First considerations about impressions

[Speakpigeon]

I have a criterion, a subjective one, to distinguish between an impression and an emotion.

And I'd be interested if anyone had anything to say about that distinction, whether it's to say there's none, or to say there are also objective criteria for that distinction.

Any thought anyone?
EB

 

[Malintent]

In my mind, an impression is a tentative conclusion... the result of a sub process that is still part of a larger consideration. As someone else expressed, the strong neural connections that are familiar and visited often provide quick impressions that help guide the thought process to the final conclusion.

 

[Speakpigeon]

In my mind, an impression is a tentative conclusion... the result of a sub process that is still part of a larger consideration. As someone else expressed, the strong neural connections that are familiar and visited often provide quick impressions that help guide the thought process to the final conclusion.

I can agree with that. I could always nitpick on the wording, but may be not. "Tentative conclusion", provided by the "subprocess", yes.

Subprocesses that are unconscious and provide their "conclusions" to at least the main conscious process.

"Help guide", yes, with a caveat. As I see it, you'll follow what an impression suggests as long as you don't have any good reason to do something else.

For example:

Suppose you're having a leisurely walk around some unfamiliar neighbourhood. At one point, you get to a simple crossroad. There are three possibilities for you to continue your walk (excluding the road you had come from). You have the time and the motivation to continue. But which way? There's no particular reason you should opt for any one road in particular. Yet, just looking at each road from where you are, one of them just seems more interesting. I assume most people would go this way in the circumstances but maybe not if there was something else to take into account at the time.

But maybe not if there was something else to take into account at the time...

So, here you will follow your impression that one road seems more interesting. Unless you have some good reason not to. If you're now in a hurry, you'll take the shorter route. If you spot somebody you don't like further down that "more interesting" road, you'll take another one, etc. So impressions "help" but can also be outranked by conscious fiat.

Broadly, I agree with the notion that an impression is there to "help", so to speak. You could say it's your experienced brain regurgitating bits of expertise on what's going on around you and providing advice you're free to disregard. Yet, I suspect that impressions may be too blunt an instrument to assess unusual situations, for example. "Help" in this case may become counterproductive.

Still, broadly, yes, I agree with what you say here.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Impressions are somewhat underrated.

We underrate our own impression. We don't pay them much attention.

Yet, as I understand it, they are the "texture" of our appreciation of the world. We obviously have our perceptions to be informed of the things around us and that's clearly absolutely essential. Yet, perceptions are not all there is. What we perceive is constantly commented on by essentially unconscious processes producing conscious impressions so as to, apparently, nudge us into action or inaction as the case may be. This running commentary is made of the impressions we have. Look at that house and you'll get an impression. See this guy? Yes, and you get a good, or a bad, impression about him. And on and on all day long. Yet, we don't really give them much of our attention.

Impressions are there, conscious thoughts but somewhat blending with the background and hardly ever noticed. Yet, they're crucial. It's not so different from having a seventh sense. It's a second order sense. Or rather, it's a third order sense if we count as second order sense our more basic and pervasive impression that our perceptions are the actual things out there in the real world, a second order sense equally absolutely crucial to our appreciation of our perceptions.

And so, more ordinary, mundane impressions, such as "this guy has a problem", or "it's a lovely house", make up a third order sense that comes in to supplement our first and second order senses so as to give a texture to our perceptions. Without this texture, life would be somewhat meaningless. Think of an old house where you think you would be happy to live and grow a family. Well, in reality, all you can actually see is just stones and mortar and slates and wood and glass. Something altogether more "mineral" and dead. That's really all that you see but fortunately here comes an impression that what you're looking at is an old house where you could be happy with your family. You would be looking at it and a faint smile would appear on your face. Just walking by this house would make you feel better. You would actually choose your route to make sure you pass in front of it and have a look at it. And so get to have this nice impression that you'd be happy to live there. Without these impressions, all that you would see would be just "mineral" things. Dead things in the sense of meaningless things. Without those impressions, life would be meaningless.

So, just try to pay a little more attention to them.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

We all have very ordinary impressions, like, for example, that the neighbour is somewhat out of place in the neighbourhood. Or that the same spoon you use for the sugar every day is somehow particularly good for the job. Trivial impressions barely noticed and immediately forgotten. Yet, there is one impression which is absolutely fundamental to our survival in this unforgiving world. The impression that the tree or the car that you're looking at are real. The is such a fundamental impression we tend not to realise it's there, like, all the time, at least when we're looking at something. Obviously, I should say it differently. The actual impression is the impression that your perceptions are real material things, real things in a world broadly understood as "material".

Are you aware of this impression? Not the belief, mind you. The belief that things around you are real material things in a material world is one thing, the impression is something else. Presumably, the belief is entirely based on the impression but is still something different. One is a belief, the other an impression. The impression is so strong it's I think impossible to shake it or dismiss it. The belief, well, I can conceive stopping to believe that.

Why is it our impressions barely register as an object of study in science?
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Types of mental events, outside psychological disorders, are not that many. Sensation, feeling, emotion, perception, proprioception, memory, idea, conception, comprehension, judgement, thinking, mental picture. Plus a few more exotic things like inkling, funny feeling, premonition, presentiment, apprehension, hunch, suspicion etc., which are all usually regarded essentially as intuitions.

So, I don't think any of these things qualify strictly speaking as impressions. Walking down the street, I may have the impression that I should be able to squeeze past in between two immovable obstacles a bit ahead of me. Strictly speaking, that's no perception. There's no colour or shape or anything else that is perceived as my likely ability to squeeze between these two obstacles. Rather, it seems to be an unconscious process that makes this assessment, clearly based indeed on my perceptions, and deliver the end result to my consciousness. All I will be aware of is the final assessment, the impression itself. It's also not just an idea in that it's not a consciously voluntary assessment. It comes about unbidden. It's not an emotion. Except in some specific situations, there usually wouldn't be any necessary emotion about having the notion that you should be able to squeeze between two obstacles. And I expect all these things to have something specific about the way that the brain and the body make them possible, just like I expect sounds and odours to have specific brain and body elements to them.
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Sorry I've been absent so long Speakpigeon.

In the ordinary sense of the word "impression" I'm using here (see dictionary definitions in the OP), there's a clear distinction between impressions and perceptions. Personally, I don't seem to have any difficulty in making this distinction, for each and every impression or perception I have, and I have a lot of them day in, day out. Same as for impressions and emotions. Obviously, all these mental events must have things in common, but I'm interested here in what's accessible to us as subjects, through our subjective experience. I would have thought that should be the starting point for any good science of the mind, but maybe I'm just too ignorant or confused as to what's really going on around here.
EB

Lets look at what drives us to sense and be aware. Arousal is the process of the brain organizing itself to respond which is added by attending and sensing. All of these have paths and causes and all of them are linked to some level of emoting which has very well defined pathways and sources and causes.

One can't just take impression and categorize it separately from perceiving or sensing or even attending or arousing. If the eyes are closed one can only get visual impressions from within the brain or through interaction with other senses like olfaction and audition. Yet, even the closed awake eye can form some differences between light sensation caused and internally caused sensation of light outside of oneself. Close your eyes. You'll see what I mean almost instantly depending on how hard you keep your eyelids closed.

So going back to some external reference seems to me the only unbiased way one can move from uncaused sense to caused sense. And so the ideal observer we get what is physically possible for one to sense and how effective one is able to achieve that state.

Yes this moves quite a ways from philosophy since it hangs it's meaning on physics and information processing capacities.

The job is being done. Your impression impression is quaint though and probably somewhat more insightful than was Wundt's  Introspection

What you are trying to get at is what people like Haynes are using to study foresighting one's mental processes using fMRI.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Sorry I've been absent so long Speakpigeon.

Sure. And congratulation to whoever is now presenting you. Good job!

Sorry, it's a bit long, my reply, but you can skip to the last line if you're not that interested.

In the ordinary sense of the word "impression" I'm using here (see dictionary definitions in the OP), there's a clear distinction between impressions and perceptions. Personally, I don't seem to have any difficulty in making this distinction, for each and every impression or perception I have, and I have a lot of them day in, day out. Same as for impressions and emotions. Obviously, all these mental events must have things in common, but I'm interested here in what's accessible to us as subjects, through our subjective experience. I would have thought that should be the starting point for any good science of the mind, but maybe I'm just too ignorant or confused as to what's really going on around here.
EB

Well, don't bother quoting what I say if you're not going to address my points.

Lets look at what drives us to sense and be aware. Arousal is the process of the brain organizing itself to respond which is added by attending and sensing. All of these have paths and causes and all of them are linked to some level of emoting which has very well defined pathways and sources and causes.

I agree here. I did assume myself we are always subjected to "some level of emoting". May be zero or more. So, we agree here. And I'm pleased here if "very well defined pathways" have been identified by scientists. Not absolutely relevant to what I am considering here but broadly in the same ballpark.

Perhaps they could start working on the pathways specific to impressions. I expect they should be well identifiable and distinct from other types of pathways.

Right now, I would assume no one is looking for those. And quite rightly not seeing them.

One can't just take impression and categorize it separately from perceiving or sensing or even attending or arousing.

One can, obviously. I just did it. And it's really easy to do. And I'm not the only one to do it. Many people speak of this or that impression. There's a long history of that. Don't tell me scientists have missed the boat?! That's so sad! It certainly makes a bad impression!

And I hope that most people can recognise memories from emotions, sensations from perceptions, pain from a sugary taste, a sense of loneliness from exultation etc. I would have guessed that recognising all this menagerie of mental events has to be taken as the very basic aptitude one needs to have if one is to live up to one's status as a human being.

So, how do scientists see this, by the way? Should be interesting. What do scientists say about our impressions? That's what I'd be really interested in.

If the eyes are closed one can only get visual impressions from within the brain or through interaction with other senses like olfaction and audition.

What's a "visual impression"?

I know of "lingering visual impression", but that's obviously very different from the kind of impressions I've been talking about here.

A proper impression that might be called "visual" would be an impression about a visual perception. I look at somebody's face and I may have an impression related to that. But, the impression itself isn't visual, so using this expression could be misleading.

Apart from this, I don't know what a visual impression would be except in the context of some mental disorder whereby the subject would experience non-voluntary visual events unrelated to actual perception. Is that it?

Of coure, going further, I would expect you could also get some visual event if your skull suddenly takes a hit for example. Things like that.

In any case, I'm only talking of fully functional impressions. The kind of things it is normal for everybody to have all day long. Things that are useful and operational, and that on the whole you'd better pay attention to because they're meant to be helpful.

Yet, even the closed awake eye can form some differences between light sensation caused and internally caused sensation of light outside of oneself.

I can't parse that but you're clearly not talking about anything remotely to do with the kind of impressions I'm talking about here so I will just ignore that.

Close your eyes. You'll see what I mean almost instantly depending on how hard you keep your eyelids closed.

Sure, I see it, but there's something I don't see and this is your point here.

So going back to some external reference seems to me the only unbiased way one can move from uncaused sense to caused sense. And so the ideal observer we get what is physically possible for one to sense and how effective one is able to achieve that state.

Well, the thing is, I don't really understand what your fuss is regarding "caused sense" and "uncaused sense". I have no idea what you're talking about. You would need to learn how to explain yourself clearly to start with. I'm sure you must have a point but you can't ask me to read the runes.

That being said, if you can provide any scientific reference about the kind of impressions I'm talking about, I'd be real interested and very surprised.

Yes this moves quite a ways from philosophy since it hangs it's meaning on physics and information processing capacities.

I can already tell they're not going to discuss my impressions.

I'm please you've managed to insert the word "philosophy" here totally irrelevantly but still disparagingly enough. One mark for that! You're one of the best here!

The job is being done. Your impression impression is quaint though and probably somewhat more insightful than was Wundt's  Introspection

Thanks but more importantly I get the impression (Oops! Sorry!) that I'm also being more insightful than all the brain scientists in the world put together. Could you do something to dispel that no doubt erroneous impression?

What you are trying to get at is what people like Haynes are using to study foresighting one's mental processes using fMRI.

I'm right now very sceptical about this claim. I get a clear impression that these people are not even aware of the pervasiveness of impressions in our mental life. But, again, maybe you could dispel.

Hard work, that, I know.

Still, I'm pleased to see you're back!
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Impressions are really very similar to ordinary, conscious, thoughts and ideas. They're unconscious but it seems as if they would be coming from a little person inside your brain, thinking very hard about what to signal to you. The little person would just watch everything you can see around you and send you mental notices to help you throughout your day. So, in a sense, be aware you're no alone inside your mind. And makes sure you express gratitude to the little person that's lurking in the shadows of your mind, ready to send you impression after impression at every hour of the day without you asking for anything. And it's done for free. No strings attached! Really devoted to your well-being, although it's fair to say your well-being is his well-being, too.

And if you're hard at work concentrating on something, like your fiscal revenues declaration, the little beast won't disturb you. No impressions when you're busy! "Don't disturb", and it works. But as soon as you stop working, impressions come in one after the other, like as many announcements on display screens in a control tower in an airport. Very well organised all that! Impressive!
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Setup: You are lying on a chaise lounge. I'm behind you with peep and notebook recording your free narrative.

I intererupt your long chant on impressions and consciousness to ask you "what is your basis using these terms. Is there a physical basis for your use of them. If so could you describe it for me?" You begin to repeat yourself as if explaining .....

I interrupt again. "If you have no verifiable physical basis for these terms perhaps you can relate them to characteristic physical conditions?" Again you repeat your previous exposition as if somewhere in that I would see a glimmer of physical basis.

That is where we are. You have clear yet undefinable language for what you believe. I find no physical meaning to the terms in what your are saying. You provide no operational basis for your terms. One of us is on the wrong thread.

Maybe if I give you a model you can identify what you mean in relation to what I model.

When I go about finding a person's sensitivity to sound I present appropriate stimuli to the observer at various levels of magnitude or intensity that I have referred to a basic attribute measure of average human Sound Pressure Level (SPL) threshold for hearing sound at 1000 hz. More formally,

The threshold of hearing is generally reported as the RMS sound pressure of 20 micropascals, corresponding to a sound intensity of 0.98 pW/m² at 1 atmosphere and 25 °C.^[3] It is approximately the quietest sound a young human with undamaged hearing can detect at 1,000 Hz.^[4]

.

The advantage of this sort of measurement is that we can related physical properties of sound to other physical attributes such as pressure, force, energy, etc. and we can adjust it to any setting we might encounter when taking such measurements.

At the human end of the study I put the observer into an environment that minimizes things like wind, other sounds, and other distractions so that when she responds I am traking measurements I can be assured the observer is responding to whatever physical information she hears, when following directions, reporting her experiences to the physical information I am presenting. Whatever the observer perceives, whether one characterizes them as impressions, sensations, observations, guesses they can be aggregated into a metric that is both consistent and repeatable.

This approach arose out of an interest in understanding how humans respond to acoustic stimuli at the ear (von Bekesy carried out similar experiments on the skin of human arm and back) demonstrating the power of this methodology for recovering human sensitivity to airborne and aquatic acoustic waves.

Enough of the preaching. The point is that the basis for these methods arise form our interest in finding sensitivity to physical stimuli which humans can reportr in some way or another. We choose to call these responses sensed or impressed experiences. Here's where your little wander into your unknown is exposed.

Yes you can call whatever you will, but you cannot tell us what it is whilst we can by taking control of the terms and relating them to detected physical experience. Oh, by the way there are other studies by researchers who have parsed sense, impression, perception, etc. and related them to the physical stuff I just described. there are even theories of sensation and perception that pint to particular regions of the brain where thee operations are being carried out.

I believe that is enough for now.

So feel free to explore impressions in the world of science. Just do it without trying to invent a repeat of what has already been achieved. You may not be satisfied but the scientific community, I assure you, is satisfied.

 

[Speakpigeon]

blah-blah-blah

I've already seen all that before, I'm sure. I think you're just doing a repeat.

I already replied so no need to do it again. If you didn't understood the first time round, you won't this time.

Oh, by the way there are other studies by researchers who have parsed sense, impression, perception, etc. and related them to the physical stuff I just described.

If you can't quote a link, it doesn't exist.

Such is life on the Internet...
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Here's an oldie and moldy one for you Handbook of Experimental Psychology https://books.google.com/books/about/Handbook_of_Experimental_Psychology.html?id=OzVEAAAAIAAJ

Wow. It's still 1400 pages. Here are two of 17 citations on impression, the first on page 42 and the second on page 1229.

Enjoy.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Here's an oldie and moldy one for you Handbook of Experimental Psychology https://books.google.com/books/about/Handbook_of_Experimental_Psychology.html?id=OzVEAAAAIAAJ

Wow. It's still 1400 pages. Here are two of 17 citations on impression, the first on page 42 and the second on page 1229.

Enjoy.

That's just obfuscation.

Pathetic.

Just give me one quote we could see it's relevant.

It's you who claimed to know there was relevant science carried out today. And all you can do is produce a 1951 handbook!

Whoa.
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Well my copy is sitting on my desk right behind my computer screne. The handbook is a set of chapters by researchers in fhe field in the late forties and early fifties. Among them Are Smitty Stevens, JCR Liklider, Roger Sperry, Ernest Hilgard, Kenneth W. Spence, George Miller, Georg von Bekesy, Hallowell Davis, Walter A Rosenblith, G.R. Wendt, Paul M. Fitts, Robert H. Seashore ... name dropping certailnly, but the names are authors of the chapters in the book sumarizing their work and the work of others on important topics still in experimental psychology which includes social, personnel, psychophysics etc.

As for a quote S. S. Stevens gets to the nub of it when he talks of stimulus rating, a subjective task designed to estimate a physical attribute. Stevens writes:

"The common problem in these activities and the thousands like them is the utilization of subjective impression to predict the result that would be obtained by an objective measurement. To perceive the stature is one thing: to measure him with a yardstick is another. It is the business of many of us to correlate 'subjective' and 'objective' operations such as these and to predict the second from the first. In one way or another we are constantly guessing at the physical values or relations of stimuli."

if this introduction seems interesting you might be willing to find the passage on page 42 to find that he continues to relate it to problems such as the rating standard (person) becoming what the one who uses such a standard as the measure rather than the standard. These are things commonly found in areas of social impression, and other definitions you list in your previous posts.

in other words sir. its all been done, done well, and still people who use subjective measures as indices of physical realities wind up using the measure as the object measured.

It is why it is necessary to construct physical standards to which one can attach subjective impressions so one can be assured one is actually measuring something other than the subjective standard (stimulus error).

As for using a 1951 text to point to I am showing you a problem resolved that need not be resolved again today.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Well my copy is sitting on my desk right behind my computer screne. The handbook is a set of chapters by researchers in fhe field in the late forties and early fifties. Among them Are Smitty Stevens, JCR Liklider, Roger Sperry, Ernest Hilgard, Kenneth W. Spence, George Miller, Georg von Bekesy, Hallowell Davis, Walter A Rosenblith, G.R. Wendt, Paul M. Fitts, Robert H. Seashore ... name dropping certailnly, but the names are authors of the chapters in the book sumarizing their work and the work of others on important topics still in experimental psychology which includes social, personnel, psychophysics etc.

As for a quote S. S. Stevens gets to the nub of it when he talks of stimulus rating, a subjective task designed to estimate a physical attribute. Stevens writes:

"The common problem in these activities and the thousands like them is the utilization of subjective impression to predict the result that would be obtained by an objective measurement. To perceive the stature is one thing: to measure him with a yardstick is another. It is the business of many of us to correlate 'subjective' and 'objective' operations such as these and to predict the second from the first. In one way or another we are constantly guessing at the physical values or relations of stimuli."

if this introduction seems interesting you might be willing to find the passage on page 42 to find that he continues to relate it to problems such as the rating standard (person) becoming what the one who uses such a standard as the measure rather than the standard. These are things commonly found in areas of social impression, and other definitions you list in your previous posts.

in other words sir. its all been done, done well, and still people who use subjective measures as indices of physical realities wind up using the measure as the object measured.

It is why it is necessary to construct physical standards to which one can attach subjective impressions so one can be assured one is actually measuring something other than the subjective standard (stimulus error).

As for using a 1951 text to point to I am showing you a problem resolved that need not be resolved again today.

One mark for you. They're working on it:

STEVENS’ HANDBOOK OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 3rd Ed.
Volume 4: Methodology in Experimental Psychology
Psychological scaling
Authors: Lawrence E. Marks and George A. Gescheider
Scaling by Partition and Magnitude Methods page 113
Functional Measurement
In functional measurement, two or more stimuli produce separate subjective impressions. When the stimuli are combined, these impressions are integrated by some rule, often referred to as cognitive algebra, and the observer is asked to rate the overall impressions. The cognitive algebra is revealed by examining how the observer’s ratings change when the combination of stimuli changes. Typically, an experimenter presents stimuli in all possible combinations to an observer, who rates the combinations on some psychological dimension. If the effects of the stimulus components combine according to a simple rule, such as linear addition, and if responses are linearly related to the underlying psychological values, then the scale values will reveal the algebraic rule directly.

Still, from this snippet, I gather that they have a rather limited notion of the range of impressions people have. I guess the quantitative methodology they're using inevitably narrows down the range of impressions they're going to be able to consider. Typically, they are considering impressions such as the impression the subject has as to the stature of someone else by looking at this person. Obviously, this is a rather simple aspect of the problem. Perfectly legitimate but rather simple. This notion of the cognitive algebra of impressions, for example, seems to me to be just the fact that the subject is able to consider several impressions independently of each other. Good. We know that so I agree with them. Now, how do you get the impression that you're going to be able to squeeze through in between two obstacles in front of you? You're not conscious of two separate impressions and somehow you do a cognitive algebra to deduce you'll be able to squeeze through. Instead, you get the one impression that you're going to be able to squeeze through. That's a major point. Impressions are produced by an unconscious part of your brain. This already requires a "cognitive algebra", except one that is done unconsciously. It seems to me, the methodology they developed, which again is legitimate, can only sort out whatever happens once the conscious mind of the subject received the impressions. Whatever happens before will remain anybody's guess. And that's what I'm interesting in. Frankly, what happens within my conscious mind is really just clear enough. That's what happens in my unconscious mind that's we need to look at. And they're not going to tell me given the methodology they use.

Still, I grant you that you've done your homework. I had to pummel you somewhat to get it but it's not bad at all. I'll try to look at the rest, but I think I identified above the gist of the problem already.

Anyway, thanks.

Keep posted if you want an opportunity to feel outraged at any further comments I'll no doubt have on this book.
EB