The Catalog of All Things

When I was in 1st or 2nd grade my family got a World Book Encyclopedia from someone selling them door-to-door.

I would wake up early on weekends to read various entries at random the same way Niko wakes up to browse YouTube.

There was so much random and interesting info in there. And when I got bored I could just go back to the A book and revisit Animals and Airplanes for endless entertainment.

Now we have the Internet, and Google, and Wikipedia. So much more amazing information, so much easier to get.

Why then isn’t there an experience of the Internet that instills the same wonder and excitement of the World Book Encyclopedia? Information overload? Poor marketing?

Imagine a book, app, or website that claimed to be the official Catalog of All Things.

What could make it spark wonder?

I think part of it is the arbitrary organization by first letter. The variety of the world is easy to imagine when wildly different entries sit side by side.

The structure of information can impact the experience of it.

I have been wondering about how a Catalog of All Things could be organized.

What if it attempted to truly categorize all things, not by spelling but by relationship to one another?

If Hume’s Fork states that all knowledge is simply the relationships between ideas, then this should be possible.

What would the top categories be?

Maybe: Something and Nothing.

Something is everything that is a thing, and Nothing is the lack of Something.

Something and Nothing, together, make Everything.

Oops, but you can’t have Everything without having its counterpart: Everything Else.

Is the top category of All Things really the set of Everything plus the set of Everything Else?

What is Everything Else, but basically a catch all for all the things NOT in the Catalog of All Things?

It’s gotta be in there or else you’re very likely to not actually capture everything.

But if you include it in the catalog, it leaves open the possibility of not truly capturing everything else. By necessity you have to always leave at least one entry out of the catalog, the unspoken, unmentioned, item representing the things you didn’t put in the catalog.

But that’s just us getting started.

Turning back to Everything, there’s plenty to get excited about. What’s the right way to go about dividing Everything up?

We’ve got Nothing, which is a fun thing to talk about. It includes things like zero, null, nil, empty set, what consciousness was before birth and becomes after death, the thing that quarks swim in, that wavicles dance in, that vacuums are made of.

And then we get to the meat of the book: Something. Which includes Meat. And Books. Not to mention the Catalog of All Things itself, it has a fantastic entry all to itself.

Something includes Me, and You, and People in general. It has to be comprehensive enough to capture each of us in our entirely, at each moment, as well as each of our internal mental models of our selves and each other, at every moment.

There would probably need to be a manual for how to read this catalog as I’m sure it would be overwhelming at times. It would probably include some caveats about the right mental state you’d need to be in to get the most out of the book. Warnings about reading and driving. And reading under the influence. And how to seek support if you read something you’re not ready to handle.

I bet if this existed it would warrant waking up early on Saturdays to have a few hours of alone time buried in its pages.

Here’s my stop! It’s a warm evening out. Looking forward to the walk home. Happy Tuesday!

— written on BART