. One could reasonably say that 99% of the »actual likeness is missing.

And that whole primates and typewriters thing is not merely hypothetical, it’s formally impossible, and ridiculous as a sawhorse for the arguments that utilize it as their stalking horse.