Never mind that, andy. I never wanted her radness. It was her means of production that I wanted to seize with the dicktatorship of my proletariat.
Ohhhhhhhh
(but I had to take it. If that wasn’t a set-up like in volleyball, I dont know what is)
i don’t think it is a matter of awareness at all
do you think that a person taking in “the feels” of a painting
would be unaware of their feelings?
you may be trying to say that those types cannot reason
or cannot put into words maybe
why they like a painting
that doesn’t indicate a lack of self-awareness of what is guiding that judgment
it’s simply that the affective element of experience has a greater pull
than other considerations, like context, composition, technique, etc
hang on i got urgent toys to deliver
I think Magnus may be right. Thus Nietzsche says somewhere that our feelings are the thoughts we inherited from our ancestors (in Dawn, probably). This would finally answer my question as to the symmetry between the T/F and S/N dichotomies: for iNtuition is basically unconscious Sensing (you’re only aware of the result, the Perception, just as in Feeling you’re only aware of the Judgment, not the reasoning (Thinking) behind it).
i think that’s plausible
though my issue again is with calling it unconscious
andy used the term not self-aware
that’s not quite it
they’re obvious conscious and aware
but the thing that is guiding their way of taking in experience
and the thing that is guiding their judgment and decision making
is not as readily translatable into common language
though one might be able to, if they put some effort into it
so sit with their feelings for a while
and trace them back until they find out the reasons why they feel that way
and then devise a rational explanation for a Feeling driven action/reaction
basically composing the anatomical model of a gut reaction so to speak
but in order to do that they’d probably have to have both intuition and feeling functions introverted (Fi and Ni) so they can bring both of those inward at the same time
but yeah, anyway
pardon if in am wrong, but introspection IS thinking, isn’t it
a thinking inward
so T isn’t a combination of F and introspection (which is T)
they’re independent processes
but T can explain F with a little help from intuition, as I proposed above
heck T and N together can explain anything
but i like this idea of feeling being a primitive mode of thinking
and sensing being a primitive mode of intuiting
because it is true that we have primitive monkey corresponding functions
to each of our fancy monkey functions
and by primitive here i mean sophisticated as fuck
because these things have been with us for millennia
our fancy monkey brain stuff is just some cool novelty
that nature has been trying out as of late
that shows a lot of promise but it’s still in beta
so maybe i get what you two mean by unconscious or unaware
you mean instinctual?
you missed out on using “means of reproduction” prom
tsk tsk tsk you’ve been better
I am told that thinking is a conscious process. (That’s what I assumed in the previous post. Am I wrong?)
And I believe that when they say that a process is conscious, that they do not merely mean that the owner of that process is aware that the process is running in the background. They actually mean that the owner of that process knows how that process is running i.e. what that process is actually doing.
(An example would be walking. When you walk, you often know that you’re walking. But how often do you know how you’re walking?)
When we introspect, we most commonly know that we are instrospecting but we rarely, if ever, know how we’re introspecting.
So can we say that introspection is a conscious process?
It is certainly NOT defined as such.
(The other potential problem with your claim is that T is a judging function while introspection is defined as “the examination of one’s mind” which would make it a perceiving function. But I choose to put this aside because the distinction between perception and judgment is blurry. Must be clarified first.)
Consider trying to discover the mechanism by which we judge paintings as either beautiful or ugly. The first thing that happens is introspection. We use introspection to become aware of the function that we use to map any given painting to a value judgment. In most cases, we are unaware of the internal workings of this process. The second thing that typically happens is speech. We use our vocal chords to express our findings vocally. However, if we restrain that process – say because we don’t think there’s a real need to speak (even though we feel the need to speak) – but without restraining it completely, the result is something known as internal speech (also known as “internal dialogue”, “imaginary speech”, “talking inside your head” and so on.) Instead of speaking out loud, we decide to do something else e.g. write things down or simply act based on our newly formed insight. But even though we are not talking out loud, we are nonetheless talking inside our own heads because the impulse to speak isn’t completely eliminated (it’s merely limited.)
Well I’m sure the sheer complexity of human behavior prevents us from establishing rigid descriptions and categories that avoid ambiguity. It is much to the fault of our language that our adjective descriptions of behaviors superinpose depth and dimension to personality that simply isnt there. If we are just a bundle of firing nerves, our ontometapsychologistic experiences are reductive to quantifiable transsubatomic events. And events dont behave. Ergo, humans dont behave. Ergo, behavioral descriptors are nonsensical.
They might be aware of their feelings – and people often are, I don’t doubt it – but what they generally aren’t aware of is the causal relation between what’s on the painting and how they feel.
For example, would you be able to verbally describe the function that you use to map any given picture to how you feel about it?
I highly doubt it.
But if you were able to not only verbally describe that function but to verbally describe the entire process as it actually happens, wouldn’t that look a lot like a mathematical calculation?
Note that “Do you like it?” is another way of asking “Do you find it valuable?”
And value is no more than what we think is useful, perhaps even necessary, in order to attain our goals. Nothing else.
So when someone asks “Do you like this painting?” and you answer with “Yes, I like it very much!” you are merely saying that you think that that painting could be of much use to you. (You might be wrong though and that means there are true and false values. But that’s another subject.)
We make such judgments constantly and easily but without understanding how. I don’t think that makes them any less mathematical.
You sort of, kind of, lost me at “ontometapsychologistic”. (But I kept pushing forward because I heard a motivational speaker – who popped up in an unsolicited Youtube Ad to tell me how lazy I am for watching Youtube videos – say that we have to push forward in order to be successful in life.)
I think you’re misusing words. You’re basically saying something like “If humans are made out of molecules, and if molecules can’t speak, neither can humans”. That’s nonsense.
it almost sounds like you’re confusing the two words introspection and intuition
i wouldn’t take you at fault for it, happens to me all the time with words that start the same
but here we are again talking about definitions of words…
…
i have a dictionary
but i’ll just google them and grab the first thing that comes up
introspection: “the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes”
aka you think something up or you feel something, and then you decide to examine that thought or feeling
it is very much a conscious effort
to choose to study a feeling instead of just feeling it and then letting it pass through
now
intuition: “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning”
intuition is often referred to as a sixth-sense, because it presents you a conclusion without the underlying conclusion generating process
actually instead of calling it a conclusion, it is much more fitting to call it an insight
so intuition it’s like having eyes that can see inward
sounds a lot more like a non-conscious process than introspection
which is why I think you confused the two
i too find it unclear but this is my reasoning
that sensing and intuiting are processes of bringing information in
one being outward sensing and the other being inward sensing (see above about insight)
therefore they are perceiving functions
and thinking and feeling are processes of taking what you’ve brought in back out
either by presenting an emotional response or an analysis’
in both cases they are expressions of having processed some data and reacted to it
therefore they are judging functions
I don’t think that the first thing that happens is introspection
the first thing that happens is the use of senses
you first look at it
the awe, or shock, or indifference is presented immediately
like your somatic response from a hot surface
before you can even think about it it’s already there
then almost immediately after that you begin to take notice of shapes and colors, light and form
that’s when thinking/introspection processes kick in
you combine those observations with that immediate first impression
and use it all to consolidate your opinion of the painting
whether it is an objective opinion (by presenting what is on the canvas, technique, materials, composition, context, etc)
or a subjective opinion (by presenting what is in you, how it made you feel, what it reminded you of, what temperatures and smells you feel it manages to express, etc)
it of course can only come out through language
what can’t be expressed by language is forever out of reach of anyone else but you
This is how I understand those terms:
Introspection is a conscious or unconscious process of becoming aware of a mental object or a mental process within your mind. (Mental objects are things such as feelings, internal speech, mental pictures, etc whereas mental processes are processes by which mental objects are generated.)
Intuition is an unconscious process and its orientation is not restricted to mental processes. (In other words, you can use intuition to become aware of things that are outside of your mind.)
Thus, in my mind, they are two different things.
Perhaps what you’re trying to say is that I am defining them improperly?
But the definition that you provide does not seem to go against my definitions. “The examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes” does not seem to be stating that introspection is necessarily a conscious process.
The first stage of instropecting the mechanism by which we judge paintings as either beautiful or ugly is gathering all relevant data. In our case, the relevant data would be a set of pairs where the first element is some painting and the second element is whether we like or dislike that painting. This information can be pulled from any kind of source – memories, senses, etc – so as long they are reliable. The introspector may or may not be conscious of this stage but I believe that in most real life cases the introspector is conscious of it.
That said, the input of the first stage are sources such as memories and senses and the output is relevant data – in our case, a set of painting-judgment pairs – to be analyzed by the second stage.
The second stage is generalizing from the gathered data – also known as “spotting connections” and “recognizing patterns”. In theory, the introspector can be conscious of this stage but I believe this stage is almost completely outside of introspector’s consciousness in every single real life case.
The input of the second stage is the output of the first (data to by analyzed) and the output of it is a mathematical function, or merely a relation, describing the introspected mental process (in our case, the output would be a function with which we map any given painting to how we feel about it.)
That’s as far as introspection is concerned.
The output of introspection can then be taken and expressed in the form of language (and then written down or spoken out) or it can merely manifest in human behavior (such as making a decision and/or doing something that suggests self-awareness.)
As far as I know, Jung never spoke of “perceiving” and “judging” functions. (These seem to be Myers-Briggs inventions.) Rather, he spoke of “irrational” and “rational” functions. S and N are irrational and T and F are rational. And what I think he meant by “irrational” is “inexplicable”. He wanted to say that sensations and intuitions (qua insights and not qua intuitive processes) cannot be explained. What that means is that sensations and intuitions are not generated by an internal, mental, process. Rather, they are given to us from without. (I guess sensations come from the material world and intuitions come from the spiritual world.)
The problem is that even sensations (in Jung’s sense of the word) such as seeing a tree are generated by a mental process that is very much like thinking (actually, it is thinking.) (That’s the reason we have optical illusions.)
I’d consider introspection conscious, intended activity. I don’t know what unconscious introspection would mean.
It could resemble a ‘zoning out’ of sorts… like day-dreaming, but without the visuals… a place where we unexpectedly fall into our thoughts/a train of thought, without even noticing that we have. Perhaps that’s how we were pre-consciousness… thinking, without the thinking.
if you’re zoning out, you’re not introspecting
it’s an analytical activity by definition
the word “inspect” is literally part of the word
there is no such thing as inspecting without an active, conscious thought process
True…
There is a mental state, of the meditative kind, that is said to be dangerous to enter, depending on one’s surroundings… I think I’ve described that, then.
I purport, that there are various levels of consciousness, just like there are various states of mind… I do not think that mind is just a matter of intra/extro.
yes i am saying that you are defining them improperly
and also that I think what you are defining as introspection sounds more like intuition
because the former is always conscious
and the latter not necessarily
that’s the way in which the definition i provided goes against yours
that “examination” is a conscious process always
he didn’t define them as such, but he used those words in his definition
irrational processes are perceiving processes
they are processes for taking in aka perceiving
also don’t think he meant inexplicable
but that they are not criterious because they will absorb whatever comes into contact with them
like a radio antenna or your eyes
perceiving a thing does not require reason
what you choose to direct your focus to require reason, and that’s the rational functions thinking and feeling
I am not really sure that introspection is by definition conscious. (The same goes for inspection and examination.) By definition, it may be conscious to a degree, but not fully conscious.
The important thing is that my original point remains either way. If the word “introspection” only refers to conscious processes, the only adjustment I have to make is to use a different term – one that describes the exact same thing that the word “introspection” does minus the conscious part. (And “intuition” won’t cut it because the subject of intuition can by literally anything – it does not have to be one’s mind. In other words, it’s too broad for my needs. I really only want to speak of becoming aware of one’s mental processes.)
It means that you’re not conscious of the mechanism of introspection EVEN THOUGH you might be conscious of 1) the fact that you initiated the process of introspection (and that it is running or that it ran in the background), and 2) the output of introspection.
Try to explain the process of becoming aware of how we judge paintings as either beautiful or ugly and note the degree to which the process is conscious.
Self-absorption… which is not self-reflection, self-awareness, or introspection, and is unrelated to extraversion, and is related to self-transcendence, which leads to altered states of consciousness.
That?
I saw the epitome of a self-absorbed man, in the local mini-mart, a few days back… he was very tall, and very blonde… a veritable giant-of-a-self-absorbed-man
that’s the beauty of the lexical/psychometrics method
it removes the ambiguity of language
reducing human behavior to its most elemental facets
by means of factor analysis
also, what andy said