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 “no- jootsing 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.

The article introduces a partial order structure to study the relations between levels and contents of conscious experience within a formal and mathematical model. Inspired by Husserl's phenomenology, our account models structural aspects of experiences as layers that can be experienced in potentiality or in actuality, composing further experiences and imposing an order among them. From our simple set of formal assumptions we conclude that a comparison among phenomenal experiences is only partial. Some experiences are comparable (e.g. experiences that carry different aspects in actuality and potentiality), but others are not (e.g. experiences that carry the same number, but different aspects, in actuality).
These formal results imply the evolution of consciousness as diverse modes of experiencing, instead of an absolute scale along species. Moreover, our methodology also elucidates structural constraints from conceptual assumptions to mathematical structure, and mathematical structure to interpretations about phenomenal experiences. This makes the mathematical formalization transparent, opening new avenues to explore the consequences of formal models based on our partial order layer structure.

Ramana Maharshi’s practice of self-inquiry is a contemplative method aimed at investigating the nature of the “I” in order to loosen egoic identification and realize the self as non-dual awareness. His teachings emphasize that the true self is ever-present, self-aware, and not constituted by mental constructs. In this article, we propose a cognitive model in which self-inquiry can be understood as a form of self-aware open monitoring of mind wandering, oriented toward tracing the “I”-thought to its source, which Maharshi describes as non-dual awareness or the true self. This account is supported by findings from cognitive neuroscience and contemplative science. During self-inquiry, practitioners adopt a non-reactive stance toward spontaneous mental contents, while repeatedly redirecting attention toward the subject of experience – the sense of being the experiencer – without stabilizing attention on a fixed object. This provisional distinction between the observing subject and the contents of mind wandering functions instrumentally, enabling progressive disengagement from self-narrative and ownership attribution. As inquiry deepens, this distinction itself becomes transparent, giving way to the recognition of the self as non-dual awareness – prereflectively self-aware, intransitive, and not organized by subjectobject structure. This cognitive framing is not intended to replace Maharshi’s own phenomenological description of self-inquiry, but to complement it by articulating how the practice may engage known attentional, meta-aware, and self-referential processes.

The conceivability argument against physicalism holds that we can conceive of a physical entity, such as the neural correlate of pain, in the absence of pain. If this were indeed possible, it would entail the falsity of physicalism, given the necessity of identity. The physicalist’s challenge is explaining why such conceivability is not a guide to possibility or a modal illusion. Previous accounts of this illusoriness have focused on phenomenal terms like “pain”. By contrast, we argue that the illusion stems from the referential opacity of natural kind terms, that is our ignorance of what they refer to. If a term like “neural correlate of pain” is a natural kind term, its reference is fixed to the essence of the actual samples denoted by that term, even if that essence were unknown to us. Thus, it is possible that the reference of “neural correlate of pain” is fixed to pain. When we conceive of pain not being identical to its neural correlate, we conceive of something that appears to be the neural correlate of pain but is not truly the same natural kind as the term denotes in the actual world, that is pain. We show that this argument can be developed within Kripke’s and Chalmers’ own semantic frameworks: given that the reference of a natural kind term is a posteriori, it is impossible to tell a priori what is metaphysically possible for the referent. This argument can be made on purely semantic or epistemological grounds, without invoking any metaphysical distinctions, as in Russellian monism. We conclude that a priori arguments cannot undermine physicalism since what is possible for natural kinds is an a posteriori question.