“Jootsing” and the Nature of Consciousness

Abstract

Douglas Hofstadter coined the acronym “jootsing” to describe our endless ability to jump out of the system (of rules, axioms, concepts, styles, etc.). Hofstadter viewed this as something possibly unique to human consciousness, which AI has not yet duplicated. Our minds can transcend computational and Gödelian limitations and contemplate totalities. In this paper I argue that there is in fact a hard limit to jootsing (tongue-in-cheek, we may call this the “nojootsing theorem”), but it is a limit that holds potentially important secrets about the nature and role of consciousness. This appears to be a generic result of theories that aspire to totality (theories that include observers/agents in addition to what they observe/interact with). I show how we are faced with a pair of potential stances that have a distinctly Gödelian flavor and that both include some kind of limitation on theories of totality: eternal inflation of knowledge versus closed loops. Using ideas from a recent version of dual-aspect monism based on the decomposition of a totality, I consider whether the two apparently conflicting stances can be reconciled, arguing that they can indeed, and this reconciliation reveals what is special about consciousness.