Post by Hrafn on Aug 8, 2018 18:16:13 GMT -5
This topic is one I’ve been meaning to write about for some time, but it’s also one I find rather difficult to explicate in any definitive way. I’m not totally satisfied that I’ve painted an entirely clear picture, but this is at least a start. I suspect some of what I’m trying to describe here may not really be specific to Si, but might be more of a general characteristic of all four Perceiving functions. On the other hand, what I would call impressions have a lot to do with accumulated information & precedent, so in that sense they would seem to draw especially on Pi.
Discussions of Si on this forum have sometimes touched on this topic in an indirect or situational way. For example, in the Si profile, where it talks about Si skepticism, it says:
I would suggest that this “visceral and impressionistic” quality is much how Si seems to view any number of circumstances; not only when it’s under stress or avoiding new experiences. My goal with this post is to describe this quality in a broader way and look at some of the ways it might manifest in different situations.
[…] often their skepticism is more visceral and impressionistic than technical, sometimes being expressed in statements like "I just don’t trust it." When something doesn’t appear to add up, the Si user will feel there is a misalignment between the situation at hand and how they have come to understand the world to work.
By the way, after I wrote most of this, it occurred to me that what I’m describe as “impressions” here seems like it has a fair bit of overlap with the term “qualia” as commonly used in CT.
What exactly are impressions?
Here’s how I might define “impression:”
A low-fidelity mental-somatic encapsulation of
--the general qualities of all the agglomerated information about a given topic or situation, and/or
--the qualities of my relationship, as a subject, to a given topic or situation.
Impressions seem to be a quick-and-dirty way of synthesizing what I understand about a given theme into a set of interconnected attributes that the topic evokes. These attributes can be more or less obviously connected to the topic depending on the situation. Impressions can certainly include words, but they aren’t primarily verbal; they’re bundles that also include textures, external senses, somatic experiences, reactions, etc. Some of these impressions straightforward & obvious, in a way that could be easily articulated. Others are so obscure & nebulous they’d be impossible to describe in a comprehensible way. An example of the former would be in statements like "it feels like there's a lot of cynicism in this country right now." An example of the latter is sometimes I'll forget the specific contents of a dream I had the previous night, but I'll retain a very general sense of its overall quality or feel, along with some isolated details. But when I try to describe such a dream to someone else, it sounds like a chain of completely unrelated events: my memory is vague enough that I have an impossible time spinning it into a coherent narrative.
Explicit observations and the role of the Judgment oscillation
I would speculate information that’s been passively, subconsciously absorbed plays an important role in forming most impressions. Even though these masses of information are never fully processed, their accumulation helps to give predictability to the Si worldview in a way that individual details cannot. And even if my knowledge of a given topic consists of a thousand clear details that I knew consciously & individually, I could not hold all these details in my frame of consciousness at one time. I’d still need an expedient way to view them as a collective whole.
As I go through each day, my senses soak up vast amounts of information from my external (Ne) and internal (Si) environments. Some of this is noted in an explicit way, sort of like an internal narrative:
--The angle of the sun is giving the ocean a clear green quality
--My head is aching
--This past winter, the snow had a heavier consistency than usual
--Whenever I bring up the topic of leave-time, he always seems slightly irritated
--The church had a Russian Orthodox-style cross on it
--That jar of jam tastes like it was made with Splenda rather than real sugar.
All of these examples are observations and/or inferences. Most of them involve consciously synthesizing incoming data absorbed through Pe with pre-existing data archived via Pi (see p. 11 of the CT book). Now, the line between an observation and an impression is very blurry; some of the above examples are plainly informed by impressions (e.g. my impression of the usual consistency of the snow vs. its consistency last winter). But my point here is that these examples all have an explicit, demarcated quality. Saying that the ocean is clear green may be an impression, but it’s also a very specific sensory detail. In fact, it's a sort of deduction in that it involves collapsing an entire milieu of shades and textures into just two words. I suspect the Judgment oscillation plays a role here in assigning precise verbiage to these impressions and thereby translating them into observations. By itself, the Perception oscillation might supply a torrent of loosely-related words, but it shouldn’t show a need to commit to such a pinpointing description. After all, S & N by themselves aren't really concerned about concluding anything or packaging anything into a communicable sequence.
Articulated observations (“ocean bright green”) are one way of creating conscious places for explicit things and qualities—indexing points on the Si map. I’m more likely to remember something if my Je has gotten its hands on it and done some of this packaging. But what about all the sensory flow that’s picked up by my senses but never noticed in a fully conscious manner? These masses of undifferentiated information form the building blocks of impressions, and it's a safe bet that they lurk behind just about every conscious sensory observation. Even if I've concluded that the ocean is bright green, traces of the countless shades & textures that went into this observation won't be altogether lost. It might linger on as a subconscious, visceral sense about the quality of the ocean that day.
Here’s an example of how vague, subconscious observations can manifest as inferences. Some years ago, a friend & I were driving through a mountain-valley during the wintertime. As the road wound down a hill, we entered a bank of fog. “Why is there fog there?” my friend asked. He wasn’t from the area, and so wasn’t all too familiar with these conditions. There could be any number of reasons why there’d be fog, yet based on the particular qualities of this fog, I thought it must be from water. It was the middle of the winter, probably -15 degrees, so I second-guessed this inference--it seemed like any water should be frozen. But when we reached the bottom of the grade, sure enough, the ice at the edge of a lake gave way to a large expanse of open water.
This inference, of course, was based on accumulated, somewhat indefinite memories of past experiences with fog and water, not on evaluating explicit criteria the fog possessed. But I should clarify that even if I were a keen observer of fog, took copious notes on it and could differentiate 112 different kinds of it, this sort of inference still might be impressionistic, depending on how I arrived at it. What matters here is the qualitative way of referencing pre-existing information.
A contrasting, J-based way of evaluating new information would be one that relied on criteria. For instance, the dichotomous keys that biologists use to differentiate species one from another. Or rigorously applying the VR code when making CT evaluations. I use this kind of approach in some situations, but as a strong P-lead, I find it more difficult to evaluate information based on delineated criteria unless I already know a topic really well. (I wonder whether or not this is, in fact, generally different for J-leads?)
Impressions vs. details
A lot of what’s written about Si focuses on its capacity to archive and recall discrete bits of information. That’s quite true, and I definitely relate to this aspect of Si…Yet saying that Si is all about archiving datapoints is sort of like saying being a carpenter is all about nailing boards together. Storing & recalling details is a key structural facet of Si, but it isn’t sufficient to encapsulate its purpose or the experience. The details derive their entire significance from their contextual relationships, and would get lost without these.
Actually, my experience is that Si details are not isolated, but are relational in nature. Let’s say that as an Si lead, I remember that an event of particular significance to me happened on January 9, 2007. I might easily forget the particular day (January 9th), and even forget the year (2007). But unless I mostly forgot that the event occurred, I wouldn’t lose its chronological place entirely: I’d still have a general sense of the approximate time in my life when it occurred, and how it fit into everything else that was going on at around that time. In other words, details can lose their fidelity & definitude, but if those details represent anything significant on my worldview-map, their general contours will remain.
I would say it’s these contours, rather than the details themselves, that form the experiential matrix of Si. Reading an evocative passage is one example of how this experiential matrix might be stimulated. Let’s say I read an article about someone who is searching for morel mushrooms, walking through a forest that had burnt the previous summer. …
Maybe this description mentions crackly, charred-ashen peat-moss that sprays up dust whenever you step on it, trunks of dead spruce whose trunks are covered in soot. It might also mention that this fire occurred on 1,000 acres of mountainous terrain, etc.
When I read these details, my mind runs a simulation where I place myself within this experiential situation. Because I’ve picked morels before, my mind will synthesize the details in the description together with stored memories from my own experiences. Initially, the first stored memories to enter my mind in this situation wouldn’t be explicit sensory details. More likely, it would be a vague physical sense that tells me “this is what I remember it feeling like when I was out hunting for morels”--an approximation of the subjective qualities of my past interactions with that environment.
This vague physical sense is a kind of impression--a very subjective one (i.e. although it's evoked by the objective environment, its initial reference point is subjective). If I probe my imagination more closely, I can clarify it by looking for more external, sensory details I’d expect to be inherent to this situation. Maybe the smoky, mineral-laden smell of the burnt vegetation. The nutty smell of the mushrooms. The subtly iridescent quality (which I can picture clearly but can't describe very well in words) that interlaces with the cement-like color of the gray morels. Swatting a mosquito from my sweat-soaked forehead and in doing so, smearing my brow with soot.
My point is that the details are NOT the experience of Si: the details are the gateway to the experience, as well as what helps to flesh out and articulate it. The actual experience of Si is more like being immersed in contours of its terrain—the quality of the worldview tapestry’s shapes & textures.
On the other hand, impressions and details are not radically different things, as far as I can tell. Instead, they’re almost like different textures of information within the Si tapestry that blend & fuse together. Impressions are inherently soft & are often somewhat fuzzy/unfocused, while details have a harder, clearer consistency. As suggested above, there is clearly a continuum between the two.
Most importantly, details are nested within impressions, and vice-versa. The terrain of Si has hard parts, soft parts and everything in between—areas that are very hard yet clear & intricate; areas that are impossible to bring fully into focus, but that have captivating colors & textures; areas that are like nebulous, stormy oceans interspersed with clear points of dry land. As I said above, being able to store & recall details has a lot to do with their contextual place within the worldview quilt.
Passive perception & evocation of impressions
Because impressions are largely an agglomeration of perceptions, they are brought into the experiential present by evoking pertinent details or sensory experiences. (As I discussed in the above section). Yet this does not mean that the reverse is true: I cannot usually access a thousand clear details by calling an impression to mind. After all, so many of these details have been subconsciously, perhaps half-attentively, accumulated. The Judgment oscillation never got its hand on these; they remained as vague, passing clouds and were never condensed into anything solid. If something spurs me to recall one of these details, I might be struck by a visceral & lifelike experience of the whole impression…but in the absence of prompting, many of them will remain inaccessible & out-of-focus.
In the past, when I would recall my experiences riding the Trans-Siberian railroad, I don’t know if I would have brought the smell of coal fly-ash into clear sensory focus. But there’s a particular saloon near the town I now live with a coal-fired stove inside. A few times when I’ve approached this saloon, I’ve gotten a strong whiff of the coal soot billowing from its chimney. In these moments, this smell brought me back to these Trans-Siberian memories in a very visceral & lifelike way; I’ll recall stepping off the train to stretch my legs at the stops. I’d walk across the pedestrian overpasses and overlook freight-trains consisting of endless coal cars, the smell of which would waft in the warm breeze that also carried whispy, gone-to-seed cottonwood flowers.
These sensory experiences evoke nostalgia. But nostalgia itself isn’t a single emotional deduction (hence, despite its implicitly emotional quality, it’s more associated with Si than with the F-functions). This kind of nostalgia is more like a fleeting sensory-emotional landscape in which agglomerations of impressions from the past are suddenly brought viscerally into the present. Perhaps the anachronism, the sense of getting a glimpse of a world that’s been lost in time, gives it its emotionally-tinged tones.