User talk:J Hill/Wikipediology

Darwikinism as it may relate to Living Systems Theory, Mathematical Logic, Formal Languages
As an amateur student of Miller's living systems theory, ISBN 0070420157, I find it very important that you have begun to create a theory describing the systemic characteristics of the Wikipedia. I recognize your work as original and will not edit it directly or otherwise call attention to its originality for any Wikipedia violation, as I personally don't see the ethical point of stifling something so integral to developing any rational theory of the Wikipedia.


 * I am not certain that the Wikipedia is a closed system unless all viewers, editor/users, and administrators are implicit subsystems of that closed system, and in that case, we are all reduced to atoms under the stated theory as currently written. I do not know if that result was intended.


 * I concur that it is a complex system, but at this point it is overreaching to say it cannot be described by a consistent and complete theory unless you can produce a proof of inconsistancy or incompleteness of every possible theory that anyone else might show up with. Mendelson's first-order theory S for natural numbers, which has the same theorems as Peano Arithmatic, can be proved to be consistent, but it falls to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, so that it is consistent but not complete. Since all digital computer storage - both data and programs written in any computer language - are reducible to strings of the binary digits one and zero, the computer side of the Wikipedia and all of its editing are a subset of S and are therefore consistent but incomplete, ISBN 0534066240, but this applies only if there can be no reduction of a Wikipedia-describing theory from S to a simpler general first-order theory which just happens to be both consistent and complete, and as written, Darwikinism is expressible as a first-order theory with equality but without number-theoretical properties, well within the scope of consistent and complete general first-order theories. It may be possible for you to provide a proof of inconsistency or incompleteness from another direction, such as that the atoms described in the stated theory cannot be reduced to a formal phrase-structure language that is acceptable to Turing machines, ISBN 0805301437, but that implies that either the Wikipedia is more than just a closed system of digital computer storage, or the previous S theory consistency with incompleteness applies with the need to prove irreducibility to a general first-order theory. Proving concurrent inconsistency and incompleteness in a thesis ought to settle this definitively while earning you a PhD in mathematical logic with honors and a Fields Medal, because the real brain damage comes from Newton's assertion that everything is reducible to a sum of terms, which in this case would be the summation of all human and computer elements as they use and are used over time as inputs, editing/storing/deleting processes, or outputs of the Wikipedia, so that again we have consistency but incompleteness with the necessity of proving irreducibility to general first-order consistency and completeness.


 * Another flaw with attempting an atom proof of human-language irreducibility to a Turing-acceptable phrase-structure language is that if successful, it also demonstrates the inability to define the stored Wikipedia in any state over any given time period as something that can be parsed by any existing or conceivable digital computing system under the Church-Turing Thesis, regardless of how much storage or how many processors you give it. Amazingly, this actually gives us a proof that the Wikipedia must fail.

My head hurts from writing just that much. I may have more comments later, or I may just curl up and die. At this point, I have concerns that without modifications by you, Darwikinism is sure to get mangled until no good (old school programmers' def. of MUNG without recursion) by the numerous logicians and mathematicians who will be looking to do wholesale editing on your subpage. Hotfeba 08:13, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Another tac for this line of thought.
Living Systems Theory is a start. But consider:
 * Wikipedia as an Knowledge Ecosystem of Memes.
 * Wikipedia is not a closed system:
 * its authors live in a larger universe
 * there are external links that hook to the larger WWW
 * the inherent content describes the larger universe, like a map