All Roads Lead to Philosophy
Recently I stumbled on a cute xkcd comic with the hidden message:
Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.
Naturally, I started to experiment. The first thing I tried was mathematics. Here is the path: Mathematics — Quantity — Property — Modern philosophy — Philosophy.
Then I tried physics, which led me to mathematics: Physics — Natural science — Science — Knowledge — Fact — Information — Sequence — Mathematics.
Then I tried Pierre de Fermat, who for some strange reason led to physics first: Pierre de Fermat — French — France — Unitary state — Sovereign state — State — Social sciences — List of academic disciplines — Academia — Community — Living — Life — Objects — Physics.
The natural question is: what about philosophy? Yes, philosophy goes in a cycle: Philosophy — Reason — Rationality — philosophy.
The original comic talks about spark plugs. So I tried that and arrived at physics: Spark plug — Cylinder head — Internal combustion engine — Engine — Machine — Machine (mechanical) — Mechanical system — Power — Physics.
Then I tried to get far away from philosophy and attempted sex, unsuccessfully: Sex — Biology — Natural science. Then I tried dance: Dance — Art — Sense — Physiology — Science.
It is interesting to see how many steps it takes to get to philosophy. Here is the table for the words I tried:
| Word | # Steps |
|---|---|
| Mathematics | 4 |
| Physics | 11 |
| Pierre de Fermat | 24 |
| Spark plug | 19 |
| Sex | 12 |
| Dance | 13 |
Mathematics wins. It thoroughly beats all the other words I tried. For now. Fans of sex might be disappointed by these results, and tomorrow they might change the wiki essay about sex to start as:
Share:Modern philosophy considers sex …
Norm M:
“Fact” leads to “truth” which leads back to “fact”, and so it doesn’t get to “philosophy”. But it’s hard to find examples that don’t!
2 August 2011, 8:27 pmTanya Khovanova:
Norm,
Someone already edited it. Ha.
2 August 2011, 8:42 pmSam Alexander:
Actually, I posted about this before xkcd did (May 22 https://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/ ), except I used mathematics itself as the universal sink. I’m not sure whether or not mathematics still is a universal sink; once this info was out, of course, people started editing Wikipedia to tamper with it.
3 August 2011, 9:42 pmObsessiveMathsFreak:
Actually, I always found World War 2 to be the inevitable destination of all Wiki-trips. Admittedly, I wasn’t clicking on the first link over every page.
Anyway, I did check this and at the time I found a non-philosophy cycle.
Human-Taxonomy-Ancient Greek-Archaic Greece-Ancient Greece-Civilization-Culture-Alfred L. Krober-United States-Federalism-Politics-Greek Language-Indo European language-Language Family-Language-Human
The first link rule would divide the set of all pages into disjoint orbits. The examples above show that this set has more than one orbit, but I suppose the real question is whether Philosopy is a member of both the largest orbit.
19 August 2011, 9:49 pmNorm M:
Someone did a full analysis of all first links in Wikipedia for 7/22/2011 for this question: “https://matpalm.com/blog/2011/08/13/wikipedia-philosophy/”. He found that, in this data set, 3.6 Million first links lead to Philosophy, 50 thousand lead to a cycle that doesn’t include Philosophy, and 50 thousand end with a broken link.
There’s been a tremendous amount of editing of Wikipedia related to this, as I discovered when I tried to post a counter example!
22 August 2011, 12:40 pmDavid Wilson:
It’s scary, but
politics
24 August 2011, 9:19 pm-> group decision making
-> group decision making
-> individual
-> person
-> human
-> extant taxon
-> biology
-> natural science
-> list of academic disciplines
-> knowledge
-> fact
-> truth
wonderer:
fact now leads to argued and then to philosophy 🙂
5 September 2011, 5:21 pmLogic:
Does Logic count? It would take one step.
28 December 2011, 5:39 pmLogic:
Science gives a continuous loop.
28 December 2011, 5:44 pm