"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick.
Great quote. PKD has a nice way of saying things.
I tend to think very little actually falls into this realm. Perhaps nothing.
I can feel this doubtful of 'reality' at times. Certainly, belief and perception are impossible to separate. The beliefs we can see the clearest are someone else's.
To my mind, reality is most often, perhaps always, the perceptual experience of the person experiencing it. My experienced reality is different than another's. As humans sharing a life experience, they are interdependent reality experiences, but that does not make them the same. Nor does a difference between two perceptual realities mean either one is in error.
I'm attracted to this perspective because its very accepting and I know that you mean it genuinely.
I feel an internal compulsion to honor factual reality if I encounter it, but I feel no obligation to adopt someone else's vision of "truth" or reality as my own if I find it to simply be an agreed upon shared vision of reality among a particular group of people.
I think I have something akin to this internal compulsion of yours. To deny to myself a perceived factual reality would feel like sacrelige.
I do not think NFs believe whatever they want, to the exclusion of objectivity, at least, to any balanced NFs. Merely that they find ways to make the truth more easily acceptable to them, as their compass is an internal world of relationships, so how things can fit into their web matters more. If I don't read the NFs here wrong, their thoughts seem to go along "of what use is the world, if we do not have each other".
That comes close, but its not the relationships with other people that is the fundamental value for me. Its simply relationships of subjective experiences and realities(mine and others; intrasubjective and intersubjective) of whatever ilk. A fact in isolation is meaningless. Its how the fact connects with other facts and to the world that creates a greater meaning. True, this does involve your statement that "of what use is the world, if we do not have each other".
An idea of truth that I like is the Buddhist view of Dependent Co-arising. Its simultaneously abstract and idealistic, experiential and relational. It feels like an NF kind of idea to me, objectively unprovable and yet highly meaningful.
I actually think NFs second-guess themselves a lot more than NTs, and that is where the compassion comes in, and if you see the approach to finding truth as an unravelling of layers, then they do it better.
That hits the nail on the head. I know that I second-guess myself endlessly and one of the ways I think of truth is as existing in layers. There is something to the correlation of uncertainty of truth and compassion. The more uncertain I feel, the more compassionate I feel. I idealize compassion, and maybe a part of me idealizes self-doubt along with it. Uncertainty creates an openess in my experience which feels 'true'.
An NT's world is frequently harsher. But we do also have to question if someone who goes for brutal honesty is after the honesty or the brutality. The former will work in favour of objectivity. The latter could cloud things worse than emotions and consideration for others would. To add to the analogy. "Of what use are others if it is the wrong world".
Maybe NFs are less likely to brutally honest in the way of NTs, but to be fair I know I can be brutally honest when I feel one of my values has been treaded on. The difference might be that the healthy NF under normal circumstances would rather not be brutally honest even if the facts are obvious to them. Some NFs can be quite abrasive when they feel they're in the right.
From an INFP's perspective:
The truth does not change.
Introverted Feeling
Extraverted Intuition
Fi idealism projected into Ne future possibilties.
Have you heard the saying, "Look to a gown of gold, and you will at least get a sleeve of it?" What I don't understand about T's is why they're satisfied with nature and reality as they are. I want to try and make reality as close to my idea of how it should be as possible, even if it isn't necessarily logical to do so.
That's a nice saying. I'd never heard it before.
That relates to what I've heard about optimists. Supposely, optimists are less accurate in their perceptions of present reality, but they're more capable of creating new future realities. It takes some severe depression to cause an NF to lose their hopeful imagination. Depression often only fuels an NFs dreaming of what could be.
Let's just say it's very easy for an xxFP to incorporate values that aren't very good, and it's near impossible to get rid of them once they're in there.
This might be true. Once a value is deeply implanted in my psyche it takes on a life of its own.
Fi can be held accountable to... what? Itself?
Fi is held accountable to collective moral ideals even if they aren't as ameliorable to specific social conditions as Fe would be. Fi isn't merely personal subjectivism.
If what you are saying was true, NFs would be very unlikely to be paranoid, have issues with anxiety, or to suffer from depression, wouldn't they?
I for one can vouch for anxiety and depression.
NFs don't necessarily consider truth and fact the same thing, nor see concrete reality as the only reality.
Yep. I'm more likely to argue about 'truth' rather than to argue a specific truth.