In Wednesday's xkcd, in the alt text, he made an interesting observation: "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'." So I tried it with [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius"]Toyota Prius[/ame]: Toyota Prius -> Hybrid electric vehicle -> Hybrid vehicle -> Power -> Power (physics) -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy!
You may reach "science" or "knowledge" or "fact" sooner than philosophy (as your Prius trial did). Nothing remarkable there - all inquiries will have fundamental concepts as their base, and there aren't that many fundamental concepts. Did you continue past "philosophy" to see where that went? Eventually you'll wind up in a loop when a link downstream takes you to a page you've been to before, and by that point the constituent words will likely be in the family of fundamental concepts. Now that paragraph is all conjecture - I haven't tried a thing; just thinking out loud. But I'll wager it's true.
Philosophy is the root of all rational thought, so it only makes sense that a websearch would lead back to it eventually.
Let's see: Philosophy -> Existence -> Sense -> Perception -> Awareness -> Consciousness -> Mind -> Panpsychism -> Philosophy Yup, you were right, closed loop.
Thus even starting with Philosophy, you end up at philosophy! The interesting thing with that comic though... The number of postings of "I found one that breaks the rule!", followed almost immediately by someone editing a page on Wikipedia to make it follow the rule
OK...just as something else as random...with this observation. I thought I'd look up anatomy terms. I Googled Gastrocnemius muscle: when you follow these rules, you just end up with an endless loop between hitting "skeletal muscle" and "striated muscle" as your end entries. No "philosophy" there. But then that's a physical science...I then tried theoretical science like astronomy: black hole....sure enough, eventually..."modern philosophy", "philosophy". I never really understood why philosophy is still a subject in schools...but since it encompasses so many subjects, I can see why it would be a return in this situation. Even though I think it's interesting I didn't hit the term with an anatomy term: I'm sure there's quite a few philosophies about muscle groups and evolutions.
Good point. There should be a wise man on a mountain, sitting far above the rest. Maybe that's next week's comic.
From the Kevin Bacon article on Wikipedia it only takes 30 clicks to get to philosophy (yeah, I just tried...shutup).
It may not have been on the chart because it's merely applied sociology, not even on the scale. And lower still - mathematics: just a branch of applied philosophy. And there's your circle -
