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Ne and Ni

VagrantFarce

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WHAT Ne REALLY IS LIKE:

"Oh look, that person spat to the side as he walked past me. Man, that's disgusting. Hmm. Why am I disgusted? Why do people spit, and why is it considered to be a universally derogatory act? Some cultures perceive different meanings from the same gesture (such as, say, slurping up your food) but spitting seems to be frowned upon everywhere!

Actually, wait- that's not true... spitting is considered reasonably acceptable in China, after all. (But could that be simply a socio-economic thing rather than a cultural thing? Can you ever really separate the two? I think not...) But spitting on another person, or in response to a person's action- that's definitely derogatory, isn't it? I suppose it's the bodily fluid... it probably goes way back to prehistoric times? It's like a simplified version of taking a piss on someone, an act of contamination, of degradation- reducing the other individual to a receptacle for bodily waste.

This could just as easily be construed as Ni - "how could I reinterpret this in a different way?"

The difference really just seems to be where meaning and context are thought to emerge from:
  • Ni-types think of meaning and context as defined by the assumptions we take into the world -the perspectives we choose to hold as individuals. You change the meaning of reality and the possibilities available to you by allowing yourself to "look" at things in a different light - to actively ignore what simple observation suggests.
  • Ne-types think of meaning and context as defined by what we observe in the world - the web of connections that are just already there. To change the meaning of reality and the possibilities available to you, you have to allow yourself to be open to what observation suggests, and to not be arbitrarily dismissive of possibilities at first glance.
 

visaisahero

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That's a thought. To me, reinterpretation and looking at things from varying perspectives is more of a habit than an instinct- I attribute it to my Ti, which craves logic and sensibility.

I suppose what I was trying to do is to share how a Ne-dominant mind works in reality, rather than try to isolate Ne altogether (which I think is quite a ridiculous and pointless endeavor).

Surely Ne-dominant people will reveal some Ni, and Ni-dominant types will reveal some Ne? I don't really think it's possible to be completely outward or inward directed... I suppose this is where the secondary function will come in.

So perhaps Ne + Fi/Ti will give you some hints of Ni, and maybe Ni + Fe/Te will give you some hints of Ne?
 

VagrantFarce

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An Ne's thoughts could be construed as Ni, and vice versa, on the surface - but behind the scenes, I still see them as completely different ways of thinking that opposing types tend not to share. :) For example, I can certainly see how other people will think the way I described Ni, but I certainly don't think that way - indeed, my instinct is usually to dismiss that sort of thinking as contrary and dismissive to what is being discussed.

See these for a better explanation for what I'm talking about:

Holistic Spiraling

The typical rhetorical style of NPs, especially INTPs: appeal to Extraverted Intuition, pointing out relationships among disaparate things, to trigger an "aha!" of Introverted Judgement.

In Holistic Spiraling, one makes a contrast or comparison to establish reference for a term, then uses that term to state a proposition. That proposition is then contrasted or compared with other propositions, creating a new vocabulary for proposing yet more hypotheses, and so on, hence the "spiraling". "How does this relate to that? Now that we understand that relation, how we can we better understand these other things?"

In contrast to rhetoric guided by Extraverted Thinking, the conclusion cannot be stated at the beginning. Nearly all of the rhetoric is concerned primarily with establishing a shared understanding of reference points in reality, in terms of which the conclusion will be framed. The rhetoric of Extraverted Thinking more typically begins with a conclusion framed in terms of an already shared conceptual framework, followed by reasons to establish that conclusion as opposed to contrary conclusions.

Type From Scratch

A conversation between two NPs has a distinct pattern: you could call it Holistic Spiraling. When NJs talk together or an NP talks with an NJ, the spiraling seldom takes off even though there's still lots of reframing of ideas.

The peculiar disconnect that nearly always happens between INTJs and INTPs. From the INTJ's standpoint: "He seems awfully attached to his model, as if it's the only possible one. There are so many possibilities he hasn't ruled out. His argumentation is simply unfair: he is choosing observations to stack the deck to favor his interpretation over all others. He seems oblivious to the complexity of the subject. He does not seem to know what he's doing." From the INTP's standpoint: "I'm trying to point things out and draw distinctions in order to define a vocabulary that carves out some aspect of the subject matter. That would be forward progress. But he refuses to look. He keeps translating everything I say into some moronic vocabulary that he's already familiar with, where what I'm saying is a trivial goof. He seems completely stuck in his box."
 

Eric B

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In light of looking at Beren's "philosophy of life" descriptions for the "operating Charter" thread; I find that they hold the key for completely cracking this confusion of Ni with Ne.

Ne: There are always other perspectives and new meanings to discover
Ni: There is always a future to realize and a significance to be revealed.

"Revealed" basically means "uncovered". So it's a matter of UNcovered versus DIScovered. They sound synonymous, but there really is a difference.

un- prefix of reversal (from PIE *anti "facing opposite, near, in front of, before")
dis- "do the opposite of" (from PIE *dis- "apart, asunder")
 
"uncover" or "reveal" implies that something was covered, and now we're reversing this.
For "discover", the object is not necessarily covered to begin with. It's just not known about, and instead of covering it, so it remains unknown, we're doing the opposite of covering it, and making people aware of it.
 
So "discover" reflects Ne's external focus, of meanings that are implicit in the object, yet are being made known to observers by the subject relaying the information.
"uncover/reveal" reflects Ni's internal focus, where a subject picks up a significance that has apparently been covered, and now reverses this by applying it to the various objects involved.
 
Also, we have meanings vs significance.
When I compare MBTI with the other temperament matrices, I first see that both include introversion and extroversion. So if they share that in common, I then wonder if MBTI has any counterpart to the other temperament factor of people/task. I eventually find that the factor corresponds to both T/F and J/P. So now, I "discover" this new (to everyone else) meaning of the T/F and J/P factors. The connection is already implicit in those external objects, but now instead of covering it up like it doesn't exist; I'm doing the opposite.

Ni is about significance, which is really a subjective thing, not directly implicit in the object.
A good way I have just thought of of describing this is what I have decided to call an "event template". Like I can remember being real young, and taken to the beach. It was an exciting new adventure; but IIRC falling into the water, and it was very scary and traumatizing. Later, going to a pool, I was pushed in. Going under water for me is very scary. So I had this sense of danger reagarding beaches and pools.

Years later, I catch the Brady Bunch episode where they go on vacation in Hawaii. I remember it was a very exciting event for them, and it seemed like it would be a great time. But then, these negative events start happening. I remember the hideous spider attack in the room. And the, the older brother wiped out in the surf, and was thought to be dead. There was this looming sense of a curse, from the Tiki they encountered.

Now this was not even my experience. It was fictional. Yet it tied to experiences I had, and formed what I'm calling a "template". A sort of situational counterpart to an archetype. I could name it like an archetype; such as "Hawaii-Bound" after the episode (though that title is not really descriptive enough). It also parallels Christ's statement "those who shall save their lives shall lose it", or "When they shall say 'peace and safety', then shall come sudden destruction". Again, when we think things are so well, all horror breaks loose. So I could call it "peace and safety".

This would form a mental background future events would be engaged against. They then take on a significance. Like I cut my finger really bad on a family outing to a beachside resort, on a 104° day in a hotel with no A/C, but the windows painted shut from whern there were A/C's. This seemed to fall right into this template, though I probably wasn't even thinking directly about the Brady Bunch episode. It was just this background sense of things being "too good" on the way to the outing, and thus something go horribly wrong.
Another template is based on Aliens, where they make the exicting discovery of life on another planet, but the guy has the horrible experience with the face-hugger. When it comes off; it seems he is all right, and he tries to move on from that trauma and in somewhat of a daze, get back to normal life by eating with the others. But then, that's when the horror of horrors happens. The alien inside him bursts out. This is what loomed in my mind as I had to walk around in this heat after loosing so much blood, and I tried to be OK and get back to normal, but the others were saying I was not completely myself, and almost in a daze. Luckily, no further horror happened after that. Still, it all fit into these templates.

The templates are purely my own in applying to situations; hence, introverted, and yet they do tie into universals (hence, other people using the same concepts), which is also characteristic of introverted functions. Those would be the internal "focal points" of the illustration I posted.
So what ends up happening, is that whenever there is some really exciting event or prospect, I have this fear that something really bad is going to happen. Of course, Ni for me is in the shadow, in the "Senex" or "critical parent" position. It is negative, and very incomplete, and not a good guide at all.
So now we see the basis of Beren's description of Critical Ni as "putting a damper on plans for the future with negative thoughts of how things will be". It's based on a sort of negative template. My "good" parent Ne tells me that the negative is only a possibility, but more likely (looking at the external data available so far), things will go all right. Yet for some reason I lock on to this negative possibility. I'm no longer exploring possibilities; now I'm inferring significance. (For the record, since this deals with stressful events, it can likely be seen as a manifestation of the archetype. I otherwise don't usually trust or think much of such a process).

For NJ's, this function will be more mature, and they will have more positive uses of it, which will also be more likely to come true, as more indepth, complete templates will be created, which will pick up more cues on whether a particular outing really fits into the template that ends in disaster.
Ni is often described as dealing with "frameworks", which is a term usually associated with Ti (also making it confusing). But Ti deals with frameworks of judgment, you make decisions with, such as sets of principles. Ni would deal with frameworks of perception, in which you take in new information. I would say all four introverted functions have frameworks. Ti is logical frameworks (involving 'principles"), Fi is ethical frameworks ("values"), Si is concrete frameworks (i.e. memories of how things should be), and Ni is abstract frameworks, such as these event templates.
 
Ni is often confused with Si even, because a person can look at how events play out over and over, and then get a sense of what will happen in the future. However, this can be Si. Looking at how gravity always pulls things down, and then deducing that something you let go of will drop would be Si. It is concrete data. It's the act of creating a template of events that is the process of abstracting (from memories), not just any "foretelling" of the future. It generates a concept.
The whole "Bad things will happen on a fun outing" is not based on concrete facts such as gravity. It is a model pairing together otherwise unrelated events that only share a few details in common, such as going to a fun outing. There is no external element connecting the two to any common negative chain of events. It's all in an internal template, or perhaps 'storyline', if you will. Another example is conspiracy theories. In this case, the negative outcome has already occurred, and now you employ a template of conspiracy scheming to "reconstruct" how it was carried out. (The "blaming" aspect of this will be especially pronounced for those of us with this process as the blaming "critical parent"!)
 
So just as you can experience a current event, which is Se, or abstract a new meaning from it, which would be Ne; you can also look back at a memory, which is Si, or abstract significance from it in the form of things such as these templates, which would be Ni.

This also brings to light the fact that the simplistic descriptions of Ni as "foretelling the future" really do not do the function justice. This is what has made it so hard to figure out all this time. And any person who seems to have some sort of "visions" of the future is automatically made into an NJ type. The templates may give you a sense of what will happen, and you can loosely call them "visions", but they are not glimses into the future.
Another example is in one of Berens' descriptions of Ni; a person choosing a dog has a "vision" of a dog barking and crying, and then realizes that they should get a dog that didn't mind being alone. This doesn't even have anything to do with any particular singular event being "predicted". It was a template or model of a situation that was referenced to inform a decision for the better, to avoid that template possibly being realized in a future event.

This makes it more clear to me, about a close friend of ours, who I always typed as ISTJ because of being pure "Melancholy" on the APS. Yet there was this problem (for my correlation) of her having these "visions" of things. And other people in the churches (which are charismatic-leaning) who otherwise seem SJ, say they have these "insights" as well. Yet I have realized that these visions are totally concrete in content. Like seeing a dome shape, and then, an event occurs involving a dome. But this is not Ni. Ni is abstract. Now, if the dome was a symbol of something, then it might be fitting into an Ni template. Even though the aforementioned dog vision seemed concrete, its application was clearly an abstract model, and again, not a hard prediction. They claim the insights are gifts from God, and that would be more fitting than a natural cognitive preference. The cognitive process test I am seeing confuses both Ni and Fi with such oversimplified descriptions in the questions, and SFJ's end up coming out as ISFP's (yet with very high Fe!). Yet I find; you give some of them some real Ni, they tend to think it's crazy, as fitting for something deep in their shadow.
 
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goodgrief

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Everything starts from senses, please tell me how it cant. I am saying N cannot exist without S.

Ne is tied to Fi and Ti in some sort or fashion, but then you end up with Ji and Pi at work. An internal judgement function in essence creates our internal perception or judges our internal perception.

Yes, N cannot exist without S, since that is needed to actually take in noticeable information, but without N, how will we know what to do with information. Without N, we will have no intelligence, because we take stuff in but never apply it and are therefore a vegetable,never seeing more than what is.

Without N, person sees a bone and no thoughts occur.
Without S, person doesn't notice bone.
With both, person sees a bone and thinks "That is a bone, which means it's from a dead animal etc..."

Of course no information can be processed without some level of both.
 

Kalach

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Se and Si are both as much a pair of cognitive functions as are Ne and Ni, and neither of them are identical to the operation of the senses. If they were, then we would rightly say a video camera experiences cognition since it obviously has damn strong Se.

The other functions don't supervene on Se. People who don't have Se in their function order don't do Se. Ne and Ni products both started out way back in the perception chain as exactly the same flood of input as Se and Si, but the functions that generated that product carved up that input in substantially different ways and took it in very different directions.
 

the state i am in

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Se and Si are both as much a pair of cognitive functions as are Ne and Ni, and neither of them are identical to the operation of the senses. If they were, then we would rightly say a video camera experiences cognition since it obviously has damn strong Se.

The other functions don't supervene on Se. People who don't have Se in their function order don't do Se. Ne and Ni products both started out way back in the perception chain as exactly the same flood of input as Se and Si, but the functions that generated that product carved up that input in substantially different ways and took it in very different directions.

yeah, it's not like people who don't have Se don't have a visual cortex, an auditory cortex, a motor cortex, a somatasensory cortex etc. it's just a different way of pipelining amongst brain structures.
 

Kalach

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yeah, it's not like people who don't have Se don't have a visual cortex, an auditory cortex, a motor cortex, a somatasensory cortex etc. it's just a different way of pipelining amongst brain structures.

It's an interesting question, this one of the physical interface between the world and the mind. We know, obviously, that most of that interface is inside the body--the various cortexes and whatnot. But where does it stop being interface and start being mind? And if we detect physical differences in interfaces, have we detected differences in minds?

But, for instance, obviously (sort of) the perception functions start out by accessing the body's normal physical sensing mechanisms. The Pe functions certainly do, anyway. Do the Pi functions? They absolutely do NOT access immediate sensory information when they are engaged in the function of Pi. They are off cogitating on the subjective, not the objective. But do they not draw seeds out of the normal flood of information too? Would it for example be right to say the person uses their Se to feed their Ni? I presume this is right only if we also say people must be using their Ne to feed their Si... which sounds very wrong-headed. So it looks like the P functions feed--to their own degree and according to their own purposes--off the normal physical stream we all have because we have bodies.

But what about J functions--do they do this too? Or do J functions require an intermediary P function? Can J functions access the normal flood of physical information that comes to us just because we have bodies, and cherry pick content, abstracting or objectifying according to their want?

For the effective functioning of the personality the functions are supposed to work with one another, so for normal operation toward that personality's goals, a J function would require an intermediary P function. But... what goes on subconsciously? Consciously, some function such as Te cannot be used to scan a physical environment. To consciously do that one has to use a P function. But subconsciously, via the stream of physical data being present just because the person is embodied, can Te (or Fe, or Fi or Ti) be prompted? If so, then probably only minimally, but still....

Even so, it wouldn't be something we could harness. The person still would function better if they consciously sought out the kind of information they prefer and consciously organised that information in the way they prefer.
 

gromit

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I have read almost the entire thread and I still am not really clear on the differences... I have heard Ni described as an internal model of reality, that a greater understanding can be gained by looking at things from different angles. Is the difference that Ne is less concerned with the model itself, more with the possible connections that can be made between ideas? I can see the point of Ni, but I can't see the point of Ne, I guess. What is the end goal of Ne? Is that part of the difference, that Ne doesn't really HAVE an end goal, but Ni does?
 

Eric B

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Ne is not concerned with a model at all. Models are products of introverted functions. Ne looks directly at an object and extracts connections to "ideas" or possibilities.
Ni references abstract models of reality, which can be fictional stories, archetypes, etc. (hence, why I notice NJs' language is often full of these references) that universal meanings are extracted from to create greater understanding of things.
 

gromit

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In theory, Ni is paired with Se and Ne with Si. I would imagine this is because, when Ni is interacting with Se, the role of Se is to provide more information for the model or something...? Do they directly interact like that?

I guess I ask because I'm wondering if the Ni model HAS to be 'fed' by Se or if can it be fed by Ne in addition?
 

Virtual ghost

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In theory, Ni is paired with Se and Ne with Si. I would imagine this is because, when Ni is interacting with Se, the role of Se is to provide more information for the model or something...? Do they directly interact like that?

I guess I ask because I'm wondering if the Ni model HAS to be 'fed' by Se or if can it be fed by Ne in addition?


From INTJ perspective things look like this. (if we presume that the function order is correct)


Ni leads in every way as a way of perciving thing and feeds the Te. The Te then decides what to do, how to do and when to do. The only task of the Se here is to make sure that you can read and that you don't fall down stairs.
 
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