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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")
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.
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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