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 All Roads Lead to “Philosophy”

There was an idea floating around that continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” 1 This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere.

It also sounded like an idea that would be easily examinable with basic client-side scripting tools, using the Wikipedia API and a good graphing package. …

via { xefer }

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Interesting experiment. Click through to test it!

But I wonder, isn’t this a fallacy? I don’t know the formal name — backwards reasoning? Why Philosophy? Would the same work for, say, “information” or “science” or “universe”?

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ANSWERS:

{ What I Remembered }:

Science is pretty narrow in terms of what it is designed to know (as I seem to be forever pointing out), the Universe, although it is everything, is still understood by most as an object of study, which leaves open the question (and the next click) to means of study and how we know things. Information is just what Wikipedia is, so everything they present falls into this set, but having the wikipedia page on information be the page that all others lead to would be like having the wikipedia page on wikipedia be the page that all others ultimately point to.

OS, RE WIR:

Thank you for your answer; a good point! I tend to think of things in an interconnected way (thus why I also named science; despite the practice of Science being specific), but as you said, the context of this project has to do with study; “how we know things”, and “the next click”.

In my question (and usually when I use the word) I meant “universe” as everything. The object containing study, not purely the object of it (this is a visual description).

The part about the recursive Wikipedia link — I see what you’re getting at. Yes, in the context of this code, it’s probably true. But in a more general sense, I disagree. The way I’m using it here is, like “universe”, in the sense that all “things” are information. (There’s some outlining of that { here }, though mostly in a more specific sense, about Algorithmic Information Content.) Philosophy is, itself, information, just as it is itself contained within the Universe, inescapably so.

{ The Revolution is Coming… }

i think the point here is that everything starts as philosophy, as philosophy is basically just life theory. some of it is reasonable, some of it isn’t. the point is that all ideas start as a thought, which is your personal philosophy, and transform over time into something else altogether, be that science, or math, art, politics, religion, etc. of course if you trace anything back over time your going to find the inception of the idea, being personal philosophy. its a logical beginning to all things. imo.

OS, RE RIC:

Also a good answer! But the last part “its a logical beginning to all things” is something to question. I’m not sure that it’s obvious, as I attempted to explain with the reasoning for an even more “general” or “core” word like Universe or Information.

And this: “the point is that all ideas start as a thought” — I’d argue that they do not. That is of course a philosophical argument in itself, but I’m not interested in debating Chairs here. Just a suggestion to reach past that; consider that ideas start as a thought, which in turn begins as something from outside ourselves. (I don’t mean Plato’s world of ideas or anything, just that our ideas stem from the experience of Information over millenia. “Experience of Info.” meaning our experience as being info., ancestral genetic experience of it, and info. as physical constituents of the universe.)

{ Jack Crofts }

I agree with your stance on fallacy. In fact, in high school during lulls in classroom activity, we would play a game called the 6 degrees of Wikipedia. The challenge was to get from one random article to another though linked articles, and it was always possible. With any number of degrees of separation I would say you could link any article to anything.

OS RE JC:

This is what I was getting at! But you stated it much more clearly. Thanks for this. Basically, if we allow the number of links between any two words to be infinite, as you said, it’s probably possible to link anything to anything.

I think this is also a kind of “cherry-picking”, like that { BS snowflake experiment }. If you want to get to a conclusion, eventually you will. Thus the importance in experimental science to not try to arrive at a result.

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It’s great to see some discussion about this!

This helps me define the question better: Again, thinking on broader terms than only the project in question and the limits of code (but also encompassing this project/inquiry), what do we consider the meeting point of all roads? (Loaded, I know. Don’t have to answer.)

Because this is something I tend to think about a lot, I find it funny that Philosophy is the “Rome” here. Not funny as in unusual, but because it seems clear that it should be so. But it’s also completely human-centric — I want to bring attention to that. Philosophy is the product of Our thoughts, whereas We can be thought of as the product of the Universe / of Information.

I’ll continue to re-post answers here, if that’s fine. Message me if you want yours omitted.

What is is always a totality of ensembles, all present together, in an orderly series of stages of enfoldment and unfoldment, which intermingle and interpenetrate each other in principle throughout the whole of space.

…”the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Having a “point” is a very human category.

When we hear about a scientific breakthrough, the first question is always of practicality: “What are the practical applications?” Usually meaning something like: “What technologies will this allow us to create?” or “What will this cure?”

But, why isn’t the question about perception? Shouldn’t that be a priority — isn’t that how scientific inquiry began?

Why isn’t the question: “How will this allow me to improve my understanding of my world? How will this change my point of view? What does this tell me about nature, therefore, about the way I proceed through a life within the same, inescapable nature?”

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.

{ Networks: An Introduction } by Mark Newman
& { Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide } by Karl F. Kuhn

I’m really excited about both of these books and want to share them with those of you who have interests in science (physics), networks, and systems theory.

Of course, I’d read good reviews about both of these prior, but actually beginning to read them solidified any preconceived notions: I downloaded them both in one evening, meant to check them out quickly before tuning out for the night… and ended up staying up until 4 am. It’s rare to find a non-fiction so engaging, especially as both of these are quasi-textbooks.

I’ve put Basic Physics on hold momentarily, but got 10% through Networks — ~ 72 pages. (Tilde because both of these are available on Kindle! Amazing, for someone who often reads on the go and likes to take notes while reading (without carrying a whole bunch of crap around), and to have instant dictionary access (& Wikipedia where there’s wifi) for learning about new terms.)

As the author states, Networks increases in difficulty with each chapter. Not sure I’ll be able to have a grasp on some of the matter in the later chapters just yet, but so far (through Chapter 5) it’s easy to understand and I’ve learned quite a bit.

Basic Physics is basic, but offers hope for anyone seeking to gain a deeper understanding of nature, “from the ground up”. Just like Networks, it’s easy to follow — no BS. A good companion for an interactive online class like Udacity’s { PH100 }. …And well worth $9.99.

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Photograph of blood & milk by { Frederic Fontenoy }, via { but does it float }

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The liquids form tendrils, veins, cells, branches, { networks },
following { repeating orders } — how did this become?

Evolution of Regularites?

mythologyofblue:

Wright’s Celestial Map of the Universe, 1742

Thomas Wright was an 18th-Century English astronomer who was credited with being the first to describe the shape of our own Milky Way galaxy.

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OS:

{ high-res }, whole version.

(via scientificillustration)

Northwestern University researchers are the first to discover that very different complex networks — ranging from global air traffic to neural networks — share very similar backbones. By stripping each network down to its essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton and these skeletons share common features, much like vertebrates do. The findings could be particularly useful in understanding how something — a disease, a rumor or information — spreads across a network.

Complex systems — such as the Internet, Facebook, the power grid, human consciousness, even a termite colony — generate complex behavior. A system’s structure emerges locally; it is not designed or planned. Components of a network work together, interacting and influencing each other, driving the network’s evolution.

The networks they studied differed in size (from hundreds of nodes to thousands) and in connectivity (some were sparsely connected, others dense) but a simple and similar core skeleton was found in each one.

…living systems on this planet … may differ widely from many of the diverse complex adaptive systems that surely exist on planets revolving around distant stars in various parts of the universe. On some of those planets, perhaps the only complex adaptive systems are ones that we would not necessarily describe as alive if we encountered them. … Even the rule that genes must be made up of the four nucleotides abbreviated A, C, G, and T, which seems to be true of all life on our planet today, may not be universal on a cosmic scale of space and time.

Scientists … are trying hard to understand the ways in which structures arise without the imposition of special requirements from the outside. In an astonishing variety of contexts, apparently complex structures or behaviors emerge from systems characterized by very simple rules. These systems are said to be self-organized and their properties are said to be emergent. The grandest example is the universe itself, the full complexity of which emerges from simple rules plus the operation of chance.

The death of organisms is one of the more dramatic manifestations of the second law of thermodynamics.

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. “Common as the air” meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving—no, demanding—of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.