Oh oops nevermind just ignore my above post, I just saw your cognitive functions results in the other post. I have managed to narrow down your type to INFJ, ISFJ, ISTJ and ISTP.
Among these few functions below, which do you think describes you best? Ni, Si, or Ti?
Ni: "I just like putting all of life's little dreams in perspective. The real world is inside my head. Imagination is the doorway to the world--if you can imagine it, then it exists. The difficulty lies in compromising that world enough to get along with the other one. I mean, if you think about it, I have no proof that you or anybody else really exists. Is anything really 'true' in the most ultimate sense? Or is whatever we think of as 'truth' just another frame of reference, with no more objective value than anything else? I try not to take any one definition of reality too seriously, because then I lose the ability to give equal consideration to others."
As introverted perception (Pi) dominants, INFJs are constantly busy with the private inner world of subjective association of signs and symbols with personalized meaning. Both Pi functions (Ni and Si) are concerned with generating internalized impressions of past experience--in this way they are quite similar. But while Si depends on specific and concrete sensory data to build its personal conceptual map of meaning, Ni instead depends on more vague and loosely defined skeletons of the intangible and abstract relationships between ideas. It can't build a map as thorough and complete as that of an Si type who has directly experienced all of the information in a given area, but it can use the conceptual outlines of its own experiences to "fill in the blanks" and predict how related experiences that it hasn't actually had will feel in terms of the personal impression they create.
Often, the way a particular piece of information strikes them is simply too dependent upon the assumptions inherent in Ni's worldview to make its significance meaningful to anyone else. Putting it into words ruins the point because words are yet another limited medium which carries too many inherent assumptions to fully carve out an effective vocabulary for the conceptual impressions in which Ni specializes.
As an introverted perception function, dominant Ni is not making any kind of value judgments. It's only taking in impressions--as many different possible interpretations of the significance of any given idea or event as possible. That may sound similar to Ne on the surface, but it's not--Ne is picking up a lot of different events and ideas at once and looking for common threads between them; Ni is picking one idea or event at a time and examining ("from a clean slate", as Yukawa says) every angle of every component of that one thing in order to find any as-of-yet untried interpretations that might cause us to view the whole issue in an entirely new light.
While Ne explodes into a million new places from one starting point, Ni is much more comfortable "imploding" into an overarching interpretation that combines many different disparate elements into one more cohesive whole. Often this results in the keen ability to pare down many different apparently disparate options into the best and most effective option for the singular vision that the INFJ's judgment functions have decided is the best use of time. This ability often leads others to see INFJs as possessing some sort of mystical, almost supernatural foresight; of course, there is nothing supernatural about--Ni simply notes the general ideas implied by conceptual impressions, and from there it's not a difficult jump to imagine how they might be deconstructed or rearranged for different purposes. Ni dominants are often surprised and a little perplexed that others don't naturally see the unstated meaning that characterizes their entire self-experience.
Ni dislikes forcing rationalized structure onto its conceptual impressions because that structure is bound to operate under a certain set of assumptions which may prematurely (and without even realizing it) eliminate the very kind of information Ni is interested in: using past experiences with related conceptual frameworks to eliminate the barriers on its holistic understanding of symbols and the meaning they signify.
Often, INFJs feel that others operate under too many unstated assumptions of meaning to even follow the esoteric trains of internal imagination in which they live. All too commonly this results in feelings of isolation: the INFJ sees himself as too unorthodox in his very assumptions about the nature of reality to fit into the frameworks by which most of the people surrounding him define themselves.
Si: "It seems so obvious that it's kind of silly I even have to say it, but things just always seem to go more smoothly when you know exactly what you're doing. There's really nothing quite like having your own private map for how to do things--the more I study and work on the areas I'm interested in, the more I develop this ability to connect my experiences to everything else I've done, and the process just builds and builds. I don't even mean for it to happen that way--I guess I just know what kinds of things I like, and I know what makes me comfortable and what doesn't, and I know that the more I plan my life around setting myself up to work in areas I know I'm confident in, the more I'm going to succeed and the more in-depth information I'm going to have about the skills I specialize most in. I think one of my greatest strengths is that I know what I'm good at, and, perhaps even more importantly, I know what I'm not good at, and I have the good sense to know when to avoid the latter. I don't understand why people insist on haphazardly jumping into things they don't have any idea how to handle properly. What's the point? If you don't know what you're doing, aren't you just bound to fail?"
ISFJ is one of the most poorly understood types in the entire Jungian Cognitive Function canon. The fact that they're often misunderstood and inaccurately stereotyped as groveling doormats who live to serve others and let people walk all over them serves only as a testament to the true extent of their humility in terms of how private they keep their true selves and their real passions and interests.
While they do prefer to conduct the bulk of their interactions with the external world through auxiliary Fe (which I'll get to in the next section), that is not at all the primary focus of an ISFJ's cognitive hierarchy or preferred lifestyle. To understand the significance of Si, we need to touch for a moment on the overall nature of introverted perception (Pi) in general, and to compare and contrast it with the extroverted perception attitudes by which most people who have written about ISFJs have gathered their information and totally missed the point of what these people and their dominant attitudes are really all about.
There's a scene in the film Across the Universe where two characters argue over the dinner table about the nature of experience and identity. While one of them, a young P type, argues that, "Who you are determines what you do", the older character (presumably a J type) insists on exactly the opposite: "What you do determines who you are." This latter attitude is a great way to introduce oneself to the philosophy central to Si: we build our identities on the experiences we've internalized. This is fundamentally why Si dominants go to such great lengths to control their experiential intake: they're not turning down unfamiliar experiences just to annoy their ExxP friends; they simply understand that the comfort in perceptual familiarity is such a powerful force in their own lives that they have to be extremely careful not to fill themselves up with too many experiences that might not end up being healthy or productive for them in the long run.
They know themselves well enough to realize that, above all, their natural tendency to seek out very specific kinds of informational and experiential input depends directly on the kinds of input they've become accustomed to through their prior life experiences. Like their Ni dominant cousins, Si dominants are most concerned with how their individual cognitive tendencies associate meaning with various kinds of signs and information; however, since they assign this meaning based on direct association with highly detailed sensory information imprinted on their consciousness from previous associations, they know that if they start spending a lot of time involving themselves in a certain kind of experience, the fact that it becomes familiar and slowly works its way into their experiential comfort zone means they may start to like it. And then they may never stop doing it.
While Pe dominants are constantly on the search for all sorts of new information and new experiences of as many different kinds as they can get their hands on, there's not as much of a threat of becoming attached to any one specific sort of experience or information. They'll just tire of it and look for something new the next day anyway, but not so for Pi dominants: since they have to focus their attention fully and completely on whatever kind of information they're seeking out, they can't just shut off this focus and switch to a different kind of input on a whim. Once they allow themselves to become immersed in the absorption of an experience, they know they won't stop until they've built a completely internalized map of every detail of every piece of meaning this experience has for them. Their choices of experiences literally create their identities--so how can they not be constantly wary of what sorts of experiences they let in?
ISFJs are, above all, highly cognizant of their own impressionable nature. They like to figure out what areas interest them, and then maximize the absorption of all sorts of information, data, skill sets, and experiences related to "mapping" as much of that terrain as humanly possible. I've known ISFJs who sit up all night on Wikipedia reading about their favorite subjects. Note that they don't prefer hopping around to as many different unrelated articles as they can find--they have a focus, a taste for certain particular flavors of input, and they want to know everything they can about those specific areas. If you've ever watched Antiques Road Show, well over half of the expert analysts who appear on that show are likely ISxJ types. They didn't necessarily set out to become experts in their fields--they just found that they so enjoyed internalizing sensory information related to, say, World War II-era Confederate rifles, or Kandinsky paintings from the 1920s, that after focusing their lives on these fascinating pursuits for so long, they eventually found that they'd become certifiable experts. Given enough time to learn, absorb, and practice all the established information, methodology, and techniques in a given area, Si dominants will outperform virtually everyone in terms of consistency and thorough attention to detail.
Ti: "Above all, I like to maintain a consistent outlook that fits well with the things I like to do and the way I like to do them. I'll stay out of your way and, as long as I offer you that courtesy, I expect the same in return. I like to work with things where I can figure out the best approach myself and then tweak and adjust the pieces and see or hear or smell an immediate change or improvement. If something isn't doing what I want it to, I need to be able to get my hands on it, figure out what makes it tick, and rebuild it how I want to without having to worry about it making sense to anyone else or getting approval from how they'd do it. More than anything, it's important that we let each other have the freedom to do what we want, when we want to--if I don't see that it's going to have any real impact or I don't think it makes any practical sense, I'm not going to do it."
ISTP is an often poorly understood type that embodies a number of seemingly contradictory characteristics and seems to confuse a lot of people. It's been suggested by some that ISTPs are so different from INTPs that they should not be seen as even having the same dominant function at all--but I contend that there quite a number of similarities between the two in principle, even if the outward expressions of these principles are approached in very different ways.
Above all, dominant Ti values a highly refined sense of universal correctness, fairness, and internal consistency. While ISTPs may not make this belief as overtly obvious as their oft-argumentative INTP cousins, they ultimately believe that fair is fair and there's no getting around the idea that some things are inherently more fair, more consistent, and more reasonable than others. The thing that makes this difficult to discern is that ISTPs are, by far, the least interested in debate of all four xxTP types. They'd much rather actively demonstrate their principles and ideals through concrete action than spend time sitting around trying to convince other people that they're right. While they may easily grasp the reasoning behind various abstract representations of logical reasoning (especially when tertiary Ni is developed), they simply don't see any reason to talk about it when they could be creating, building, or participating in something that generates realistically tangible representations of the structural and symmetrical relationships that fascinate their sense of global systemic consistency.
Inconsistent reasoning and poor logic irritate the ISTP just as much as they do the INTP; the ISTP is simply much less concerned with using abstracted hypothetical explanation to demonstrate why. Actions speak louder than words. Why should he bother with empty words and arguments when he can simply show you demonstrably what it is that represents the personal sense of structural completeness around which his values are centered?
Fiercely independent, resourceful, and self-reliant, ISTPs will tend to disregard or ignore outright any rule, law, or external expectation that doesn't fit their internal set of principles regarding what's inherently fair and reasonable. They are characteristically skeptical of any external attempt to compel them to behave in any particular way, as they feel that often the people designing and imposing these rules are neither logically-minded nor genuinely experienced in the areas of life that their frivolous rules and laws will impact most. Very few things upset the ISTP's core sense of fairness more than unreasonable attempts to restrict his freedom of action or impose the will of others upon his own.
Like most Ti types, ISTPs tend to have an interest in systems and the relationships and frameworks that make them fit together the way they do. They will pour extraordinary amounts of time into the study of these systems, but rarely through book study, never without hands-on experience, and not necessarily because they accomplish any particular goals--mostly just because internalizing and possessing complete understanding of all the variables that make up a complete system is inherently satisfying on its own.
