Yet if a system is computationally irreducible this will inevitably not be possible. For at any point the system will always in effect be able to do more things that one did not expect. And this means that in general one will not be able to construct a finite set of axioms that can be guaranteed to lead to ultimate completeness and consistency.

And in fact it turns out that as soon as the question of whether a particular string can ever be reached is undecidable it immediately follows that there must be either incompleteness or inconsistency. For to say that such a question is undecidable is to say that it cannot in general be answered by any procedure that is guaranteed to finish.

But if one had a system that was complete and consistent then it is easy to come up with such a procedure: one just runs the system until either one reaches the string one is looking for or one reaches its negation. For the completeness of the system guarantees that one must always reach one or the other, while its consistency implies that reaching one allows one to conclude that one will never reach the other.

So the result of this is that if the evolution of a multiway system is computationally irreducible—so that questions about its ultimate behavior are undecidable—the system cannot be both complete and consistent. And if one assumes consistency then it follows that there must be strings where neither the string nor its negation can be

The effect of adding transformations to the rules for a multiway system. The first multiway system is incomplete, in the sense that for some strings, it generates neither the string nor its negation. The second multiway system yields more strings—but introduces inconsistency, since it can generate both and its negation . The third multiway system is however both complete and consistent: for every string it eventually generates either that string or its negation.