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Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

matpalm.com

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Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#42

Post by dimmuborgir »

bluekeybox wrote: post #27

Why philosophy? If you keep clicking, you actually end up in a loop: Philosophy -> Reason -> Human nature -> Thought -> Consciousness -> Mind -> Panpsychism -> Philosophy -> ... I'd say, of the above, "mind", "thought", and "reason" are pretty basic -- you cannot have philosophy without a mind, for one (though you can probably have a mind without philosophy).

Saying "you cannot have philosophy without a mind" itself is one of the many philosophical concepts of mind-matter dualism.

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#44

Post by starwed »

mat_kelcey wrote: post #4
duien wrote: post #2

By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?

I was using the 2011-07-22 set so the data's already a bit stale...

When I first read the xkcd comic, I was amused that the article on philosophy didn't lead to itself. (It got trapped in a 2-cycle.)

Then I noticed that this was only because of an edit someone had made earlier in the day...

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#45

Post by epscylonb »

maeon3 wrote: post #19

Community -> Living -> Life -> Physical body -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy It's kind of like zooming in on what it means means to be alive in this universe. The fact that it ends at Philosophy is profound glimpse into what it means to be a thinking entity in the universe. I…

I would be interested to see the same thing done with Politics.

I suspect there may be a few abstract concepts that this applies to.

Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?

#47

Post by michael_dorfman »

Retric wrote: post #30
burgerbrain wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has more to do with how encyclopedia articles are formatted. The first sentence always describes the broader subject which the topic resides in. I view it more as zooming out from topics that matter, each time you do so you lose resolution and only see a fuzzier image.

I think it has more to do with where people end the chain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature is after philosophy. Community -> Living -> Life -> Physical body -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy -> Reason -> Human Nature -> Thought ->... The fact that http://en.wikipedia.…

PS: I suspect that most articles can be reached by every other article so you can take just about anything and say it's the "root" article for the rest of Wikipedia.

Most articles can be reached by every other article, but not if you are only following the first link. You can make a case that anything on the chain that leads from Philosophy back to Philosophy is the root, but anything outside of that is going to be tough to argue, in my opinion.

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