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[Jungian Cognitive Functions] Ni - What the hell is it?

Kalach

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Lets say that as a function occurring in a person, intuition is all about the Exploration of Implication. The introverted version is an internal system. Implications within that system are variously extrapolated and refined, and depend on personal whim and on the layout of that inner world.

That inner world is however wildly flexible. It is expected that all available implications can be, and indeed should be, turned upon their heads. It is not only acceptable, but welcome and exciting, to have the entire system be open to reinterpretation. Indeed, to survive as a system, it must be open to reinterpretation. And the one systematic feature of this constant reinterpretation is a requirement that there exist meaning relationships between each new interpretation and the one or ones it succeeds. This is the process of building the metainterpretation.

And the meta, well, they say no one looks upon the meta and comes back wholly the same.
 

Amargith

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Seriously..the more I read about Ni, the more it resembles my Fi-process...or at least part of it :peepwall:
 

Aleksei

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Of all the functions, this is probably the hardest to understand what it means.

I mean you read a description and it's like "Knowing thins instinctively" and "Experiencing Premonitions" and it's just like WTF? It's hardly an explanation of how a mental function works. Does anyone have a better explanation? I can almost never tell definitively in characters if what they are using is Ne or Ni, since both are abstract idea generators and pattern connectors, supposedly.
Ni is about shifting perspectives. It solves problems by focusing on seemingly simple ways in which they could be different, which outwardly manifests as a strange "knowing" or clarity of how things should be. It is different in outward appearance from Ne in that Ni users are very self-assured about their own view of how things should be. Ne is always looking for options about how things should be different, and always considering different perspectives and changing its mind.
 

redacted

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Seriously..the more I read about Ni, the more it resembles my Fi-process...or at least part of it :peepwall:

Fi consciously decides if something is good or bad.
Ni unconsciously links pieces of information together.

They shouldn't overlap at all. It's true that they're both motivated by the assumptions in the internal experience, but they do very different things.

I always think of Ni as a giant concept-tree/map. New pieces of information are seen in the light of the concept-tree that has already been thought through. Each instance of Ni is another connection between nodes in the tree. Ne, on the other hand, doesn't spend energy linking new information to past understanding -- instead of a concept tree to ground the new info, the environment is grounding in and of itself. Each piece of input is seen for what it is, then expanded upon metaphorically. Whereas with Ni, each piece of input is seen for how it relates to the internal world, then expanded upon metaphorically.

I hope that made sense.
 

Aleksei

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Ni doesn't really link information together -- that's more akin to the Ne process of pattern-finding. What Ni itself does is analyze information by playing with its own perspective of it; as opposed to Ne, which links information to other seemingly unrelated environmental factors, weaving a new emerging pattern out of reality.
 

redacted

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Ni doesn't really link information together -- that's more akin to the Ne process of pattern-finding. What Ni itself does is analyze information by playing with its own perspective of it; as opposed to Ne, which links information to other seemingly unrelated environmental factors, weaving a new emerging pattern out of reality.

"playing with its own perspective" can be thought of as changing around connections between nodes/switching schemas, etc.

They both work by connecting nodes together that weren't connected before. Since Ni feeds on itself, it can go through tens of repetitions and create something that looks like an entirely new schema. But each step is just one connection. Ne probably wouldn't change things around in such a focused way, as each new piece of information resets the environment.
 

Eric B

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Descriptions of Ni always seem to be in terms of what it does, moreso than what it is.

I've come to think of Ni in terms of models or "templates" of situations. These are basically internalized patterns that we retain and identify situations with, rather then external patterns necessarily inherent in the objects themselves.

So it deals with the archetypal, including a lot of fictional characters, which are themselves often products of universal archetypes (such as stories involving a more serious character, with a silly airheaded one: the "senex" and the "puer" or parent and child figures).

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 (called "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 event templates.

Beren's "philosophy of life" descriptions for the functions (the little quotes on the top of the page in her book on the functions) 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.


"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.

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. The application was clearly an abstract model, and not a hard prediction.

She also (in an article somewhere) used a forest analogy, where the template would be what the forest was said to be symbolic of. Life's interconnectedness, which includes recycling. Things are created, then destroyed, and new things are created from the, Hence, the replacement of forest with a housing development (possibly with materials made from the forest!) will play out this pattern.
 

Arclight

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Ok it's pretty obvious nobody has a damn clue. except Eric B:yes: and begrudgingly, Marm, at least she knows what Ni and Ne aren't..

Therefore I am going to stick with what I ascertained from Jung, Myers + Briggs and Kieresy ..
 

Aleksei

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Descriptions of Ni always seem to be in terms of what it does, moreso than what it is.

I've come to think of Ni in terms of models or "templates" of situations. These are basically internalized patterns that we retain and identify situations with, rather then external patterns necessarily inherent in the objects themselves.

So it deals with the archetypal, including a lot of fictional characters, which are themselves often products of universal archetypes (such as stories involving a more serious character, with a silly airheaded one: the "senex" and the "puer" or parent and child figures).

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 (called "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 event templates.

Beren's "philosophy of life" descriptions for the functions (the little quotes on the op of the page in her book on the functions) 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.


"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.

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. The application was clearly an abstract model, and not a hard prediction.

She also (in an article somewhere) used a forest analogy, where the template would be what the forest was said to be symbolic of. Life's interconnectedness, which includes recycling. Things are created, then destroyed, and new things are created from the, Hence, the replacement of forest with a housing development (possibly with materials made from the forest!) will play out this pattern.
This may be the best description of Ni and Ne I've ever seen.
 
S

Sniffles

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Allow me to paraphrase one ENFP on the differences between Ne and Ni:

Ne seems to operate within time
Ni seems to operate outside time


I often notice that Ne-doms seem to very adept at punditry. By pundit, I mean in the manner it's traditionally understood as "someone who offers to mass-media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable." As we even see with pundit shows, a vast range of topics are discussed, and it's often very fast-paced. Yes it often can be loud too(but not necessarily).

By contrast, speaking for myself at least - I don't thrive in such an enviroment. I tend to prefer a more calm in-depth discussion on certain themes. I say themes because there maybe a wide range of angles and topics involved, but there's still an underlining theme involved. Here's an excellent example of what I'm talking about from a scholar I have great respect for:

[youtube="_99ZCeO7wfU"]Ni at work?[/youtube]
FYI, I often classify ^^ as INFJ, but he definately is Ni-dom.
 

Kalach

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Ni, I insist, isn't frameworks, plural. It's the conglomeration of frameworks. The framework of frameworks. Ni is The 42. The activity of Ni is the reinvention of frameworks to generate The 42. As such "seeing the future" is a byproduct. We should say that frameworks come and go, but parts of their content stay and, frequently, are altered. It's a perception function after all, and restless, meaning any given framework provides much too static a vision of things and isn't enough, however ironic this should sound against the assertion that Ni is the 42. "The 42" is all possible 42s merged into 42, and is an end state where all things implode into One. Naturally, I metaphorialise, seeking once again the new single description of the many. That is the 42 at work.

The goal is the one single unifying framework. The practice is the invention of multiple frameworks. And these two things are not contradictory. There must after all be some guiding principle in the creation of frameworks, or these frameworks would be as content-free as the next wild surmise.

But still, what is a framework? Shall I hedge and say a framework is a perspective? Or shall I say a framework is (not identical to but embodied by) an act of interpretation?

Such frameworks as appear in the functioning of introverted intuition are (embodied by) those acts of reinterpreting common data. The goal is to show how those common data are part of the 42. And there is a tension between "showing" and mere "seeing". On that point one ought to note that there is some Yin/Yang relationship between a common datum and the re-interpretation of that common datum, but that relationship is more exactly the province of some extroverted function. The 42 seeks only to re-imagine what exists until it all fits into the re-image of the everything, and one can finally settle into nothingness.

It is, after all, an introverted function.
 

Polaris

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marmalade.sunrise said:
Ni is an unwavering singular vision - that singular vision can be awesome and correct, or it can be paranoid or even batshit insane. And by "vision" I don't mean psychic vision. I mean VISION - like I SAY THIS WILL BE, for example a successful business, a brilliant film, a social solution, the very foundation of Christianity...or Nazi Germany, and religious cults. It gives Ni users a kind of focus (at least if they're using their Fe or Te fully) to manifest something new.
Rather than a singular vision, I would say that Ni has a certain confidence about how a whole range of things could or will pan out. What these things are depends on what Ni is focusing on at a particular moment, and 99% of the time, it's something extremely mundane like a successful career (which you mentioned) or (as Eric mentioned, via Berens) avoiding a certain kind of pet because it's occurred to you what will happen if you don't. These visions aren't precisely unwavering, either. At the time that I'm caught up in them (I can't speak for others), they have a lot of definiteness about them, yes, and if you were to ask me about them, you would come away thinking that I'm dead set on seeing them through. At the same time, though, I'm always receptive to new visions, some of which might supplant the old ones. Those visions have to be my own--I resist any kind of external input--and that's probably what creates the impression of someone who is rigidly set in their ways.

marmalade.sunrise said:
Ni is also a penetrating intuitive evaluation of the person or situation. It can be scarily spot on - like wow! - or bizarrely out of left field and ...not.

It's a kind of creativity and imagination that springs from within - I think one of the reasons I recognize myself as an Ne user is because I collect things to make something new, like a collage. Or I see patterns in divergent things or ideas. On the other hand, I think Ni users seem to come up with things that seem PURELY IMAGINATIVE. Like sometimes I feel like Ni users are more creative than me, because I can recognize how I've collected things from other sources and pieced them together into something new. But their creativity can at least appear to be...singularly unique...because it comes from their inner intuition instead of extroverted intuition.
Yes, this is spot-on for me, so good job.
 

IZthe411

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I don't think future and past are that useful in explaining the difference between the two. Intuition is simply abstract thought, and you can think of a spectrum of that thought as having internally driven on one side and externally driven on the other. Ne, being externally driven, will think abstractly about what's currently going on (including where the conversation is, what the social assumptions are, where the user is, etc.). Ni, being internally driven, will think abstractly about whatever is going on in their own heads (including the output of the last Intuition).

(I italicized 'about' because the distinction between the two functions is only based on what they look at, not what the mechanism is.)

So Ni can feed off itself (and other introverted functions) without once referencing the outside world. Ne can only feed on itself if the environment is affected. This makes Ne users more adaptable -- anything that comes at them can be thought of without the weight of past thoughts. It also means Ni users think more deeply about fewer ideas. They both have their pros and cons -- there is a tradeoff between integrating new information and processing information you already have.

What's here, especially the bottom portion is a very good way to explain it.
 

Billy

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Simplest way to look at it, Ni is just connecting the dots of random data into an answer. It boils the random data which seems unconnected, connects and boils it down into an answer. Ne is more about taking a single issue or bit of data and following it outward to other possibilities or tangents.
 

IZthe411

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When dealing with the external world, Ni involves getting perceptually outside of a system, usually in order to take a shortcut or avoid a pitfall that everyone who plays by the rules is oblivious to. You might be wandering through a maze, for example, when it suddenly occurs to you that you don't need to weave your way through the halls and corridors; you can climb over the walls or dig a tunnel under them instead, and reach your goal in a more direct fashion.

Ni will often see ways to take advantage of the assumptions it detaches from. For example, an Ni user may realize that there is a certain style of speech, a certain carriage, a certain overall way of presenting oneself that creates the mere impression of authority; and that Ni user will by the same stroke learn how to make themselves appear authoritative to others, who for the most part, won't be perceptive enough to question appearances.

So Ni is essentially about playing the game instead of letting the game play you. This becomes possible only through an attitude of detachment toward the world, an attitude that regards the world as a place made up of people carrying out actions in an uncritical and almost mindless fashion. To the extent that an Ni user continues to develop that sense of detachment, they'll eventually seek a perspective that transcends the world and even conception itself, discarding them both as mere appearances. What is left is Ni at its purest, and linguistically, this purity of intuition can only be described as a kind of silence or nothingness, not because those words are at all accurate but because they don't mean anything: they erase language and lay bare the essence that Ni seeks.


That essence is the silent truth within us--the clear vision, the lucid knowledge, the "just knowing" that constitutes Ni at its purest. That knowledge may take the form of a certain future, an insight into another person's behavior, or any number of things. What is essential to this knowledge is its irrationality: it doesn't come from anywhere or take an instant to arise, nor does it spring from any line of reasoning.

What's bolded is Pi- introverted perception, in general.

And Ni can't be about shortcutting. It can have the appearance of it, because it's taking whatever information it has at that point and leaping to conclusions/basis with it. Comparatively , Si has the ability to 'leap', but their conclusions/basis are related to what they've experienced in the past, while Ni's may or may not. Unlike Si, experiences aren't heavily relied upon. I'd say, compared to Si, Ni gets you there faster but with more risk of inaccuracy.
 

Night

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Of all the functions, this is probably the hardest to understand what it means.

I mean you read a description and it's like "Knowing thins instinctively" and "Experiencing Premonitions" and it's just like WTF? It's hardly an explanation of how a mental function works. Does anyone have a better explanation? I can almost never tell definitively in characters if what they are using is Ne or Ni, since both are abstract idea generators and pattern connectors, supposedly.

It's a little more concerted than a vague, oceanic feeling of certainty.

Ni is the quiet accumulation of ostensibly unrelated items, often spanning various fields. It's an assembly line of different parts collectively configured to be something meaningful; something once hidden.

Think of how a car is made in a factory. Each part is independently sharpened to perfection before joining the central engine block. By themselves, the parts hold less value - it's only when all are cohesively formulated does meaning emerge.

Such is Ni.
 

OrangeAppled

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Seriously..the more I read about Ni, the more it resembles my Fi-process...or at least part of it :peepwall:

Seriously....using FiNe makes Ni seem rather unimpressive to me. The demi-god status of it 'round these parts makes me roll my eyes. I like the simple descriptions, as there's no pretense of mystery or superiority. They actually make sense & ring true to me because of it. Of course, I hate having my Fi oversimplified, so I can understand why Ni-doms become all poetic in describing their precious thought process. :p
 

Aleksei

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Simplest way to look at it, Ni is just connecting the dots of random data into an answer. It boils the random data which seems unconnected, connects and boils it down into an answer. Ne is more about taking a single issue or bit of data and following it outward to other possibilities or tangents.
What? No; Ne is about finding hidden patterns. Taking unconnected data and forming theories out of them is a very Ne skill.
 
G

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It is very important that people understand that a cognitive function does not a personal behaviour make.

Ok, master.

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