From my “watched a YouTube video” understanding of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a consistent mathematical system cannot prove its own consistency, and any seemingly consistent system could always have a fatal contradiction that invalidates the whole system, and the only way to know would be to find the contradiction.

So if at some point our current system of math gets proven inconsistent, what happens next? Can we tweak just the inconsistent part and have everything else still be valid or would we be forced to rebuild all of math from basic logic?

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    5 days ago

    To be clear, we do not have one single system. Branches of math are built on axioms, and different branches include different axioms. Some branches are simple enough that we can prove consistency. But what if you find an inconsistent one? Then you remove one of the axioms that helped demonstrate inconsistency, and then you move on.