Jootsing (Jumping Out of the System)

Jootsing

Doug Hofstadter (1979, 1985) calls the tactic jootsing, which stands for “jumping out of the system.” This is an important tactic not just in science and philosophy, but also in the arts. Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules of the system from which it springs. It might be the system of classical harmony in music, the rules for meter and rhyme in sonnets (or limericks, even), or the “canons” of taste or good form in some genre of art. Or it might be the assumptions and principles of some theory or research program. Being creative is not just a matter of casting about for something novel—anybody can do that, since novelty can be found in any random juxtaposition of stuff—but of making the novelty jump out of some system, a system that has become somewhat established, for good reasons. When an artistic tradition reaches the point where literally “anything goes,” those who want to be creative have a problem: there are no fixed rules to rebel against, no complacent expectations to shatter, nothing to subvert, no background against which to create something that is both surprising and yet meaningful. It helps to know the tradition if you want to subvert it. That’s why so few dabblers or novices succeed in coming up with anything truly creative.

Sit down at a piano and try to come up with a good new melody and you soon discover how hard it is. All the keys are available, in any combination you choose, but until you can find something to lean on, some style or genre or pattern to lay down and exploit a bit, or allude to, before you twist it, you will come up with nothing but noise. And not just any violation of the rules will do the trick. I know there are at least two flourishing—well, surviving—jazz harpists, but setting out to make your name playing Beethoven on tuned bongo drums is probably not a good plan. Here is where art shares a feature with science: there are always scads of unexamined presuppositions of any theoretical set-to, but trying to negate them one at a time until you find a vulnerable one is not a good recipe for success in science or philosophy. (It would be like taking a Gershwin melody and altering it, one note at a time, looking for a worthy descendant. Good luck! Almost always, mutations are deleterious.) It’s harder than that, but sometimes you get lucky.

Advising somebody to make progress by jootsing is rather like advising an investor to buy low and sell high. Yes, of course, that’s the idea, but how do you manage to do it? Notice that the investment advice is not entirely vacuous or unusable, and the call for jootsing is even more helpful, because it clarifies what your target looks like if you ever catch a glimpse of it. (Everybody knows what more money looks like.) When you are confronting a scientific or philosophical problem, the system you need to jump out of is typically so entrenched that it is as invisible as the air you breathe. As a general rule, when a long-standing controversy seems to be getting nowhere, with both “sides” stubbornly insisting they are right, as often as not the trouble is that there is something they both agree on that is just not so. Both sides consider it so obvious, in fact, that it goes without saying. Finding these invisible problem-poisoners is not an easy task, because whatever seems obvious to these warring experts is apt to seem obvious, on reflection, to just about everybody. So the recommendation that you keep an eye out for a tacit shared false assumption is not all that likely to bear fruit, but at least you’re more likely to find one if you’re hoping to find one and have some idea of what one would look like.

Sometimes there are clues. Several of the great instances of jootsing have involved abandoning some well-regarded thing that turned out not to exist after all. Phlogiston was supposed to be an element in fire, and caloric was the invisible, self-repellent fluid or gas that was supposed to be the chief ingredient in heat, but these were dropped, and so was the ether as a medium in which light traveled the way sound travels through air and water. But other admirable jootsings are additions, not subtractions: germs and electrons and—maybe even—the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics! It’s never obvious from the outset whether we should joots or not. Ray Jackendoff and I have argued that we must drop the almost always tacit assumption that consciousness is the “highest” or “most central” of all mental phenomena, and I have argued that thinking of consciousness as a special medium (rather like the ether) into which contents get transduced or translated is a widespread and unexamined habit of thought that should be broken. Along with many others, I have also argued that if you think it is simply obvious that free will and determinism are incompatible, you’re making a big mistake.