“Jootsing” and the Nature of Consciousness

Human consciousness may have a hard limit on its ability to 'jump out of the system'—a capacity called jootsing that Douglas Hofstadter thought might be unique to minds and not replicable by AI. This paper argues that any theory aspiring to describe the totality of reality, including observers and their interactions, faces a Gödelian limitation that produces two conflicting stances: an eternal inflation of knowledge or closed loops. Drawing on a version of dual-aspect monism that decomposes a totality, the paper shows that these stances can be reconciled, and that this reconciliation reveals something special about consciousness.

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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.