The Paradox of Dominant Intuition

"No time but now."
"There is no 'now.' More precisely, there is nothing but 'now,' so no need to divide 'now' and 'not-now.'"
"This is it. There is nothing but this. Can you prove otherwise?"
"This has no purpose, no function, no essence. It just is."

Paradoxical or not, introspection-prone dominant intuition types, especially those with extraverted intuition (damn, I miss those symbols!), often come to an understanding of reality that seems to deny the very essence of their leading function.

Perhaps the best expression of this can be found in the world of non-duality. I find the male extraverted intuiter teachers to be most radical in their expression of non-duality, and most satisfying to me personally.

Specifically, Jim Newman and Fred Davis (both IEE, I believe). Take a look at them if curious. Some refer to this type of teaching as "Neo-Advaita" or "Radical Advaita." Among past teachers in the East, perhaps the most uncompromising was Nisargadatta Maharaj (ILE, I believe).

There are, of course, plenty of non-ILE/IEE non-dual teachers, such as Adyashanti (some rational type, maybe LSE), Rupert Spira (LII?), Mooji (SEI?), Eckhart Tolle (probably IEI) and countless others.

But also look at music. Dominant intuition types often gravitate to improvisation, and some of the best-known improvisers are extraverted intuiters like John McLaughlin (IEE) or Frank Zappa (IEE or ILE -- update 02.2021: I now think Zappa's type is EIE).

From a certain perspective, radical improvisation could be said to be a rejection of time: "I will consider nothing but the present moment. There will be absolutely no plan whatsoever, no consideration of how the music is supposed to unfold, no comparison to the way I might think it should be."

I also find a preponderance of extraverted intuiters in contact improvisation, which is the same as radical musical improvisation, but in the realm of dance and bodily interaction.

In the realm of language learning, I myself developed an approach which rejects the idea of preparation and looking towards a future time when you will have more knowledge than you currently do. You take whatever you know now and apply it in practice in the moment, while learning in the moment. Nothing needs to be learned other than what comes up in practice. This radical approach resonates with a small minority of language learners, but produces stellar results.

(Needless to say, I myself strongly gravitate to all these approaches, and always in their most radical forms which are unpalatable to most people. Apparently I am a radical kind of person. Not all intuitive types are by any stretch.)

Is this a rejection of intuition, a pull towards the suggestive function, or the maximal expression of intuition? Or something else?

Thresholds and Psychological Types

I think the concept of thresholds might be important in unraveling the mysteries of different psychological types.

A threshold is "the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested" (MacBook Dictionary).

Thresholds are already a working concept in neuropsychology, and some types of thresholds -- such as pain thresholds -- have already been well-researched. Some people react to pain at lower pain levels, while others are more resistant. The lower a threshold, the greater one's sensitivity.

Could it be that socionic types essentially differ on the basis of their thresholds for different kinds of stimuli? Or might threshold levels at least be a partial answer to the question, "what are the significant mechanistic differences between people?"

I see this "mechanistic approach" to personality as the opposite of socionics' more traditional "abstract logic" approach where logical categories are established and phenomena (people, interaction, information, behavior) are classified according to these categories, but 1) there is never absolute certainty as to whether the established categories are actually the most useful ones, and 2) the actual mechanisms by which the categories exist and operate are unknown.

The pitfalls of socionics' dominant methodology are well-known and far-reaching, and I feel like I talk about them in every other blogpost. The shortcomings of the mechanistic approach are 1) the slow pace of scientific progress and 2) the possibility that the results obtained through research will be too disorderly to be of much use to laymen. In my opinion, many socionists have a gut fear of disorderly scientific findings messing up their clear mental picture of things socionic.

But I digress. The mechanistic approach must be developed in socionics to bring it back to life and make it something more than a scientific conjecture (that is treated as fact by many of its proponents).

When looking for thresholds that may be significant determinants of interpersonal behavior and compatibility, I see no reason to assume that there must be 4, 8, or 16 such thresholds, or that the level of the threshold can be only "high" or "low," making it convenient to divide people into two discrete groups. Or that each threshold must be independent of the others (such as the four Jungian dichotomies), making it convenient to create a typology.

I would prefer to work from the bottom up, observing individual people and looking for thresholds, and basically any traits in general, that seem to play a significant role in their interaction with the world around them.

It is easiest to start with myself and people with a temperament similar to my own. From what I can tell:

- well-developed planning faculties, but unwillingness to make long-term plans (commitments) due to impulsivity (see below) and changeability of one's state

- low short-term self-control (things like leaving the house on time, abstaining from eating free cookies, or redoing one's work), but fairly high ability to make rational longer-term choices

- impulsivity as a result of low short-term self-control and changeability of moods and desires (a low threshold to a certain kind of stimuli?)

- waves of productivity as a result of impulsitivity; someone like this typically has to find a way to exploit one's changeable mental states in order to be productive, for instance by choosing an unstructured lifestyle and developing productive activities for each recurring state, and then engaging in each of them as the states change

- generally high threshold to signals from one's own body and to sensory signals in general; can easily take a mental interest in these areas via study or mentorship

- strong tendency towards mental absorption, which is a positive emotional experience; this absorption is often stronger than the demands of one's physical needs and almost always stronger than one's self-control, leading one to "overdo" things and neglect one's personal needs and external duties, if any

- great interest in information exchange with other people; a need to know what's going on in the spheres one is interested in and exchange information about it with other people

- low novelty threshold, and novelty is associated with positive emotional experiences; mental activity is easily stimulated by anything unexpected, unusual, and unfamiliar (however, this applies only to things that can provide mental stimulation: news, information, facts, activities, people, capabilities of other people, characteristics of the environment)

- as a result, one tends to use novelty as an "upper" to stimulate positive states and motivate oneself to act; lack of novelty is associated with boredom, lethargy, and indifference

- avoidance of pain and potentially painful situations (low pain threshold?), whether physical or interpersonal; this can lead to avoidant behavior patterns and an unwillingness to deal with problems

Clearly, this temperament "signature" is not unique to myself. Furthermore, it is clear that it has an evolutionary basis and serves a valuable societal function.

The observations above might be summarized as follows:

Societal purpose

This type is oriented towards the satisfaction of a certain kind of mental needs -- one's own and of society (hence the drive to exchange information). It specializes in the detection, processing, and conveyance of new and potentially useful information (news, trends, useful skills, tricks) and accumulates and exchanges this knowledge and skills with others, largely passing by information that is not easily conveyable. Where there is too much information available for one person to keep track of and process (such as in a complex society), a person of this type tends to develop niche interests and disregard other areas, in order to conserve energy.

Thresholds

Other, competing classes of needs -- physical and, to a lesser degree, social -- take a second seat to mental needs. This is probably accomplished through thresholds: mental states having to do with the presence or absence of new, interesting information (boredom/absorption, mental excitement level, a sense of prospects or the lack thereof) have low thresholds, meaning that they affect behavior powerfully, while physical needs have high thresholds (with the probable exception of one's pain threshold) and social thresholds are at medium levels.

Lifestyle

This type is poor at making commitments, exercising continual conscious discipline, or submitting to structure and external demands due to impulsivity, changeability of moods, lack of self-control, and high susceptibility to mental absorption. At the same time, the type is good at engaging in a wide range of activities fitted to its different states of mind.

In addition…

Challenges

Find ways to become an information specialist and exchanger without overstimulating yourself mentally and weakening your body and social relations. Develop a lifestyle that capitalizes on your high mental absorption potential and lack of self-control while steering you away from addictions (see earlier post).

Who complements you

Most likely, people with high novelty thresholds, low physical thresholds, and medium social thresholds, who are also moody, changeable, and impulsive.

Some ideas

I would need to do some research on physiological and neural thresholds to build upon or revise what I've written above. However, I do have some ideas that might be applicable to socionics.

One is that types are fundamentally interested in information exchange, while what types are interested in can less easily be called "information" in the traditional sense of the world. It's more an experience or process, or perhaps a way of seeing things.

Another observation regards different types' response to what I call "novel information." Most types I can think of seem to have a much more reserved, somewhat negative (mistrustful) response to novelty. They are more resistant to the influence of new information and tend to accept it only after it has ceased to be novel (at least in their particular social circle). Again, we have to be careful about defining "novel information" (which I won't try to do here).

It is tempting to try to associate each socionic function with some kind of threshold, and I try to resist this impulse. Nonetheless, I wonder if one might have a low threshold not only with the 1st function, but also with the 4th. The difference might be that the motivation with the 1st function is to embrace, while the motivation of the 4th is to avoid. In other words, the 1st function is easily stimulated with the purpose of embracing, while the 4th function is easily stimulated with the purpose of avoiding.

It is also tempting to continue on in this classical socionic spirit and hypothesize a "new socionics model" (whoop-dee-do) where each function number is assigned an approximate threshold level (High, Medium, or Low) and a positive or negative sign:

1: L+

2: M+

3: M-

4: L-

5: H+

6: M+

7: M-

8: H-

You analytical types can now pick that apart in search of symmetry and asymmetry and make it more elegant, but I am still convinced that this type of model gets us nowhere. It just teases a certain brain module without providing any real answers. Progress will be made by working from the ground up, collecting data, and trying to understand how specific neural mechanisms work.

So, it is more useful, in my opinion, not to look for thresholds that correspond to socionic categories, but rather thresholds that correspond to directly observed phenomena.

I find myself moving away from the classical socionics ideas that information can be divided into 8 categories and that when two types interact one function somehow conveys information to the same function in the other person. I'm not sure these concepts have much practical potential anyways (can they ever be tested?).

When thinking in terms of thresholds we can see that some bit of information might be "novel" and hence stimulating to one person and yet "old news" and hence uninteresting to someone else of the same type. Thus, it could be treated with interest or disinterest for reasons having nothing to do with type. The novel information (or old news) might be conveyed by a person of any type (imagine hearing a phrase such as, "have you heard about ________?"). Thus, something novel might be gleaned from someone who had no idea that he possessed novel information or qualities.

Note also that I am suggesting a definition of quite different from Augusta's definitions: "the inner content and structure of an object" and "the object's potential energy." In practice I find that types (ILE and IEE) are more about gathering, trying out, and conveying new and novel information than about "studying underlying phenomena" and "grasping the inner substance" (traits of analytic minds, perhaps?).

Extraverted Intuition in Society

Introduction
Society is a differentiated entity. It contains love, war, caring, aggression, invention, traditionalism, and all other traits found in humans. These traits tend to collect in pockets. If you go into the academic world, you'll find a higher concentration of traits such as strict rational thinking and a lower concentration of traits such as comradery and tenderness than in the population at large. If you enter the world of night clubs, you will find a high concentration of sexuality and a low concentration of rational thinking. Society has places where every human characteristic we have in us finds its full expression. (Stable communities with pockets of certain traits form the sociopsychological realms I talked about yesterday). This applies to information aspects as well.

So, where do we find pockets of in society?

Concentrations of are to be found wherever something big is just beginning and the outcome is unknown. "Big" is a subjective concept; it can apply to both an important new theory that might change the way the world views things and to a new acquaintance that might lead to something important later on. At any rate, we are talking about the beginning of things that will cause changes in the outside world, as opposed to internal or invisible, qualitative changes. A new business will be created; a new couple will form; popular conceptions will be overturned. We see pockets of wherever these things are about to happen. More specifically, this means more people of types paying close attention to and trying to participate in new developments.

Ironically, as soon as what was expected to happen actually materializes, or the outcome becomes known, the energy and attention dissipates and heads elsewhere (essentially, types stop paying attention). If what has been created is a visible, tangible asset that can be owned or taken away, congregates. If the result is a technology or reliable means of production, gathers. If the outcome is a fun, exciting, or emotionally moving activity, comes to the forefront.

The race of against in socionics.
I've already discussed the integral type of socionics. So far, is in the lead. Important connections and insights have been made, but the theory is raw, unfinished, and sometimes contradictory. Many people think something "big" might be done with socionics, but no one knows for sure. As long as this outcome remains unclear, and new insights and connections are being added to socionics faster than existing connections have been formalized and fully integrated into the theory, is winning. As soon as the "termites" crunch through and digest all the existing material and even reach the most recent insights, will win out. In the article I linked to above, I discussed the possibility of the integral type of socionics shifting to LII or LSI as socionics reaches the limits of its expansion and applicability.

If ever happened to become the primary focus of socionics, it would take a long and convoluted evolution before became dominant again, if ever. This is because the types would have mostly left the field or stopped investing energy in it. Something very important would have to change in the external situation to create fundamentally new opportunities for the field to the degree that the surge of interest would overpower traditions.

The same thing that happens on an organizational level happens on the individual level as well. For instance, as soon as I stop writing down new insights (or mental connections) and begin restructuring and reworking old ones, the emphasis disappears and is usually replaced by (creating material that "works better" for the user) or (improving logical consistency and clarity).

As we can see, we are unwitting tools in the hands of larger-scale processes. Each of us is unconsciously drawn into performing certain tasks of group significance that go far beyond our own physical survival, based on our socionic type and other personal traits.

Back to pockets of in society...
Obviously, every field and activity imaginable will have at least some minor concentration of somewhere in it, as there is potential for at least some significant change or potentially interesting outcomes in every community or system at certain moments in its development. For example, if we take the field of oil drilling, at the dawn of the oil era was likely focused on imagining how much oil there was and whether it could be used for anything. As it became clear that oil was a useful resource, focused on making contacts between businessmen interested in developing the oil industry that might lead to future partnerships and breakthroughs. As oil drilling became a common practice, shifted to trying to guess where else there might be oil around the world. Today, is preoccupied with what will happen when the oil runs out and what alternative energy sources might be developed.

The Information Aspects Revisited

Let's revisit the information aspects with the help of The Semantics of the Information Aspects. First, a very brief look at what the information aspects are about (areas of overlap of both the extraverted and introverted versions of the aspect):

Intuition ( and ): creating mental images
Sensing ( and ): concreticizing and materializing
Logic ( and ): the thinking process
Ethics ( and ): influences on people's feelings

Now in more detail (translated material in black, my paraphrasing and commentary in red):

Intuition
Intuition involves the process of creating a mental image. Images are usually described in speech through the use of metaphors and figures of speech. The more the description of an object or situation is abstracted from a multitude of concrete details - as is characteristic of image-based perception - the more complete and multi-faceted the image can be. Through the pole of intuition the individual perceives the object or situation in its wholeness and entirety and strives to translate concrete information (sensory images) into more generalized form, resulting in a perceptual vector from specific to general.

Overlapping themes:
Describing time
perceives time as an external process and describes it in relatively concrete terms (indicating specific time intervals or amounts of time), while perceives time as an internal sensation and describes it in subjective terms (what time seems to be doing and how it feels to be in the flow of events).

Perceiving non-material aspects of reality
describes guesses or insight about the external non-material world (intuitive guess, realizations, insights; motives, paradoxes, prospects), while describes the reflection of the external non-material world on the individual (foreseeing, imagining, anticipating; a sense of the meaningful).

Sensing
Both extraverted and introverted sensing involve concreticization - emphasizing the specific characteristics and details inherent to the object or situation - resulting in a perceptual vector from general to specific.

Overlapping themes:
Describing object's concrete characteristics
perceives physical traits directly, without an implied reference to the individual (size, shape, color, strength, rigidity), while perceives physical traits as they are experienced subjectively (objects' feel in your hand or as they come in contact with the subject through all senses).

Handling objects
describes the handling of objects as an external physical act (throw, grab, stick, push, remove, fit, hit), while describes the experience of handling and interacting with objects (hold, rub, hug, feel, squeeze, try, stain, clean).

Assimilating space
describes the physical act of assimilating an area (look around, squeeze in, get through, rearrange, put in its place, influence), while describes subjective experience of assimilating space (get adjusted, get cozy, make comfortable).

Needs and desires
describes desires as the need to consume an external object ("I really need," "I want," "come on," "I want you to"), while describes the internal experience and physiological processes of satisfying one's needs and desires (processes and sensations associated with health, illness, physical exertion, sex, pleasure, eating and drinking).

Logic
Both extraverted and introverted logic describe thought processes (the process of reaching logical conclusions). Individuals with introverted logic describe to a greater degree - and, hence, are more aware of - thought processes (their own or other people's) expressed in analysis or classifications. Individuals with extraverted logic describe the external manifestations of this process - for example, one's awareness of one's actions. Both aspects involve citing or listing facts and data; in citing data serves to specify the subject of discussion and the order of listing is irrelevant, while in it reflects the information's internal structure. Also in common between the aspects is the theme of discussion - expressing and substantiating one's thoughts, as well as the habit of referring to the functioning of living things (people) as if they were mechanisms.

Overlapping themes:
Clarifying information
essentially treats facts and data as external, autonomous objects (emphasizing facts, details, principles, algorithms, and the act of expressing them), while perceives data in the context of its structure and organization (emphasizing constructions, models, proper organization of data, outlines, systems, and structures).

Asking clarifying questions
focuses on the what and the how of facts and data, while focuses on the why - the logical basis of assertions.

Substantiating one's own and others' conclusions
focuses on the external proof of assertions - facts, examples, illustrations, concrete data and its interpretation - while focuses on internal proofs of the logic of statements and the consistency of logical principles applied.

Ethics
Both extraverted and introverted ethics describe influencing and influences on people's feelings through vocabulary such as offend, make happy, enthrall, infuriate, scare, get interested. It appears that individuals with strong extraverted and introverted ethics emphasize somewhat different aspects of this influence: the former are focused on external action as a way of changing the emotional atmosphere (saying or doing something), whereas the latter are focused on changes in the subject's emotional state and feelings as a result of this impact.

The same is true of emotional states. Extraverted ethics emphasizes external manifestations (facial expressions, gestures, words), while introverted ethics emphasizes internal feelings, though the theme itself is a part of both aspects. Also, all ethical types are prone to personification - the "animation" of unliving things ("bad computer!" "the computer is acting up again," "this fence doesn't seem to want to fall over; it's still alive"). The field of ethical aspects also includes evaluatory or emotionally charged oaths, for example "creep" or "mean person."

Overlapping themes:
Verbs describing relationships between people
describes external manifestations of relationships (meet, date, make friends, be friends, flirt, break up, make up, break off, suck up), while describes the subject's experience of relationships (be grateful, admire, love, fall in love, hate, be offended, be embarrassed, value).

Verbs describing influencing feelings
focuses on the external (observable) actions associated with emotional interaction (excite, praise, get going, hurt, fool, offend, cheer up, scare, make laugh, comfort, calm down), while focuses on internal feelings (trouble, get tired of, make nervious, offend, let down, scare, irritate, make mad, make upsent, calm). Note that the same words can be used, but with a different emphasis.

Abstract nouns for expressing emotions
focuses on visible emotional states (edginess, gloominess, breakdown, boredom, quietness, ecstasy, horror, panic, enthusiasm, sarcasm), while focuses on internal feelings (guilt, unrest, delight, pride, annoyance, fright, love, hate, hurt, feeling, shame, embarrassment).

Adverbs describing how actions are performed and one's attitude toward them
, again, focuses on visible emotional attitudes (gladly, dismally, wonderfully, half-heartedly, discreetly, sarcastically), while focuses on internal attitudes (frankly, honestly, dishonestly, decently, in a friendly way, in a good way, in a bad way, tactfully, tactlessly).