I was thinking recently about how images work at the data level, and it kind of broke my brain.

Take a simple case: a 3×3 pixel image with only black and white pixels. There are only 9 pixels, and each has 2 options (black or white), so the total number of possible unique images is:

2^9 = 512

That’s tiny, you could generate and look at every one of those images in a few seconds. But already, you’re looking at the complete universe of 3×3 B/W images. Every possible shape, face, glitch, symbol, if it can exist in that resolution and color range, it’s already in there.

Now scale up.

A 1920×1080 image (full HD), with each pixel using 24-bit RGB (i.e., 16.7 million colors), has:

(2^24)^(1920×1080) = 2^49,766,400 ≈ 10^14,983,365

That number is incomprehensibly massive. It’s orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe (≈10⁸⁰). And yet, it’s finite.

Which means:

- Every possible frame of every possible movie is mathematically there.

- Every photo you never took exists in this space.

- Every piece of digital art, every childhood memory, every face, every impossible scene, all of it is representable by just one of those possible combinations.

Of course, almost all of those images are noise. Pure entropy. But buried in that space is literally everything.

Makes you wonder, are we creating images? Or are we just exploring a tiny, meaningful subset of a space that already contains them all?

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

The Sloot Digital Coding System is an alleged data sharing technique that its inventor claimed could store a complete digital movie file in 8 kilobytes of data — which, if true, would dramatically disprove Shannon's source coding theorem, a widely accepted principle of information theory that predicts how much data compression of a digital file is mathematically possible. The alleged technique was developed in 1995 by Romke Jan Bernhard Sloot (27 August 1945, Groningen – 11 July 1999,[1] Nieuwegein), an electronics engineer from the Netherlands.[2] Several demonstrations of his coding system convinced high-profile investors to join his company, but a few days before the conclusion of a contract to sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The source code was never recovered, the technique and claim have never been reproduced or verified, and the playback device he used for demonstrations was found to have contained a hard disk drive, contrary to what he told investors.

You mean the Library of Babel's universal slideshow? https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info

You can go through picture by picture or search for a picture you already have.

I think there's a problem with tense in the title, obviously all the pictures I have seen so far in my life existed (or I wouldn't have seen them...) The question posed is more about whether all the pictures I will see in the future are already in some sense present, which might be true, but I still haven't seen them yet...

We live in a many dimensional phase space. Our life is a trajectory line in it, moving along the line is percepted as time.

God sees all the space at once (this is an “all knowing” part).

But we are left with the choice of which turn to take at every moment (this is the “free will” part), which picture to draw, which movie to create (this is the “in god’s image” part) etc.

From human perspective there is no difference if you create or explore the phase space. Just a wordplay. Because by definition you can’t distinguish those.

Similar to the plot of the library of babel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel)

One of these images is the screenshot of this conversation, including your reply to this comment that you haven't posted yet.

The core assumption here that the color depth is fixed or that the frame size cannot grow is flawed. We can always increase both, creating infinite possibilities.

Also you'd have to generate these images for them to exist and not merely be probability.

Here is one - there are finitely many mathematical symbols (or at least, all mathematical symbols can be defined in terms of a finite core of symbols).

That means the set of all mathematical definitions is countable (i.e. you could assign a whole number to each one, putting them into an infinitely long ordered list).

However, the set of real numbers is uncountable (by Cantor's argument).

Therefore the vast majority of numbers ("almost all" numbers, in a mathematical sense) cannot be defined, even in principle.

that really makes sense while it is very hard to imagine about. i have thought about this several times before too, but rather than that its for files, not just images, with the similar idea: how many distinct files can be created from a fixed file size, say, 4KB?

in fact, you "create" something when its not existed yet, or its never been perceived to exist by anyone. despite in theory everything are already in track of an algorithm, we cant really sure that its already there, or its creating enough effect to be known to exist, i.e. hardly anyone will think about it.

well, after all, whether it is "created" or "discovered" depends on the context and people's general perception about it.

This seems like an isomorphism of "is math invented or discovered"?

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1/is-mathemat...

Here is a number that has all those pictures encoded: π

You should look at the jpeg/mpeg compression algorithm, definitely contains bits of this idea but uses the actual images as a starting point

See also: What Colour are your bits? - https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23