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Apparently large swaths of healthy, neurotypical humans have been experiencing emotions and ethical decision making in entirely different ways from each other and no one ever told me?
I took a one week break from TheMotte because I was writing an entire freakin' novel about all the weird and wonderful facets of human subjective experience I was learning about from my study of the MBTI personality system (it's actually not a theory of "personality" per se, it's more like a theory of perceptual cognitive architecture of which personality is just a nondeterministic byproduct, but, whatever). And then I realized that if I broke the 10k word mark, there would probably be no one who would actually take the time to read it. So you're getting a hyper-condensed version of what was going to be "chapter 1", because this concept in particular was just so fascinating to me, and so immediately applicable, that I really felt compelled to share it.
I quickly learned from discussions with the MBTI community that many of us are subjectively experiencing the world in quite dramatically different ways, and I had let some of these differences go underappreciated before. This reddit thread was one the earliest signs that something interesting was going on; it asked the question, "Do you feel emotions as physical sensations or intense thoughts?" My immediate reaction was, "well obviously intense thoughts, right? Or, I guess it's a little more abstract than that, it's more like a thought plus something else that's kind of ineffable. But not a bodily sensation. What would that even mean? Stuff like 'getting red hot with anger' is just a metaphor, right? I mean, ok, I guess if you hooked me up to a machine when I was angry you could measure an increase in body heat, but I don't think I've ever been consciously aware of that in the moment. The only emotion that comes with a physical bodily sensation is anxiety. Now that one is very palpable, the characteristic stomach-twisting nausea of intense anxiety is unmistakable. Thick weights dragging you down, unable to move. One of the primary, perhaps the primary, sources of unhappiness and discomfort throughout my entire life. Surely this sensation is a universal part of the human experience, yes?"
And then I scrolled down to the replies:
What the heck are you talking about how do you have it exactly backwards, also what do you mean you have no internal dialogue how can you just admit to being an NPC like that.
Ok, so what I thought was universal from birth, turned out to not be universal. Got it. What else could I have gotten wrong?
Each of the 16 MBTI personality types is classed as either an "introverted feeler (Fi for short)" or an "extroverted feeler (Fe for short)" (you can check here if you're curious which one is which). What these terms actually "mean" is... not entirely clear, because this whole thing was based on some notes that Carl Jung scribbled in a book in 1921, and people have just been kinda wingin' it since then. But I had independent reasons to believe that there was a legitimate phenomenon going on here that was worth investigating. If you just engage in a cursory "surface level" investigation for the actual definitions of Fe and Fi, you'll often be presented with something like the following: Fe means "placing the group above the individual; orienting one's value judgements based on what the group thinks, rather than what the individual personally values; acting in accordance with commonly accepted values", and Fi means "placing the individual above the group; orienting one's value judgements based on one's own internal moral compass, independent of the moral judgements of others; acting primarily to maintain one's sense of authenticity to one's own values". And those concepts seem... bizarre and not particularly helpful. Surely everyone's a bit of one and a bit of the other? Few people, under these definitions, would want to admit to being a "Fe user" (as the MBTI jargon goes). Value judgements are always a complex interplay between self and world; they are never purely internal nor purely external. Furthermore, a number of self-identified "Fe types" were making what seemed to me to be highly bizarre claims such as, "I'm not even sure if I have any opinions of my own sometimes, I can't really know what I'm feeling until I externalize it somehow". How can someone not know what they're feeling at any given time?? Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough that I had to keep digging.
The breakthrough really came when I realized that I had to stop thinking in terms of grand philosophical examples and life-defining choices and focus on how people act in ordinary, everyday, non-stressful social situations. At that point, a clearer dichotomy between "Fe" and "Fi" (or, we might say more uncharitably, "neurotic people pleasers" and "selfish assholes who seem to be unaware of the existence of other humans") starts to emerge. Michael Pierce gives probably the best "definition" of Fe and Fi (aside from my own definition that I'm going to give right after this):
In either instance, the default instinct (in the girl's case, to act amiably, and in the boy's case, to act according to whatever is rendered by his own internal value judgements) can be overridden by rationality if the situation calls for it, but this is a picture of the default "pull of gravity" in the introverted feeler and the extroverted feeler.
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
After a great deal of ruminating on various anecdata and my own personal experiences, I arrived at the following "distilled" definitions of Fi and Fe. My highly speculative hypothesis is that these are not just statistical generalizations of clusters of traits that are observed in the population, but may be related to actual neurological differences between individuals; sort of like two different architectural versions of the Human Morality Processing Chip, Intel vs AMD. Both of these architectures are very much designed for functioning in face-to-face interactions in tribal hunter-gatherer societies, and should be thought of in that context, rather than as generators of abstract moral beliefs:
Fe is more of a quick and dirty algorithm, like an embedded system that can only do one thing: the directive is simply to minimize human suffering in the immediate physical environment, and that's about it. The Fe user takes in as much emotional data from other people in the environment as possible and unavoidably factors that data into the decision making process; negative emotional states in other people will almost always produce some level of felt discomfort, resulting is an instinctual pull towards alleviating that discomfort or extricating oneself from the situation, though obviously there will be many mitigating circumstances where this empathetic pain reaction can be blunted, e.g. in cases of self-defense. Fe users tend to feel emotions in a less intense and more transient manner than Fi users, and, speculatively, they may in some sense have less emotional introspection on average than Fi users. It seems that things are set up this way so that their own emotions will not override the "prime directive" of focusing on others' emotions, and this all seems to be tied into their tendency towards greater emotional expressiveness as well. (I tried doing an experiment myself. Normally I like to be walking around while listening to music, or at least doing something active. I tried sitting absolutely still, not even any facial expressions, while listening to a song that normally makes me quite happy. The emotional reaction did seem to be significantly blunted, almost to the point of disappearing entirely. I'd be interested to know how common this reaction is.)
Fi is more like a programmable CPU; it can do almost anything, and the exact "software" that is being run will vary greatly between different Fi users. The "instinctual pull" in this case is towards the fulfillment of the Fi user's own judgements, and not towards the alleviation of suffering in other people. Fi users certainly can factor another person's internal subjective emotional statement into their decision making process, but this is only done contextually when the Fi user has decided that it's relevant according to their own internal value standards. It is not the same automatic, unavoidable process that it is for the Fe user. As the name "introverted feeling" implies, Fi naturally sees its own feelings as, well, introverted: private, unique, generated wholly out of the self, and therefore, not something that needs to be shared or discussed. In a sort of automatic typical-minding, the Fi user assumes that I have my feelings, you have yours, they have no particular relationship to each other, and so there's no need to express them in outward displays of emotionality. (This is not the case for the Fe user, as their emotions are quite literally dependent on the emotions of those around them.)
It is not the case that one can straightforwardly say that Fi = male and Fe = female, although that is the general trend, despite numerous exceptions. According to random images on Google image search that had data that was probably pulled out of someone's ass, the two most common MBTI types in men are ISTJ and ESTJ (both Fi types), and in women the two most common types are ISFJ and ESFJ (both Fe types).
We can now see where the earlier surface stereotype of "Fe = herd animal" came from. If your body has told you on a literal, physical level from birth that your value is dependent on the value judgements of the people around you due to the palpable discomfort you feel at the negative emotional states of others, then the general trend will be to align your more abstract moral views with the views of those around you, in order to seek their approval and minimize internal cognitive dissonance. It takes an intelligent and independent-minded individual to develop their own independent moral thinking in these circumstances. (I'm not throwing any shade at women here -- this is absolutely how my own body works too, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that this may not be a universal human experience!)
My entire life I've been perpetually flabbergasted at how so many men could just... do things, without seeming to care much for the impact that their actions have on others. These things could be anything from aggressive sexual advances on women that any reasonable person could predict would cause them distress, or it could simply be a tendency towards perpetual rudeness and bluntness in situations where I would be instinctually driven to sugarcoat my words and attempt to elicit agreement. A generalized weakening or strengthening of the anxiety response in different individuals is probably part of the explanation, but it's not an entirely satisfactory theory on its own, as one individual may be highly neurotic about one thing but not neurotic at all about others. (It is easy to imagine, for example, a ruthless corporate attorney who ruins lives for a living while also being a huge germaphobe, or perhaps he feels palpable fear over issues of immigration.)
I never really thought about the issue that deeply; I suppose I just accepted it as a fact of life. If I had a theory for how some individuals were able to act so boldly in matters of interpersonal conflict, it would have been something like... a total obliviousness to the potential consequences of their actions? As in, they just weren't "thinking" as much as me, and if they "thought" more then they would align themselves closer to me in terms of choosing to act cautiously. Or else they had access to some infinite wellspring of courage and willpower that I did not. But this new theory seems quite a bit better: some people are literally capable of just not weighting their decisions based on the emotional states of others, even in the absence of significant stressors. (This might sound like a huge "duh" moment, but keep in mind that when I talk about "weighting" data in the decision making process, I'm talking about palpable, involuntary, bodily instincts; it's very easy to typical-mind and assume that everyone is feeling the same physical sensations as you, and they're just choosing to deal with them in different ways.)
In spite of how highly speculative this concept is, I feel like it's been so immediately applicable for me that I can't throw it out. There are certain people in my life whose behavior used to mystify me; now that I understand them as "high Fi users", it suddenly all makes sense, and I'm much more empathetic to their point of view.
Anyway, that might all sound insane because I had to cut out multiple examples and intermediary reasoning steps, but if this idea sounds interesting then I'm certainly willing to discuss it further.
(As a parting gift, I was fortunate to come across this today, although it should perhaps be renamed to "Real Fe vs Fi moment")
This is indeed how I feel and act, and it is neat to read a description of it that actually makes it sound cool.
Growing up I felt like everyone else got to read a secret manual about how to act in social situations, and I was stuck trying to figure out the manual through trial and error. I'm not autistic so I'm not oblivious to the veiled insults, or the looks of hurt on people's faces when I broke a social rule. And I'm not a psychopath, so I'd still feel bad sometimes when I caused those moments of hurt.
There is a great deal of rational self-interest in being able to moderate your behavior to match social norms. Its how you make friends, acquire romantic partners, maintain any job with a boss or customers you must speak with, etc. Its required, not an optional add on. We at at least need to know the rules before we can know how to break them. But the rules are not very simple, they usually take an entire childhood to learn, and I've known plenty of adults that still don't seem to understand all of the rules. I had always been jealous of the people that seem to have a psychic ability to read and measure the flow of a conversation with someone in such a way that they are just always a joy to be around. Then I discovered a magic elixir that could temporarily grant me their powers. People call it alcohol.
Grass is always greener on the other side I guess.
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I'd say that most people feel emotions physically - e.g. you are so anxious before an important event so that you want to throw up. You are so angry that your hands tremble and maybe even contort into fists. You are so ashamed that you feel your face and ears turning red in wave of hotness.
In fact I think there was some post possibly back in reddit TheMotte days, where there was somebody promoting a theory of polytheism being born of these particular physical foci of emotion. I do not remember it that well, but the gist of it was something about the fact why you had god of war or lust and so forth with specific rituals and physicality - down to actual representation of that emotion in vocabulary: like the words heart, bile, spleen, gut, stomach etc being associated with courage, hatred, anger, anxiety, fear etc. The theory was that your actions were driven by that particular emotion associated with that part of you body related to a specific god who had domain over it. In order to be integrated you had to appeal to this multitudes integrated into you being. Monotheistic religions like Christianity integrated all these emotions into one person, putting reason/logos on top of all of it, as the ultimate ruling principle.
But I still think that rational thinking is a reflective stance, there is still a need to control the emotion on a physical level in order to analyze it. But the underlying physicality is still there - how could it not be. Stress or fear reaction are famously related to various levels of hormones with large impacts on physical state. Just because you have more experience controlling them does not mean they do not exist physically.
I even think that a good way of controlling/regulating your immediate emotions is to disassociate yourself from these physical effects - you posit your ego as an observer of physical impact of your emotion as if you are some curious anthropologist of yourself, not fighting or appeasing them directly from within the paradigm.
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Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions? And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
Because MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions (although behavior is obviously correlated in an important way with internal phenomenology). OCEAN could perfectly predict all human behavior for the rest of time, while also simultaneously telling us nothing about what it actually feels like to be a given individual, from the inside.
See the other reply I just wrote for some examples.
There's certainly a high degree of overlap, yes. The biggest difference is that I've here proposed a(n admittedly highly speculative) mechanism that helps explain why some people are highly agreeable and some are not, along with an attendant phenomenological account of what being an agreeable or disagreeable person feels like from the inside. And furthermore MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
I'm very skeptical, on Hansonian grounds.
I'm skeptical that there's a rigorous way to show a difference between really experiencing something vs. claiming to experience it for the evolutionary advantage.
What are those predictions? And how are they validated or falsified? If not by behavior, then what? I would expect that any correlation with other psychological and personality traits would fall out of the analysis that produced OCEAN.
I of course knew that in many cases, we would quickly run into this issue of a fundamental difference in perspective. Which is perfectly fine. Not everything has to be for everyone.
First-person subjective experience exists. Almost all materialists will acknowledge that humans are not pure behavioral black boxes, but instead they also have subjective experiences that accompany their behavior. These subjective experiences are, in principle, not directly observable by anyone except the person who is having the experience. You know what red looks like, and you know what blue looks like, and you know how they're different, but I can never be 100% sure that your red is the same as my red, nor could you put your experience of red and blue into words that would communicate the experience to someone who has been blind since birth. You can only describe the experience of red in relative terms ("a very dark shade of red") to people who already have some sort of shared subjective experience with you that they can use as a starting point.
I have my own subjective experiences, and other people have theirs, and it seems clear enough that these do not always align. Individual variation in subjective experience is intrinsically interesting and worth studying in its own right. Since we can't actually observe the subjective experience of another individual, we have to ask them to talk about it instead. This will always be fraught with dangers, as there are numerous philosophical problems regarding the nature of introspection and the extent of its reliability (this was essentially the founding problem of the psychoanalytic tradition, of which Jung was a follower), but, since the pressing nature of the inquiry cannot be ignored and we have to start somewhere, we ultimately have to start with the only tools we have, which are introspection and linguistic communication.
If you disagree with any of the above, then Jung's thought is simply not for you. And that's ok! You are encouraged to instead pursue matters that you find more fruitful and useful.
Quite a number, but probably the most basic and obvious one is that "introverted feeling" is always paired with "extroverted thinking", which is characterized by a number of traits that center around themes of: driven to use thought as a utilitarian tool to attain tangible, real-world results; low tolerance for theoretical speculation that does not make an attempt to ground itself in "consensus" truth, whether that "consensus" be the facts of empirical reality as observed by the subject, or a religious tradition, or the consensus of the scientific community, or any other source of truth that lies outside the subject; a greater subjective need to have one's own beliefs and opinions grounded in such sources of consensus truth. And "extroverted feeling" is always paired with "introverted thinking" which would be, well, something of the opposite. I am aware that these traits sound somewhat behaviorist, and they are, but you still ultimately have to do a phenomenological analysis to determine whether any given action was performed or any given belief was held for an "extroverted thinking" reason or an "introverted thinking" reason.
By phenomenological introspection.
OCEAN deals with behavior and MBTI deals with phenomenology. MBTI unavoidably does make some behavioral predictions, and if it's wildly inaccurate in those predictions then that would be a problem worth knowing about, but ultimately at the end of the day the decisive factor for the theory is the phenomenology, which empirical psychology does its best to studiously avoid.
If your primary criticism is "MBTI is not empirical science", then yes, I completely agree with you. None of this is empirical science and I do not intend in any way to misrepresent it as empirical science.
I don’t think the Hansonian argument is about there being no subjective experience. Hanson’s arguments emphasize that there are some emotions and thoughts that we are not fully aware of because it is better not to know.
For example, you may brag to increase your status, but your brain avoids noticing that you are trying to do that because bragging is socially discouraged.
The same ideas can apply to your perception of your own personality or any part of your subjective experience.
...Yes, that was the foundation of Freud's entire body of thought. Jung was a close associate of Freud's in the early part of his career. He was intimately aware of all these issues. (Hanson thinking that he's providing an original insight here is a bit like someone walking up to an engineer who's knee deep in troubleshooting a critical production issue and asking them, "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?")
Although the problems of introspection are extremely complex, it's also clear that people are able to successfully introspect on certain things at least some of the time. Otherwise, they would never be able to accurately report their own emotional states, they would never be able to tell you any of their stable preferences or dispositions, they would never be able to accurately report on biographical memories, and in short, it's hard to see how interpersonal interaction could ever function at all. So, keeping in mind that introspection will sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, we have to simply dive in and get started, and address individual problems as they arise.
There are certain well known biases in the MBTI community, in particular it's common for people to mistype themselves as INxx types because these types are seen as the most "intellectual" (which is, well, one way of putting it I suppose. Personally I think that the INxx types all represent distinct flavors of autism spectrum disorders, or at least they represent personality types that are "on the way" to autism spectrum disorders). But there are many other cases where people are honest about their own traits and honest about their own strengths and weaknesses.
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
I agree that there is a lot of information in reports of subjective experience, I think most people would agree. Some people are mistakenly believed to disagree with this just because they believe that it is easy to be led astray by such information.
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here? I have never tried to read them, and my knowledge comes only from popular depictions (which seem to be unfair, tbh). I did read The Denial of Death, which made quite a bit of sense to me. What’s the best way to learn about the work of Freud or Jung for someone who is worried about it being just woo but willing to give it a chance?
Well, no, it's... a very big deal. It's the deal. But asking for a comprehensive explanation of how psychoanalysis relates to introspection and the problems thereof is kind of like asking "what does physics say about matter and how it moves?" How much time you got?
For listening material, and also probably the easiest place to start: look at the backlog of episodes for the Why Theory podcast, pick one that interests you (quite a few of them specifically analyze different works by Freud and Lacan), and just dig in. (Lacan was another important psychoanalytic thinker who took himself to be developing and expanding upon the work of Freud.) They're fun to listen to and they usually stay relatively grounded in terms of concrete examples.
For reading material:
For Freud, many of his works are self-contained and you can start almost anywhere, although I'm fond of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Totem and Taboo.
The book that actually turned me onto psychoanalysis in the first place was Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. It... does have a decent amount of woo jargon, but as the name implies, it's focused on showing how psychoanalysis works in a clinical setting, so you can skip the theory parts if you want and just read the case studies, if you want to get an idea of how this stuff actually works as a therapeutic practice using real life stories.
The Jung book that MBTI was based on is called Psychological Types.
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As an INTP, it falls to me to point out that MBTI are basically zodiac signs for nerds.
That is not to say that categorizing people in somewhat arbitrary boxes can not provide useful insights sometimes. Categorizing people by their dominant humour or Hogwarts house or Middle-Earth species can might all lead to true discoveries about how people are different. Astrology is hampered by not categorizing based on personality traits, but personally I would not be shocked if there are minor systemic differences between people born in spring and autumn on which they can capitalize beyond the Barnum effect.
This looks like another mapping from the MBTI. Each MB type gets assigned an ordered list of length four of two-letter types. The first letter is any of N,T, F, S (intuition, thinking, feeling, sensing), the second is either e or i -- extro/introverted. Each first letter appears once in the list. The list is in orders of decreasing priority. Also, suffixes have to be assigned alternately. If your first "function" is -i, then your third suffix will also be -i and the 2nd and fourth suffix will be -e. Obviously.
Naturally, there are 4! ways to arrange the first letters, and for each possibility you can pick the first suffix, so you should have 48 types in total. Luckily, 32 of these are swept under the rug and the remaining 16 are assigned to MBTI signs using some mapping. The first MB letter -- I or E -- decides with what suffix you start for your first function. Your second MB letter (N/S) will end up in one of the first two functions on your list, as will your third (T/F). Your last MB letter (P/J) will determine the order of the first two letters according to something which may or may not be systematic.
So INTJ maps to Ni, Te, Fi, Se, while INTP maps to Ti, Ne, Si, Fe.
Each of these letters then gets a paragraph reading like a horoscope:
I would introduce another level on this analysis. Most but not all of these types also correspond to chemical elements.
Fe is iron, a common element on earth instrumental in building civilization.
Fi is not a known element.
Se is selenium, a rare element. In low doses, it is essential for humans, but in high doses it is toxic.
Si is silicon, another common element, which famously is used in microelectronics.
Te is tellurium, another rare element, but without a known biological function.
Ti is titanium, a metal known for its excellent strength to density ratio.
Ne is neon, a noble gas. The lightest of the personality type elements, it will not easily form compounds.
Ni is nickel. Another metal, which is commonly used to prevent the corrosion of steel.
So the PSE personality type for INTP aka Ti, Ne, Si, Fe would be:
The model certainly does predict that you would be predisposed to do that, yes!
As an INFJ who naturally wants to see everything, particularly other people, in terms of patterns and underlying meanings (even in cases where these "underlying meanings" may admittedly be delusional), there are few things that tickle my brain more than systems like MBTI which allow me to view people as individuated instances of stable generic archetypes, whose behavior can be explained by (or at least, statistically correlated with) underlying hidden variables. But it is precisely because I am highly conscious of this subjective bias within myself that I am all the more conscious of the need to submit my thinking to critical inquiry.
Well, no, they're not swept under the rug. It's simply an axiom of the system that when one of the perception functions is introverted, the other must be extroverted, and similarly with the judgement functions. "You're seeking on the outside what you lack on the inside", would be the poetic way of phrasing it I suppose.
With a large enough sample size and a precise enough conception of all the "cognitive functions", this could ultimately form the basis of a research program for empirically checking the model's predictions, although, as I have to reiterate, it's ultimately not behavior we're looking to validate, but rather internal phenomenology and underlying thought patterns. And because two distinct underlying thought processes can manifest as the same external behavior, any attempt to empirically validate the model will result in endless fractal complexity (you have to ask people to introspect, and you have to trust them to be honest, and you have to verify that we all agree on the meanings of the key terms and we're not talking past each other, and so forth. This does not in any way imply that the study of internal phenomenology is fruitless or pointless. It simply means that phenomenology is more of a task for philosophy than it is for empirical science).
Funny that you bring up Si in particular, because the most dramatically successful empirical prediction of the model to date for me came when I asked someone about Si, which I'll get to in a moment. I agree that the description of Si you quoted is vague and vulnerable to the Barnum effect. You really need to synthesize a lot of examples and a lot of different descriptions of the functions from different angles before a clearer picture starts to emerge. But nonetheless, I would submit that even the vague description of Si you quoted is already more interesting and less horoscope-like than you might expect.
What does it mean to think in a "stable" and "linear" fashion, anyway? Does everyone think the same, or do we think differently from each other? Could some people legitimately be described as thinking in a more stable and linear fashion than others? Consider for example the description that urquan (who I believe to be an INTP) gave of his thought process, and compare it to the description that FistfullOfCrows (who I believe to be an INTJ) gave of his thought process. urquan's is intrinsically highly verbal, while FistfullOfCrow's is only verbal after some conscious effort. I would submit that based on these descriptions, they don't think in the same way, and that furthermore urquan would be described as the more stable and linear one. This immediately raises a number of further questions: how many different "ways" of thinking are there, anyway? Are the two descriptions I cited just mere idiosyncrasies that are unique to the individuals in question, or could they represent isolated instances of more general patterns? Could your "way of thinking" be correlated with other psychological and behavioral traits?
Si-dominants (so, people who use Si as their "dominant function", the ISTJs and the ISFJs) seem to be more likely to report experiencing the external world through a sort of hyper-subjectivized lens, where direct sense perceptions are automatically associated in a literal, ineluctable way with memories and concepts that have personal meaning to the individual (I will simply include as a universal qualifier over all statements here that everything in individual psychology must ultimately be statistical rather than deductive, and not all "Si-dominants" will report the same experiences). An ISTJ on reddit described his experience as follows:
This is not how I experience the world. There's no Barnum effect going on here. The phenomenological experience described here is completely and utterly alien to me. I don't believe I've ever had any experience that could really be termed as a "flashback", much less an "automatic" one, even much less to the point that they became "annoying". I have personal memories, certainly, but choosing to explore them is always a voluntary process.
The Si-dominants seem to report experiencing the highest rate of involuntary flashbacks, although I have seen them sporadically reported among "secondary" and "tertiary" Si users as well. In general, any type that uses Si as one of their main functions seems to report an increased vividness of detail in personal memories, and simply a greater capacity for retaining personal memories in general (this could include both memories of personal life events, and "personal" memories in the sense of "I have a vivid memory of exactly what was on that Wikipedia page that I looked at last night"). One INFP (tertiary Si user) said that they were one day struck by a flashback of an unpleasant memory that was so vivid it was almost as if they were reliving it. I have simply never experienced anything like this, and I'm not even sure if I'm capable of having such an experience. In terms of raw sensory impressions, personal memories of actual events from my life seem to be about as vivid as imagined simulations of experiences I've never even had before.
Back to that "empirical success" I was talking about: based on a few facts about my mother's behavior and biography, I immediately narrowed her type down to ISFJ. There were simply no other choices. This is a Si-dominant type, so I would expect her to be more prone to experiencing these flashback sensations. She's never talked before about experiencing anything like this phenomenon in her life. But, I decided it would be an interesting test of the model, so I simply went and asked her, "mom, kind of a weird question, but do you ever just look at something, say in the house or when you're out walking or whatever, and you get a strong flashback that's kind of like-" and before I could even elaborate further, she immediately responded with, "oh my God yes, all the time!" And she launched into quite a vivid description of the experience. Frequently these flashbacks are to specific events from different points in her life, although sometimes they have a more abstract and ineffable "ancient" quality, which she always interpreted as visions of a past life (she's devoutly religious). She learned from a young age that not everyone has these types of experiences, so she learned to keep quiet about them and not share them. When I asked her if this is where her preference for routine comes from (she is extremely ritualistic in her behavior), she responded with "yes, that's exactly it! New experiences won't give me the flashbacks. I always like to have them with me, they help me feel safe and grounded". (I do not consider this to be a leading question. I too am rather a creature of habit, but in my case, that's simply due to a generalized anxiety about future possibilities. Describing my preferences as being related to any sort of "flashback" process is, as I have already stated, simply absurd to me.)
So, all in all a very fascinating event. Of course, one data point does not a successful model make. But, if nothing else, I am extremely grateful to MBTI for alerting me to the existence of these "exotic" phenomenological experiences, even if the distribution of these experiences in the general population does not ultimately match the distribution that would be predicted by MBTI.
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It seems to me the ways we can be internally wired are surprisingly numerous. For me its neither. Emotions aren't a physical sensation, they aren't thoughts either. Instead they are a different sensation i'm at a loss to describe. Same for internal monologue, I can do it, but it's not something that's inherently needed for thoughts. In a sense I can construct ideas/notions/sentences instantly as fully formed thoughts. Indeed it takes concentration and some work to translate these into words in English (or other languages), the speed of this subjective experience is incredibly fast, I have nothing to compare it to, but it feels like it's definitely on another scale compared to some of the people i've talked about this with. It's like the monologuers are beholden to this external framework of language and ideas they have absorbed from the outside, but that's not it for me.
It feels more like my mind operates in an abstract, global regime, where meaning exists in a raw, platonic form before any linguistic scaffolding is applied. The “translation” into language is almost a compression process, reducing something vast, multi-layered, and instantaneous into a linear stream of words that inevitably loses detail. Emotions in this space are not felt as muscle tension, chest tightness, or heart rate changes, nor are they simply patterns of thought.
This matches my experience as well. I find that consciousness almost constantly throws off quanta that emerge as concepts to which language then attaches, which defines and refines the concept into something more definite. My attention inevitably engages something from this firehose-like blast of experience and from this my inner monologue emerges, describing my experience to me. Emotions are unusually intense quanta with fractal-like definition that require much more attention and language to tease out, almost as if I have to weave my thought and language around them to accurately capture what I'm experiencing.
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I would basically agree with this, yes. That was the "something ineffable" part I mentioned in my own description. I think that's what a lot of the people who answered "thoughts" were getting at, although obviously there's no way to be entirely sure.
One person mentioned that they literally have to examine the linguistic contents of their internal monologue in order to know what they're feeling, which is quite bizarre to me, and not how I experience things.
The MBTI jargon for this way of thinking is called "introverted intuition". I was always under the impression that this is just how "thought" worked in general, although recently I've discovered reasons to doubt that this experience of thought is as universal as I had originally anticipated. Although I wouldn't describe my experience quite as intensely as yours (maybe you just have a stronger "CPU" than me haha), I do feel that my thoughts exist in non-linguistic form prior to being given linguistic expression (the "thought" comes first, abstractly, and then I have to start "writing out" as a sentence what the thought actually means and what implications can be drawn from it, assuming I want to communicate it).
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Absolutely yes!
People have so much more variety in the way they view the world than you might imagine based on the fact that most people end up doing more or less the same things.
It gets super interesting in the case of legitimate pathology like personality disorders and speaks to some interesting things about the human condition (ex: true sociopaths with zero anxiety. They really aren't human, and it tells a bit about what anxiety is for).
As you note nearly everyone here is not normal at all and has features like super high ability to decouple, and a common fail state for people like us is to assume people with low ability to decouple aren't actually intelligent.
Another fun one is the way different cultures and native language speakers interact with the world can result in some foreignness. The results are generally mostly recognizable societies but a lot of Russians, Asians, Middle Easterners etc just experience the world in a way that is unexpectedly foreign.
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Do you think or feel your emotions? It’s obvious a both/and situation. Why dichotomous it?
Oh, that’s why
If you mainly feel with your thoughts you probably have alexithymia, a surprisingly common condition
Men are stronger than women, and upper body strength has been found to have a very strong correlation with anxiety/depression rates. Make of that what you will
Why are we medicalizing this? It's common and not disabling. People should just go through life this way. It's 'normal human variation' not a 'condition'.
We medicalize way too much normal human variation. ADHD people should just... not become accountants and use the reminder/note taking functions in their phones instead of taking amphetamines. The mildly autistic should stop calling it that. Etc, etc. You don't need special accommodations for every human variation. Maybe just accept that not everything is for you.
I agree we over accommodate people with learning issues or whatnot, but it probably is to some extent bad for you to not be able to identify what emotion your “feeling”. Alexithymia is a useful word for a kind of state, but maybe I’m misinterpreting what they mean by “feeling with thoughts”
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FUCK
In my defense, the ADHD diagnosis came after the CPA, although admittedly it wasn't much of a suprise to anyone (except me)
Quit accounting last year though, life has improved a lot since
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That question in particular wasn't related to any "MBTI dichotomies" (although I suspect it might be correlated). It was just a way to get people to start thinking about the diversity of emotional experience.
And for what it's worth, a number of people in the reddit thread said they experienced them as thoughts only.
That's the thing though, I don't think I have "emotional blindness". I've never felt unable to identify what emotion I was feeling; I do it easily and often! I'm practically trauma dumping in my group chat on a regular basis about every subjective impression I have, positive and negative. I just... don't get bodily sensations with them. Except for, as previously mentioned, anxiety.
(Although, since learning about this stuff, I may have suddenly become consciously aware of bodily sensations associated with other emotions on a couple of occasions, and... I'm not really into it. I think I'd rather nip this in the bud before it gets too far. I have quite enough on my hands to deal with as it is, best not to go throwing all new ingredients into the mix.)
Then you must be wrong that you don’t get a physical sensation. You aren’t a machine that can reduce emotions to thoughts. Thoughts aren’t emotions, and according to a lot of neurophysiological literature, emotions are primary and thoughts are secondary processes. You are picking up on a cue somewhere in yourself, but maybe you don’t understand what physical sensations it is you’re picking up on. Now, are thoughts connected to emotions? Yes in the same way behaviours are. But you wouldn’t mistake crying for sadness, because someone could be pretending to cry, or crying from happiness or laughter. A negative thought can induce a sad feeling, and a sad feeling can induce a negative thought, but you must lack a certain psychological mindedness to therefore mistake thoughts for feelings
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FWIW, I changed from experiencing emotions as intense thoughts to bodily sensations and I feel my appreciation for emotions has gotten much deeper.
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So what happens when a Fi gets programmed with highly neurotic/anxious software? Are they discernible to other people as any different from an Fe?
Good question! Under the schema I've presented, they could end up as behaviorally identical, yes. But I don't see that as much of a problem. The point isn't really to talk about behavior (nor is the point even to "sell" you on any particular theoretical view), but rather the point is to talk about the underlying phenomenological experience / thought pattern behind the behavior (which is what Jung's thought is really all about in the first place; the "personality type" stuff, based as it is on behavioral stereotypes, is just a ruse for the normies). Two people can exhibit identical behavior for very different internal reasons.
I believe I've shared this anecdote on TheMotte before, and it's one of the anecdotes I reflected on when introspecting on my own "herd animal" nature. When I was young and naive in the early 10s and I first discovered wokeism, I was immediately taken in by the "vibes". It just felt really good, y'know? I wanted to be a part of a group, I wanted to base my identity on a group, I saw that these people were enjoying themselves and I wanted to be part of that so I could enjoy myself too. But relatively quickly, my rationality kicked in and I realized that their actions violated principles of fairness and impartiality that I held to be important, which made me not want to be woke anymore.
So the movement was from sentiment (based on what I perceived to be the sentiments of others), to dispassionate analysis. And due to typical-minding, I assumed that this was essentially a universal human experience; of course everyone makes vibes-based decisions to determine their identity, and if anyone says they don't, they're probably lying because they're ashamed to admit it. But now all this stuff has got me thinking, well, maybe it's not a universal human experience. Maybe there are (neurotypical) people who don't weigh the vibe in the room, don't care about the vibe in the room, maybe they don't even perceive the vibe in the room because they've deemed it not even worth their time to assess it (obviously in the case of someone with say Asperger's, it would be different because their ability to pick up on emotional and social cues is actually compromised). In their case, they might make the opposite movement, from dispassionate analysis to sentiment: first a dispassionate "well, everyone seems to think woke is right, and they probably have good reasons, so I'll believe it too", but then their own internal "alarm bells" start going off indicating that it doesn't fit their own personal identity. And they could do all this without ever consulting the overall "vibe" of the collective. So we could have two individuals who exhibit identical behavior via very different processes.
Of course the point being, there is no way to observe these underlying processes behaviorally, you just have to introspect on yourself or ask others to introspect on themselves and report back.
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