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?


I don’t see this happening except at the highest levels. I mean numbers are just abstractions for quantitiy and we can have visualizations easily for numbers and for addition and subtraction which are just abstrations of removing and adding to quantities. We use the visualizations a lot in early math classes. Even multiplication and division is easy to shown but is a bit more complicated. algebra is really just about moving around the unknown. all simple math could be written as equals X solve for X. You add in more unknown palce holders and it gets more complicated but I can’t see the consitancy being questions. geometry relies on postulates which is also what our abstraction of quantity was. Again those these are pretty easy to see visually and is really just sorta about defining certain properties. a point, a line, parrallel, circles, angles. I think maybe the first possible thing could be upended around here which is infinitiy. As it gets more advanced you get where someone needs to be more in math to say but calculus and trigonometry do a good job of predicting things and that seems to hold as you go higher and higher. I think that is the big thing with consistancy. If we can take the inputs when abstracting physical things and get an output that is consistant with what we see in the universe. Well then its consistent. Now the only thing here is we do have things that end up with unknowns that are sometimes then put in as constants and that becomes sort eh. So if our math is found to be inconsistant I think it would only be at some very high level and would not invalidate all of mathematics but even then I kinda doubt it. I think most problems will be with constants as placeholders or something like infinity not being represented in the real world.