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Why is it difficult to describe Ni?

G

Ginkgo

Guest
Introverted iNtuiting involves synthesizing the seemingly paradoxical or contradictory, which takes understanding to a new level. Using this process, we can have moments when completely new, unimagined realizations come to us.

It refuses to come to a concrete understanding of itself... It is kind of fun to assign human traits to a function.

Question to those who prefer Ni:

Do you ever synthesize a load of paradoxes at a time?

I'll give you an example - earlier today I was thinking about someone I know, and I realized her recuperation was her illness. This is a single synthesis, drawn from a number of information bits.

On a more prescient level, do you ever experience a series of realizations, dramatically reshaping a chunk of your whole outlook?
 

Curator

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Id say that has happened very very often with me over the last year, less so previously in life, but very often lately.
 

Vasilisa

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Question to those who prefer Ni:

Do you ever synthesize a load of paradoxes at a time?

I'll give you an example - earlier today I was thinking about someone I know, and I realized her recuperation was her illness. This is a single synthesis, drawn from a number of information bits.

On a more prescient level, do you ever experience a series of realizations, dramatically reshaping a chunk of your whole outlook?

Oh yes. All sorts of paradoxes, dualities, variances. Its not exactly like I work on them, more like they work on me.

With dramatic realizations, sometimes I have accompanying big emotional fallout. :blush:
 

Jaguar

Active member
Joined
May 5, 2007
Messages
20,647
Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

clappinghands.gif


:wink:

I don't even want to tell you what that image made me think of. Lol.
 

FakePlasticAlice

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On a more prescient level, do you ever experience a series of realizations, dramatically reshaping a chunk of your whole outlook?

It almost seems a little ridiculous how many times my entire outlook has been transformed by those "a-ha" moments
 

Nicodemus

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If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken - this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, - I never had any choice. A delight whose incredible tension sometimes triggers a burst of tears, sometimes automatically hurries your pace and sometimes slows it down; a perfect state of being outside yourself, with the most distinct consciousness of a host of subtle shudders and shiverings down to the tips of your toes; a profound joy where the bleakest and most painful things do not have the character of oppsites, but instead act as its conditions, as welcome components, as necessary shades within this sort of excess of light; an instinct for rhythmic relations that spans wide distances is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, something to balance out its pressure and tension . . . All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity . . .

A major Ni episode?
 

Thisica

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Question to those who prefer Ni:

Do you ever synthesize a load of paradoxes at a time?

I'll give you an example - earlier today I was thinking about someone I know, and I realized her recuperation was her illness. This is a single synthesis, drawn from a number of information bits.

On a more prescient level, do you ever experience a series of realizations, dramatically reshaping a chunk of your whole outlook?

First of all: I don't know whether I prefer to 'use' Ni. It's probably a bane of my existence, like chemistry [both literally and metaphorically].

Secondly, I dissolve paradoxes, not resolve them. Sometimes it's not appropiate to resolve them when their underlying assumptions are either stupid or naive. Case in point: the concept of "wave-particle duality". This is misleading, and creates the illusion that, for example light, has both wave and particle properties. The reality is that we associate photons [light particles] with a probability distribution--namely Bose-Einstein statistics--because they are discrete. The probability distribution may by continuous, and this gives rise to the 'strange' idea that a photon is potentially everywhere at once. Light does have wave properties, but this is exhibited as a macroscopic property [when, say, in a double-slit experiment, the width of the slit is far less than the distance from the slit to the detector screen].

Thirdly, I use my knowledge base to 'see' the world from different perspectives. Unfortunately, this leads me into a quite despondant attitude, as I do 'imagine' what would happen if we continue to pollute the skies for, say, the next few decades...or from a cosmic view, the fate of the Solar system far into the future. So I prefer not to dwell on such things. These 'visions' are only possible by my knowledge, not by mysticism. In fact, I don't see how having such mystical viewpoints gets me to a better understanding of reality...But I sometimes wish that I'm not alone in seeing things this way.
 

Thisica

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If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken - this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, - I never had any choice. A delight whose incredible tension sometimes triggers a burst of tears, sometimes automatically hurries your pace and sometimes slows it down; a perfect state of being outside yourself, with the most distinct consciousness of a host of subtle shudders and shiverings down to the tips of your toes; a profound joy where the bleakest and most painful things do not have the character of oppsites, but instead act as its conditions, as welcome components, as necessary shades within this sort of excess of light; an instinct for rhythmic relations that spans wide distances is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, something to balance out its pressure and tension . . . All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity . . .

A major Ni episode?

Well...it feels that way, but I always try to turn nonsense into sense. Which sounds utterly silly. But this is what I get for with a weird function order of Ni-Te. Even then, I value Te [and appreciate Ti for those who have it] more, due to my science training. But Ni's always in the background: the Universe of Ideas as I see it.
 

Thisica

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Introverted iNtuiting involves synthesizing the seemingly paradoxical or contradictory, which takes understanding to a new level. Using this process, we can have moments when completely new, unimagined realizations come to us.

It refuses to come to a concrete understanding of itself... It is kind of fun to assign human traits to a function.

It's the Universe of Ideas, of course! I can't compress it, any more than anyone could [given the fact that we are all immersed in information, which can be represented as a network of words, pictures, etc]. The Universe of Ideas, though subjective [since it is unique for each person], is navigable by reason.
 

uumlau

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First of all: I don't know whether I prefer to 'use' Ni. It's probably a bane of my existence, like chemistry [both literally and metaphorically].

In the typological sense, that is exactly what "prefer" means. :devil:

Secondly, I dissolve paradoxes, not resolve them. Sometimes it's not appropriate to resolve them when their underlying assumptions are either stupid or naive. Case in point: the concept of "wave-particle duality". This is misleading, and creates the illusion that, for example light, has both wave and particle properties. The reality is that we associate photons [light particles] with a probability distribution--namely Bose-Einstein statistics--because they are discrete. The probability distribution may by continuous, and this gives rise to the 'strange' idea that a photon is potentially everywhere at once. Light does have wave properties, but this is exhibited as a macroscopic property [when, say, in a double-slit experiment, the width of the slit is far less than the distance from the slit to the detector screen].

Actually, this behavior is a good metaphor for Ni, in that a simple change in boundary conditions changes the "answer." Except with Ni, it's more like, "Given constraint A, I am a bunny. Given constraint B, I am a solar flare." That is, to the "outside world," there is seemingly no possible connection between the two, and the changing constraints don't help the concrete perspective that a bunny isn't a solar flare, nor am I a bunny.

Thirdly, I use my knowledge base to 'see' the world from different perspectives. Unfortunately, this leads me into a quite despondant attitude, as I do 'imagine' what would happen if we continue to pollute the skies for, say, the next few decades...or from a cosmic view, the fate of the Solar system far into the future. So I prefer not to dwell on such things. These 'visions' are only possible by my knowledge, not by mysticism. In fact, I don't see how having such mystical viewpoints gets me to a better understanding of reality...But I sometimes wish that I'm not alone in seeing things this way.

Fortunately, this is simplistic Ni. If you pay attention to the news, you'll notice that you're being told that we're polluting things that badly, and there are plenty of concrete-minded people just as worried as you are. What is missing from the news and your analysis is a lot more data. The world is more dynamic than that. Economies and climates and aggregate human behavior are far more complex than that. Yes, disasters happen, but rarely the ones we predict. (But there are more than enough prophetical predictions that someone can say "I told you so.")

For example, pollution is an ongoing problem. It has been since the dawn of civilization. (Poop is pollution.) There are always trade-offs. We can curtail economic activity to reduce pollution, but that means less capacity to clean up pollution. We can reduce our impact in one arena, say by using low-flow toilets to conserve water, but cause a problem in another arena, as in San Francisco where a combination of low-flow toilets and a dry season is causing the sewers to become backed up and especially stinky.


More concrete information makes Ni more insightful and less mystical.
 

Thisica

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In the typological sense, that is exactly what "prefer" means. :devil:

I was emphaising on the "use" part of the sentence, though :) It's not as though "I" am another being that plays around in the head, hitting the "Ni" button all the time :rofl1:
I don't like the way we say at times that we "use" mental functions, as if they were things. Cognitive functions ain't things!

Fortunately, this is simplistic Ni. If you pay attention to the news, you'll notice that you're being told that we're polluting things that badly, and there are plenty of concrete-minded people just as worried as you are. What is missing from the news and your analysis is a lot more data. The world is more dynamic than that. Economies and climates and aggregate human behavior are far more complex than that. Yes, disasters happen, but rarely the ones we predict. (But there are more than enough prophetical predictions that someone can say "I told you so.")

For example, pollution is an ongoing problem. It has been since the dawn of civilization. (Poop is pollution.) There are always trade-offs. We can curtail economic activity to reduce pollution, but that means less capacity to clean up pollution. We can reduce our impact in one arena, say by using low-flow toilets to conserve water, but cause a problem in another arena, as in San Francisco where a combination of low-flow toilets and a dry season is causing the sewers to become backed up and especially stinky.


More concrete information makes Ni more insightful and less mystical.

It's probably more to do with how the media screws up our perception of the world, by publicising the negative news more often than positive ones. The Ni function's fine, I "think"...it acts as a simulation machine, accepting all sorts of outside data, and then after a few moments...out pops a result, regardless of whether it makes some sense or not.
 

RaptorWizard

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It's difficult to describe because it is the least concrete perceiving function - there is nothing in the real world to point at as a reference, it's all inside our heads. I didn't even know that my thinking was somehow "different," because it just got described as "smart." The first clue I had that I thought differently was that my explanations for why things were true just didn't register with people. In function-speak, I had to work on Te to actually explain my conclusions, but even then that didn't explain how I thought about things, all it did was supply objective (e) logical (T) "proof" that I knew what I was talking about.

It's also difficult to see oneself as being an "Ni dom." Jung is often typed as INTP (and I heard/read somewhere that he typed himself as INTP or Ti, but I don't have a source), yet if you read his writing, such as his original text on types, it doesn't read anything like an INTP would write: it's full of Ni-thinking. So, in MBTI terms, he was definitely an "introverted thinker" (INTx), but his writing makes it clear that INTJ (Ni) is far more probable than INTP (Ti). So, if I am right, and the originator of the concept of Ni couldn't see it in himself, what are we to make of Ni?

A Creator who cannot even understand his own creation as in he does not even know his own place in the creation or his own type I would guess is acting on instincts and imaginative impulses rather than from a rationalistic approach which I would agree that such a system of design is more intuitive or Ni than logical or Ti but of course I do not know much about the functions myself.
 

Vilku

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doffocult huh? No, Ni is jsut the sum of all thoughts ive had thorought my life and the uncosncious force who works as my errand boy giving me exactly the thoughts i need, and shes a god. At least christians think so, but i think im bigger than her.
 
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