Introverted Intuition (Ni)

What does Lenore mean by introverted intuition? (Often abbreviated "Ni".)

Quasi-defining statements

p. 222: "...draws our attention to immediate sensory phenomena. ... It prompts an interest in perception itself--the process of recognizing and interpreting what we take in."

p. 223: "Introverted Intuition would prompt us to liberate our sense impressions from their larger context, thereby creating new options for perception itself."

p. 229: "Introverted Intuitions are not really ideas. They're like trains at the edge of articulated knowledge. You can't claim them or advocate them. You put on a hat, grab hold of a boxcar door, and see where they go."

p. 153: "Introverted Intuition suggests that absolute meaning is an illusion--the result of having incomplete information."

As a dominant function:

p. 225: "For INJs, patterns aren't 'out there' in the world, waiting to be discovered. They're part of us--the way we make sense of the riot of energy and information impinging on our systems. A disease syndrome is a useful construct, but that's all it is--an aggregate of observations attached to a label, telling us what to see and how to deal with it."

p. 225: "Where Extraverted Intuitives see many behavioral options, INJs acknowledge many conceptual standpoints. They experience no need to declare one inherently better than another. Indeed, these types have the disconcerting habit of solving a problem by shifting their perspective and defining the situation some other way."

p. 234: "For INJs, truth isn't about logic. Truth is a frame of reference, a way of organizing information, which serves one set of needs or another."

Proposed Definitions

#1: Seeing past interpretations

Introverted Intuition (Ni) is the attitude that whatever is manifest (apparent, observable, described) is only the tiniest fraction of the total reality and all of its potential, and it is manifest only because it serves a purpose--a purpose that it achieves by exploiting a certain way of interpreting or navigating by signs. Ni is attunement to what lurks in the shadow of that manifestation. What is that assumed way of interpreting or navigating? What could we see if we were free of it?

#2: What cannot be said?

Introverted Intuition is the attitude of attunement to what cannot be said, by virtue of the structuring that "saying" requires.

For example: At work, we don't dare say our true feelings (or we can only say them if they're positive), because we know that sharing them would bring dire economic consequences. There is no other way, because the structure of the workplace (people working cooperatively to get stuff done that they get paid for) requires that people refrain from saying anything that might put their loyalty in doubt. If an accountant, in his office, says that he loves accounting, you view this as meaningless because, well, what else is he going to say? In fact, he might very well hate accounting. You have to be highly attuned to what's really going on in order to read the true meaning of what people say--which is often the opposite of the literal meaning of their words. (See Eric Berne.)

For example: Why do we put North at the top of most maps? Because the mapmaking tradition began among northern-dwelling people, who considered people who lived further south to be less important. Putting North at the top of the map frames geography in a way that, perhaps unwittingly, conveys the belief that Europeans are better or more important than Africans. This can't be said by anything within the map; the very way that the map is structured and related to reality says it.

For example: What does music mean? You can't say it. It's ineffable. (See Introverted Intuition and the Meaning of Music.) What is God? What is spirit? Any attempt to capture these things in words only cheapens them.

Introverted Intuition is an attitude of "seeing through" the distortion that any interpretation creates, to see the underlying reality. It's a left-brain attitude in that it's sign- and symbol-oriented: attempting to grasp the system of interpretation that makes any particular way of representing reality work, as a prerequisite for using that system. From an Ni ego-state, you want to understand the assumptions of a system of representation before you use the system, so that you can use it with true freedom--including the freedom to use the built-in interpretations in ways that violate those assumptions.

#3: Orientation by manner of orientation

Introverted Intuition is a way of orienting yourself to your environment by consciously attending to the expected interpretations of things. In this manner of orientation, you hold agnostic about whether those interpretations are true. You view them as expected interpretations, nothing more. Your world is a world of expected interpretations defined by others; you navigate through those interpretations and use them without regard to whether they're true, always keeping the interpretations separate in your mind from the actual objects.

For example, whereas from an Extraverted Sensation perspective, you might feel very impressed upon meeting a man wearing a fancy Italian suit (signs call forth a natural response and need no interpretation); from an Ni perspective, you would consciously say to yourself that he's wearing an Italian suit and this is supposed to make you think he's wealthy or upper-class or really has his act together or something like that, and therefore is supposed to make you feel impressed (signs and what they mean are connected only arbitrarily). Whether he really does have his act together is a matter upon which you reserve judgement. Consequently you don't feel impressed. You merely note the expected interpretation as no less a part of your environment than the suit itself.

Without knowing the expected interpretations of a system--the way signs are interpreted within that system, and the expected responses that make the system work--you can't get oriented via Ni. The expected interpretations must be stabilized and clear to you. Then you can comment from an outside perspective, or see ways to respond to the signs that violate the system's assumptions, or simply know how to operate the thing. First you have to get "outside" it, then you can deal with it. The process of "getting outside it" can take a long time. As you identify expected interpretations, you find yourself uncovering ever more and more hidden assumptions, and you feel the need to distance yourself from those, too, before you get your hands dirty or draw a conclusion.

#4: Just knowing

Ni is a way of knowing (or at least thinking you know) that bypasses reason, facts, evidence, the expected or intended interpretations of signs, or anything you can point to, simply giving you an awareness or belief that seems indisputably true to you, period. You can't tell by introspection how you got this idea. There is no thought process. There is only tuning into this form of awareness and just knowing.

For example: You've been interviewing candidates for a job. One of them has all the credentials, and scored the highest on all the company-defined criteria for the job. Another of them was pretty good but not in the same league. You have a sense about the high-scorer, though, that he's bad news, and that the "so-so" one will work out well. You can't point to anything that's let you to this conclusion, you can't justify your belief, but you have this sense just the same. To trust this unjustifiable idea is to orient by introverted intuition.

For example: The song Bad Moon Rising illustrates an Ni sense of danger. The belief is strong yet vague.

For example: A co-worker calls you on the phone and says that he has a cold and won't be able to come in that day. You "see through" what he said: you "just know" it's a lie: really he has an interview at another company. You can't point to a single thing that leads you to such a specific conclusion, and yet there it is.

For example: You are trying to solve some problem--an interpersonal problem, a mathematical problem, it could be anything. Everything seems to be snared and confused. You ask yourself, "What's really going on here?" And an answer comes.

For example: Jack Groverland (ENTJ?) preaches to "be still" and just "tune in to what that greater intelligence that is the universe wants you to do."

With extraverted intuition, you bypass the socially defined interpretations of signs by broadening the context, and thus relate to other people's ideas in a definite way: you propose something "outside the box"--the box that other people are thinking in. You expect that other people's minds will be blown, probably pleasantly, inducing a feeling of "wow!" With introverted intuition, you also bypass the expected interpretations of signs, but your belief is self-contained, and you have no sense that anyone else would find it interesting or compelling. It came to you, for no reason that you can fathom, and you can't show anyone else any reason why they should take it seriously. The belief might be very specific, too vague for words, or even too specific for words.

Orienting by Ni, you are likely to view belief as something that simply arises within each person when they tune into it. If two people have different beliefs, there is no resolving it. I have my belief and you have yours. End of story. New ideas or evidence seem beside the point. If you think there's a bad moon rising, how could mere "evidence" persuade you otherwise?

Lenore doesn't talk much about this

Lenore's writing doesn't emphasize this aspect of Ni. It's hidden in little notes here and there, like the way tertiary Ni can give ISFPs the will to hold to a belief even when others don't agree with it, or the way ENTJs "see around the corners" of an organization's official rules. For the most part, Lenore emphasizes neutrality between conflicting ideas. The present hypothesis proposes that this emphasis is a possible, maybe illustrative, but not necessary consequence of the basic idea: "just knowing" in a way that bypasses built-in or conventional interpretations of signs: seeing past the signs, and just "getting" the truth (or at least thinking you have).

#5: Orienting by explicit representation of the mapping between signs and meaning

Ni is orienting yourself by an explicit representation of the mapping between signs and meaning. For example, "This dark-stained mahogany table is supposed to make me think the owner is upper-class" or "We put north at the top of maps (rather than, say, the bottom or the right), because northern countries traditionally had more power, and we perceive 'higher on the page' to mean 'more important'." From an Ni standpoint, one doesn't feel oriented until one can articulate explicitly what are the signs one is supposed to look at and what are the meanings one is supposed to take from them.

Because the mental space that Ni "lives in" is the world of all possible ways of mapping signs to meanings, Ni leads you to consider not only the accepted ways of mapping signs to meanings, but others. For example, why couldn't dark-stained mahogany mean "lower class"? For example, what if instead of viewing failing a test as an occasion for shame, we viewed it as an occasion for celebration? How might our lives change if we merely rewired the interpretations we are giving to things?

An Ni perspective leads one to seek out the leverage points of any system. What is triggering what? What "good faith" assumptions are being made, and what would happen if those assumptions were violated? For example, ants "interpret" certain pheromones as "meaning" that something is a larva that needs to be fed. Some parasites have evolved the ability to give off these same pheromones, triggering the ants to feed them. The parasites have found a way to game the system by exploiting its assumptions. The parasites don't orient by Ni, of course, but this kind of analysis takes an Ni approach. One can apply this same kind of analysis to almost anything: looking at a system not through the lens of "how it's supposed to work", but from outside the system, merely characterizing how it converts a sign into an interpretation, triggering a cascade of behaviors.

Lenore characterizes Ni as "about the box" as opposed to Extraverted Intuition's "outside the box". That is, an Ni orientation leads you to describe the assumptions and rules that a given system of thought or perception is following.

Ni on this perspective is a decidedly left-brain orientation. It doesn't lead you to flow with anything or even participate. It leads you to stop, get "into your head", and even act in ways that go against the spirit of a system, or to think about ways that going with the spirit of rules can lead to unexpected and undesired results.

In contrast to most other definitions, this one has nothing mysterious or particularly "intuitive" about it. Ni on this definition is simply a matter of looking at things from a "meta" perspective, explicitly characterizing how signs are getting mapped to meanings. This simple definition, combined with the idea of ego-orientation, explains the many standard observations about NJs and SPs: the "commenting from an outside perspective" usually seen in INJs, the coldly "objective, impersonal" style usually seen in INTJs, the interest in pointing out that social myths exist to support power structures usually seen in INFJs, the interest in gaming a system or throwing a monkey wrench into it usually seen in SPs, the seeking of the social "cat-bird seat" usually seen in ENJs, the endless levels of meta-discussion found in INJ-filled academia, etc.

Definition #6: Transformation in general

Ni is a function that serves the process of "transformation". Transformation is to be considered on many levels (logical, ethical, personal etc.) In many instances, situations are hard to escape or avoid and Ni allows a person to focus on a specific version of themselves so as to minimise a problem or enhance understanding of it.

Example #1: Those with a habit of not completing their studies, fall into a mindset where they feel justified in not undertaking the workload and are perhaps concerned with pleasing immediate sensations (partying, lounging around etc.) or have personal problems to deal with.

Once the person has realised the consequences of their laziness, an underlying mindset is discovered as the cause. Whilst every function has a unique manner in the solution of a problem, Ni engages the individual with their unconscious thoughts and mindset to focus on a particular trait. "How can I avoid this scenario from happening again?" "What talents of mine can I capitalise on to escape this problem?"

Such problems are derived from habit/behaviour rather than by natural alignments and they can be solved if the individual chooses to focus on another "version" of themselves, which always existed but never was accessed. Further supporting the notion that Ni is a search for new angles or perspectives, requiring a solid insight to gauge action.

The common experiences of individuals having to come to their own realisations to truly grasp a problem or change their attitude, has its foundations in the Introverted Intuition function. External data or resources are not enough to create a solution, it requires a transformed way of thinking from the person's past behaviour.

Example #2: When a person has a comprehensive goal for the future, its success depends upon the many contingencies considered (problems or opportunities that could come about) and whether it is of a well-defined nature such as following a career path, raising a family, developing a theory etc. whilst knowing how to get from Point A to Point B with realistic expectations.

The process of Ni reassures the person such intentions are possible, not just on the certainty that future change will unfold in a certain way but because the plan/strategy is transformative of the person's present situation. It is like a framework, as time goes on the final goal will ensure events or details come into play whilst omitting all the unnecessary dilemma that could sidetrack or distract many people from the original plan.

Against this definition

This definition is completely clear and precise. And therefore it runs against the Jungian spirit in Lenore's thought. Whatever introverted intuition is, it can never be captured by a clear definition. Rather, Ni (and all the other function attitudes) is a kind of force within the mind, revealed only in its effects, and always capable of revealing more when it's pushed into new circumstances. Its true essence can never be known—except, perhaps, intuitively, inarticulately.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn't mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home." Taken from Mostly Harmless. I think that explains how Ni does what it does, and it explains it in a Ni way.

As a language of Ego Orientation

As a Dominant Function, Ni leads INJs to anchor themselves primarily in discovery of and attunement to that "what else"--to seek communion with it for its own sake. INJs are typically concerned with finding an independent and all-encompassing perspective on whatever interests them, so they can see it without bias, without being fooled or led along by ways in which other interests have set things up, and without a merely partial understanding.

As a Secondary Function, Ni typically leads ENJs to be aware of alternative ways of negotiating the social world, that exploit the assumptions that people make in order for there to be a social world. One might use this awareness to be on guard against cheaters, to prevail by setting knots and traps for others to fall into, to commit to a vision that might currently seem impossible, or a thousand other ways to serve or create an Extraverted goal.

As a Tertiary Function, Ni typically leads ISPs to suspect others of hypocrisy and cheating and putting on appearances aimed at exploiting people's credulity--especially hypocrisy inherent in social institutions. Sometimes ISPs draw upon Ni to find ways to throw a monkey wrench into social systems that call them into some kind of obligation: to respond in ways that don't make sense within the system's explicitly stated ways of interpreting behavior as cooperative or hostile (but are indeed hostile).

As an Inferior Function, Ni typically leads ESPs to either self-doubt or claim to a mystic vision--to see themselves as an oracle of transcendent truth, bypassing the need for finding things out through observation, reasoning, and putting ideas to a test.

Naturally, you can see plenty of dominant-style Ni in ENJs, secondary-style Ni in INJs, and so on--even inferior-style Ni in INJs.

What do ant pheromones mean?

The following might illustrate Introverted Intuition as a Semiotic Attitude.

There are certain organisms that live as parasites on ant colonies. They live nearly motionless most of their lives, inside an ant colony. Ants bring them food. Ants just keep on bringing them more and more food, which the parasites eat and eat and eat.

Why do the ants do that? Because the parasite emits the same pheromones that ant larvae emit to signal that they need to be fed. It doesn't matter that the parasite grows to 20 times the size of an ant larva and never seems to take a break from eating. The ants receive the pheromone that means "I'm a larva and I'm hungry" and they obey.

What, then, do those pheromones really mean? From the standpoint of Introverted Intuition, the pheromones do not mean "I'm a larva and I'm hungry." Clearly they don't mean that, because they can be sent by non-larvae. What they mean is the way the ants respond.

More generally, the meaning of a sign is whatever an interpreter of the sign does with it, not something external to the interpreter.

Heuristically, Introverted Intuition can lead you to use signals in ways that have nothing to do with or go directly against their built-in or "intended" interpretations. Hence the common INJ fondness for irony.

--Ben Kovitz

Against this hypothesis

Responsiveness - this seems more extraverted sensation in orientation. You respond to the moment. Modifying effect to get a response. (ie. Lenore p.151: finally admitted to his girlfriend he was never really a vegetarian; he just liked the reactions he got with socially conscious women). Ni would recognize that people are doing this and then describe it, Se would innately recognize it and exploit it. -- Robert Evans

It's Ni interpolated through Ne. The basis for the sign-interpretation in the example is the pheromone release, not anything intrinsic to the pheromone. But the example is only an approximation of Ni, albeit a good one if I understand what he's doing. Ben Kovitz identifies himself as INTP, keep that in mind. Here he's making an analogy, relating an understanding of Ni anchored in Ne.

Logically, Ni versus Si is like validity versus soundness. What happens is, ENTJs use Ni to abduct things all the time. The result is an imperfect argument, and its conclusion may not be true. This is also known as affirming the consequent. The result is fundamentally unsound. But the bottom line is, ENTJs claim to know their proof demonstrates something depends on whether (if) the application worked.

Te/Ni stresses people out because it's not too worried about perfect soundness. To make matters worse, the experiment hasn't happened yet and even if it had it's not correct for the ENTJ to believe his stated conclusion has been proven or logically forced. (I'm trying to use Ti here by the way, and probably not that well.)

Also: Lying about being a vegetarian to get a reaction from someone is an activity (lying) that any person using any function attitude might do sometimes. My best guess is that the lie hinged on Si and Fe, "This signifies something really important to them, this puts me on their internal map in the 'favorable' rather than 'unfavorable' zone," which means the person is (probably) an SFJ. Or it could be Ni, as in the person with Ni believes that Si and Fe govern the semiotics of the interaction. –Kiernan

Hypotheses

Science and semiotics

Introverted Intuitives (especially INTJs), when oriented to science (especially the social sciences), tend to become entranced with semiotics (how signs are interpreted and objects are seen as signs), as in the first Quasi-defining statement.

About reading: genres, etc...

Significant subsets of introverted intuitives (particularly INTJs) are drawn to Cyberpunk. This genre most encapsulating INTJs inferior function Sensation desire for physical and mental supremacy (or, ideally, a world in which strength and charisma have no power). (Though it's possible other types will be drawn to it for differing reasons)

Prometheus Rising as a guidebook on Ni

Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising discusses cognition and semiotics. "Reality tunnels" are how people are bound by patterns on what they want to see or are "programmed" to see and distorting information to fit their narrative. Sounds familiar doesn't it?

When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I say "meow" and you say "Bow-wow," and each of us is convinced the other is a bit dumb.

Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.

The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

He believes we are limited by subjective perceptions and judgements we attach to ideas. The "Thinker" is our preconceptions and the "Prover" is what assigns and justifies our biases to the reality around us.

Each chapter of Prometheus Rising ends with exercises on shifting your perception of the same events and observing the change in your thinking (Ni). Example:

• Visualize a quarter vividly, and imagine vividly that you are going to find the quarter on the street. Then, look for the quarter every time you take a walk, meanwhile continuing to visualize it. See how long it takes you to find the quarter.

• Explain the above experiment by the hypothesis of "selective attention"—that is, believe there are lots of lost quarters everywhere and you were bound to find one by continually looking. Go looking for a second quarter.

• Explain the experiment by the alternative "mystical" hypothesis that "mind controls everything." Believe that you made the quarter manifest in this universe. Go looking for a second quarter. If the reader is a scientist, be not alarmed. This refers not to you but only to those benighted fools in the opposite camp who refuse to recognize that your theory is the only reasonable one. Of course.

This lines up well with Lenore's descriptions and the proposed definitions of Ni on this wiki. Considering shifting reality tunnels is a reoccurring theme in his writings, he is an INJ. Bears a great resemblance to Tea Leaves and Tarot Cards.