You can try it for yourself: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill
The default first entry, "Human", doesn't even reach "philosophy" before the maximum of 50 steps is reached. Kinda blows a hole in the theory...
Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
#52A lot of them do, but sometimes there are loops (Eg. Computer Science). If you make an exception, choosing the second link for example, then it will lead you to philosophy.
If you make exceptions indiscriminately it will lead you to anything.
Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
With that metric Philosophy is just one of a chain that ~99% of articles link to, looking at this graphs science or math is probably going to have a lower average chain length.
Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
#54Why 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.
And saying what you just said is using reason.
Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
#55You can try it for yourself: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill
The default first entry, "Human", doesn't even reach "philosophy" before the maximum of 50 steps is reached. Kinda blows a hole in the theory...
It does: Human -> Living -> Biology -> Natural Science -> Branch -> Knowledge -> Facts -> Truth -> Reality -> Philosophy
Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
#56When the question came up on XKCD a little while ago the answer is "no there are several loops that don't loop through philosophy". On a more conceptual level what does it mean to lead to philosophy? First links on Wikipedia do not form a tree with philosophy as the root, after all philosophy has a first link that is not itself. So we are looking at a graph and attempting to determine if all random walks of the graph passes through point P.
Re: Do all first links on Wikipedia lead to philosophy?
#57Community -> 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 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.
This can be tested.
I assume requiring the path from the first word was only to provide an easily replicable rule. Create a rule which chooses the fifth word (and where fewer than five links are provided, choose the last). Then compare the results to the OP's.