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"Judgment is Perception Stilled"

Kalach

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A bubble of perception gets trapped, somehow, and that bubble is what we call judgment.

Judgment after all is never judgment of the thing itself but some determination based on perception of the thing itself. So in some sense it's tautological to say judgment is perception brought to a halt. But what makes the stillness?

Personally I think of introversion and extroversion by themselves as impersonal, mostly unstoppable directions of attention. By existing together they create a potential third kind of attention, and perhaps we can call it consciousness, or the beginnings of consciousness, where the external and the internal are addressed from the point of view of the other. And the beginnings of judgments in general occur at those points where one instance of a drive to attend in one direction is halted or compensated for by one instance of a drive to attend in the other direction. It's a survival mechanism of sorts, probably non-conscious but vital to our existence. If there were no such check in drive, the third position would disappear.

So, that's judgment?
 

Kalach

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I mean, after all, what would enable choice? How does it happen? Obviously it exists, but what's its substance?

Determinism, particularly given physics broadly construed, points out that we probably have very little control over the antecedents of any given choice. Body chemistry, history, the grand spinning top of everything that isn't you, and you're making free choices? But yes, we are. And probably only because this third position exists as part of the system too. But what is judgment?

Let's imagine, say, a conscious appreciation of a sunset. Let's imagine that on this particular day, in this particular head, the appreciation is being generated as Se. The person, if there is one, is soaking in the colours, and shapes, and how they're arranged. the entire canvas becomes fascinating. You, as an outside observer imagining this scene, will probably notice that in the scene awareness of self is slipping away. How is the person making any distinction between the sunset outside of themselves and the sensation of increasing chill in the air? How are they choosing what to look at? What is directing their attention? Where is "the person" in this story?

As compensation for the excessive outer focus, blammo, some categorization starts up. The person can group together elements of the stream of sensations according to how she decides they fit into an abstract scheme--near, far; hot, cold; orange, blue; sky, sun; etc. If that kind of compensatory leap backwards into inner perception didn't occur, the person would disappear. the entirety of her attention would be drawn outside until there was no way left to recognise an inside space.

Now, at the time that compensatory action occurs, external perception formally freezes and internal perception starts up. It'd be a tiny little jerk backwards in an otherwise outward plunge. Right there, sez I, is a judgment seed. But a seed of which judgment type, introverted judgment or extroverted? I don't know.


Might not be true.
 

Stanton Moore

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Judgment is the stopping of the process of perception. It is not a summation of it. One can judge too early, before perception can yield good results. J closes space, P keeps it open.
 

Kalach

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And judgment, like perception, is some fundamental process that just occurs? Nothing gives rise to it, it's just there, to the greater disappointment of perception?
 

Stanton Moore

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And judgment, like perception, is some fundamental process that just occurs? Nothing gives rise to it, it's just there, to the greater disappointment of perception?

No, I would say that judgment is fundamentally different. It requires different faculties than perception. It forms inferences from information. Perception is the gathering and awareness of that information. Data and processing. Judging is optional, depending on the end goal.
 

PeaceBaby

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It is the difference between taking one card at a time from the deck or accepting a whole hand ... between dealing the cards face up or face down ... between sorting them into suits as you go or waiting to see what the best hand is you can make from what you've got.

Even what is on the cards, if anything.

Those are the images.
 

Southern Kross

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This doesn't really seem right to me.

If I am reading you correctly, [MENTION=5731]Kalach[/MENTION], you imply Judgement is tied to Perception but that perception can pre-exist on it's own. However, Perception is just as dependent on Judgement, and choice is always an element. Judgement is not something that comes along afterwards and tidies up the mess Perception has created. It is intricately intertwined in the information gathering process.

If you are watching a sunset, you are choosing to look at the sky whilst ignoring/minimising all other images, sounds, sensations. To have truly unfettered perception would be impossible because you would be taking in near infinite amounts of perceptual data that your brain could never process. So you have to make decisions about what gets your attention at any one moment. In film school they teach you that even in documentary filmmaking, it is a fallacy to believe that you just "show reality". Each shot, each cut, is a representation - a mediated, distortion of reality. Every time you point your camera at something and frame it in a certain way, every time you don't point it in another direction, every time you cut something out in the edit, you are making decisions (consciously or unconsciously) and are altering the reality to suit your purpose. It is all choice. It is all Judgement. It is a Judgement about what is interesting and what is not, what is useful and what is not, what has meaning to you and what does not. Similarly, you choose to look at the sunset rather than the trees, or focus on the feel the wind on you face, or the fact you feel cold or hungry. You also enjoy the sunset because it is beautiful to you, which is attaching meaning to it. Without Judgement you would not be able to evaluate the aesthetic pleasure of the colours and the formations of the clouds - it would just be bland perceptual data; as cold, meaningless and devoid of context as a number. The sunset isn't beautiful in and of itself; it's just refracted light hitting the ozone layer and mass formations of evaporated water droplets. It is only beautiful because you judge it to be so. And it could be said that you only decide to look at it in the first place, to focus your Perception on it, because you have determined that it is beautiful.
 

mintleaf

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No, I would say that judgment is fundamentally different. It requires different faculties than perception. It forms inferences from information. Perception is the gathering and awareness of that information. Data and processing. Judging is optional, depending on the end goal.

But you still have to make the less conscious decision to postpone judgment, which is in a way judgment itself, isn't it? People make inferences constantly, whether they're aware of them or not; it's when they're all pieced together, considered in relation to each other (meta-inference?) and brought to the front of the mind that what conventionally qualifies as a "judgment" has occurred. When, in reality, it's just the end result of the constant, inscrutable interaction between perception and judgment. So I wonder if what we typically consider judgment is instead the stilling of that cooperative process.

i.e. I don't think that a judgment is always a black-and-white action- or value-oriented conclusion. Sometimes it just tells us what lines of perception to keep open, which to alter, close, etc. Or would this be included in the sub-function of perception, processing, as mentioned above?

I feel like I'm very off on this, because for some reason, I still haven't grasped the difference between judgment and perception. So I'd like to know if the above corresponds to typical understandings of the two, or if I'm just making stuff up. :shrug:
 

Kalach

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People, people, people... It's not do you like judgment. It's what is judgment.

Perception is RELATIVELY easy to understand because it doesn't include an idea of stopping. You just keep perceiving. (That of course is misleading because perception as we here understand so far is typed--you do stop perceiving when you start moving beyond the boundaries of your preferred perception.) Judgment however involves stopping.

Or seems to.

Active judgment is dynamic. If you put, say, Te and Se together you get a lot of motion to start with, and "conclusions" changing over time, and I guess eventually you get to some point where enough has been perceived that judgment can stabilize.

But what's this capturing of the moment business that judgment seems to do? (The "moment" here is construed broadly: there are four kinds of moment--outer physical, outer abstraction, inner physical, inner abstraction.)



I'm getting an image, in my crystal balls, of a spectrum, and on one end is full on perception, while at the other is static judgment... and people--as in cognitive persons--swinging from one end to the other.

Not sure if that helps.
 

Kalach

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It seems to me I'd better say this:

The distinction between judgment and perception is artificial.
BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND JUDGMENT, THE DISTINCTION, IT IS ARTIFICIAL!
IT'S ARTIFICIAL!!1


I am, however, unsure what that means, exactly.
 

Southern Kross

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People, people, people... It's not do you like judgment. It's what is judgment.
It's everything that Perception is not. Perception is sensing information: internally or externally; concrete and abstract. Judgement drives and frames Perception, and it reads, reacts to and structures the data Perception provides.

I suppose you could say that Judgement is a shaping device and Perception is an object that is molded. Of course it varies from situation to situation what form of shaping might take place. Sometimes it may be a process of simply shaping a series of objects by ordering and structuring them.

I'm getting an image, in my crystal balls, of a spectrum, and on one end is full on perception, while at the other is static judgment... and people--as in cognitive persons--swinging from one end to the other.
I don't see them as connected in that way - to me they are two very different things working in particular combinations. I think of it more as when Perception takes the lead, Judgement supports, and vice versa. This alters the role Judgement plays, making it active (driving Perception) or responsive (evaluating Perception).

But what's this capturing of the moment business that judgment seems to do? (The "moment" here is construed broadly: there are four kinds of moment--outer physical, outer abstraction, inner physical, inner abstraction.)
What do you mean? Can you give an example?
 

entropie

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Judgement is guided perception

Thats an oxymoron or not, depends on how you read it
 

Stanton Moore

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Perception is of the senses. Judgement is of the mind. They are different things entirely. The balance of these is what drives the P/J dochotomy in typology.
Perception is of the present.
Judgement requires presupposition, which means experience. This means it is of the past.
 

Kalach

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What my perception is telling me is:

perception and judgment work together--don't know how.
but it's weird to keep pretending they're cinderella and the ugly sisters--the beautiful cinderella is not adopted, not amazingly different in kind and type and nature, SHE AND THE SISTERS ARE RELATED!!--don't know how--siblings, clones, sides of a single coin?

Judgment and Perception go together in some dynamic function that means they need each other and might even be each other. Consciousness of one more than the other gives an artificial impression of distinctness of type and kind. But at some level it's bizarre to distinguish them. At the very least it's strange to imagine that somehow--magically, mystically--two fundamental and distinct process occur as primitive in human cognition. I'd like to know what's behind this two-ness. Why two? How two? How did we get two different mechanisms?


AND FOR GOD'S SAKE Ps, HOW CAN PERCEPTION THRIVE IF YOU KEEP THROWING DOWN THESE RULES ABOUT PERCEPTION IS THIS, JUDGMENT IS THAT?!
 

Kalach

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I should possible also point out:

I'm taking it as basic that judgment works on perception, but that there are realms where it's active and where it's passive. Extroverted judgment for instance appears in an active mode when working on extroverted perception, but for the inner realm, that judgment becomes passive in some sense.

Like, for an INTJ, Te/Se is active outer judgment (as much as it is unpleasant and tiring), but active inner judgment occurs with Ni/Fi. The Te component is formally passive. It's actively represented in "Fi" (since Te/Fi are sides of a coin and relate), but the distinct process of "Te" slows down or stops..

In that sense, judgment and perception are never... well, they might still be distinct, but they're never alone.
 
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