Mal12345
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- Apr 19, 2011
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I've submitted several posts to this thread, explaining what Ni is. The enduring confusion makes me feel like it's trying to explain quantum mechanics.
Ni is simple, but people try to make it mysterious because it doesn't fit in their view of how functions work, or because they've read too much about how Ni "taps into the unconscious" (which is just a way of saying, "it's a mystery").
Both Ne and Ni as part of one's type mean that one thinks in terms of patterns instead of concrete things and experiences (which would be Se and Si). ("Patterns" is a more down-to-earth way of saying "abstract thinking".) So where Se seeks out new experiences and Si remembers/savors experiences, Ne seeks out new patterns while Ni remembers/savors patterns. That's it. It is no more complicated than that. Any further explanation is window-dressing, and not typology, per se.
It's this "remembering of patterns" that can be interpreted as "tapping into the unconscious". Well, it sort of is, because remembering concrete things and experiences things is a largely unconscious process: you either remember or you don't, it just happens, you "just know". Same thing for remembering patterns. You either remember or you don't. It just happens. You "just know". So Ni "just knows", because Ni types think in terms of patterns and remember patterns and apply patterns on the fly. When an Si type can remember something and informs others of those memories or their implication, no one wonders, "How did he know that?!?!" No one is mystified by someone remembering concrete facts/details/experiences. When an Ni type remembers patterns, and informs others of their implications, there are no words to describe the patterns*. Because the Ni type is just stating conclusions, e.g., "we need to do Y instead of X", the reasoning is along the lines of "because X won't work", and not "Remember last time we did X? It didn't work." So people wonder why X won't work, and often times the Ni type can't explain why, because they remember the pattern, that "this pattern of things doesn't work, or usually doesn't work". Worse, in the Ni type's head, one isn't even calling them "patterns", but just "intuitively" realizing that X won't work (due to the remembered patterns), but it takes a lot of effort to turn that understanding into a concrete explanation. That dynamic is what makes Ni seem mysterious, even though it really isn't.
*Without words, without a common language to convey the patterns, it seems very mysterious. In some professions, however, there ARE WORDS to describe the patterns. Engineering and computer science have jargon that describes "design patterns", while in physics, the laws of physics are the "design patterns". In these fields, you CAN actually say why you think X won't work and Y will. For these reasons, it can be easy to mix up Ni and Si types in engineering, because they have language and words to talk about abstract things clearly and definitively.
That's a very clear explanation, yet people still complain that they don't understand Ni despite 83 pages on the topic.
Of course I haven't read all 83 pages. Who has? Maybe you have? Then where are the examples here?
The idea of "tapping into the unconscious" comes from Jung who was obsessed with the unconscious because he was trying to explain his own thinking method to himself. Using the term "unconscious" was his particular idiom, his theory on the topic. He believed he had a special insight into the collective unconscious of mankind because he was an INFJ. Jung was one of those people who "just knows," but he wanted to theorize about how he knew it - by tapping into the collective unconsciousness of mankind which is the sum-total of all the archetypal symbols representative of humanity throughout history.
Your take on Ni is more psychological, less mystical than Jung's. But it doesn't get to the heart of what Jung was trying to say, it only describes a cognitive process.
I saw a movie a long time ago about a group of well drillers. In one of the scenes, most of the well drillers were standing around a table looking at a drawing while they tried to figure out some well drilling problem. But the odd one, the one that stands out as being different from the rest of the group, was taking a nap in a cot off to the side. While the guys were arguing about what to do, the oddball woke up a little, lifted his head up, and said, "use water." Then he went right back to sleep. The other workers stared at each other in amazement as they collectively realized that he had, somehow, produced the solution.
THAT'S what I mean by an example. Although it doesn't explain Jung's take on the topic, it explains why Ni is represented as mysterious.