Exactly.
The one thing I would add just to clarify, as I believe non-dom-Ni users don't quite understand us in this regard: when uumlau says interesting discoveries lie inward, it does not mean merely inward toward ourselves, but deeper within the object itself. In a sense, we become the object, and we then try to better understand the object by better understanding "ourselves".
http://www.typologycentral.com/forums/nf-idyllic/33971-enfp-our-inner-simulacrums.html
I created the above thread to subjectively capture what FiSi does in ENFPs.
To Ne the idea along, I assume very similar things may happen in INFPs with FiSi and that the equivalent occurs in TiSi with respect to logical "archetypes" in both NTPs.
If You guys make the object become part of you....are you using Te inside of your head to study the potentials present once you understand the object? And the object becomes an "archetype" at this point and can represent a whole class of similar objects?
Do the INFJs somehow do this with people? Or are the objects they incorporate more Fe oriented...thus forming people archetypes?
once the object is part of you, is it there forever? Do you have emotive attachments to the object/archetype? (Oh.....Hey U-this is why INTJs fall in love with the "idea" of love....while ENFPs just fall in love with imaginary people in our heads
)
If we initially start as small children using our dom or aux introverted function to mirror our world, those mirrors become part of us and are self defining....we become as adults what our introverted functions saw as children....and absorbed from our world around us...
However we get a second chance to evolve when we start growing in that second introverted function, in our 20s....as it finds very different things to imprint, mirror, and mold....
thus our internal world, our sense of self is defined by two introveretd functions......at some point I would guess the second introverted function starts to play a larger and larger role over the first....
yeah Ne babble....sorry...
I think you're becoming a bit too intrigued with something that is merely a metaphor, and seems similar to how you experience Ne.
I don't "become the object."
I just think about it, a lot. I "play with it" in my head. There's a huge amount of experimentation that goes on without even having to set up a real life lab apparatus.
The reason it becomes accurate is that I still occasionally look at the real-life object, double-checking my conclusions. If I'm wrong about something, I absorb that information and include it in my internal model. If I'm right about something, then I start digging deeper.
All those times you see an INTJ staring into space, doing nothing ... we're juggling these internal models. It could be deep philosophical or scientific thoughts, or it could be a puzzle, or a computer game, or a book, or a movie (and the movie does NOT end like it does in real life, we're making it "better").
The longer we juggle these thoughts, the more we "just know" things about our topic of interest.
The more we "just know," the more we are able to make eerily accurate predictions with respect to our topic of interest.
Where Z's metaphor has a great deal of accuracy is that we essentially absorb all there is to know about something, such that the "thing" exists within us with a very high degree of accuracy. When making a prediction, I don't try to "figure it out" because I've already spent hours or days or years thinking about it: instead, I just let the "thing" do what it normally does
in my head. I don't worry about what it should or shouldn't do, it just does it, on its own. So in that abstract sense, I am the thing, but really I don't lose my ego to it. It exists within me, and I animate it, but when I watch the animation, it feels like it's the thing, it doesn't feel like me.
When you read about INTJs having multiple streams of thought in their heads, or watching movies, or entertaining themselves with thought games in their heads, this is what we're doing.
In Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," he introduces the Martian word "grok." It has since entered into popular usage. It means to really truly and fully understand something. It brings in a bit of what Z was saying, in that it means to understand so fully that the observer becomes part of the observed. In the book, Michael (the stranger) eventually comes to his own understanding of God: that which groks is God, leading to his heretical statement of "Thou art God."
[So, in that limited context, when you run into INTJs who think they're God, they're right!]