The Emergence of Patterns

I’m currently reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ve only just covered a few chapters so far, and I’m sure there are plenty more undiscovered treasures in the pages ahead, but I’m already thrilled with what the author has shared. Read it yourself, but for now I’ll tell you that it deals with formal systems, self-reference, language and meta-language, strange loops, and amusing conversations between Achilles and a tortoise, a la Lewis Carroll. One of the themes is understanding whether any system can exist and be defined only within the system itself. In other words, whether a system can be created whose explicit definition does not rely on any information outside of the system being defined… I’m doing a terrible job at explaining this, so if you’re curious go pick up the book.

So I studied a bit of philosophy at university, and I’m very much still a novice, but one thing that I frequently considered was my recognition that although a study of philosophy yields poor career prospects, it confers some very real (albeit vague and intangible) benefits to the student. This is a point that has been made by many philosophers through history, and there are a number of well-known, succinct quotations which underscore this point. This is little consolation to practically-minded parents of college-bound teens who express an interest in a philosophy degree, however. Today I experienced something which tied together Hofstadter’s ideas in GEB and the notion that philosophy has very real value to humanity.

I am a fan of the webcomic xkcd. I have seen most of Mr. Munroe’s comics (some many times) by regularly following the comic for about 4 years, and frequently clicking the "random" button. xkcd # 903 came up today, and it features a piece of trivia: Starting from any Wikipedia article, if you click on the first link not in parenthesis or italics, you will eventually end up at the entry for Philosophy. I tried it starting from a random page, and it worked! It was fascinating watching the subjects of the links moving gradually from a very specific topic to increasingly broad subjects, and ultimately to philosophy. This gives me the impression that all of our knowledge as human beings can be carefully ordered and correlated, and the most intuitive or efficient way of doing so starts with a robust foundation in philosophy. It is the bedrock on which we build increasingly ambitious cathedrals of knowledge.

This idea relates to GEB in terms of the systems and meta-systems I mentioned. It seems to me that philosophy is the meta-language we use to understand the most basic concepts of human existence, such as the nature of knowledge, reality, ethics, etc. It’s interesting that Wikipedia has been designed (presumably coincidentally) in a parallel fashion to this idea of hierarchies of knowledge. I wonder what meta-language describes philosophy? Perhaps there is no ultimate meta-language, but the hierarchy tends toward infinity.

 

I'll mention this in the trivia section, along with the Wikipedia Game!