meta-maieutics:

Because really, there’s not much of a distinction between the two characters at all.

Mad Men - Zou Bisou Bisou

I’m very happy to have this for myself. I may not be an ENTJ like Don Draper, but the dynamic just gets that much better when it is ENFP-INTJ. One time, I was very sick and in the hospital, and I let Laura live in my room while I was away, so she’d still feel close to me, even when we were apart. I was rewarded with her singing and dancing Risky-Business-style in one of my white dress shirts. I’m so lucky to have her. I was miles away and suffering, but she made me happier than I’d been in years.

Laura, if you’re reading this, I love you.

nefi-chubbylisk:

Thealecdelgado is following me. ;A;!!
He’s the first INTJ I followed on tumblr and the reason why I got into JCF instead of MBTI. ^^

Jungian Analytical Psychology and StarCraft? See? I’m not the only one!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

meta-maieutics:

I wrote this quote in big letters on a piece of paper and left it on the kitchen table for my father to read before leaving the house for a couple of days to visit a friend. It was meant as a response to this ridiculous argument we’d had the night before about him not wanting to watch a Stephen Hawking documentary on the basis that he believed him to be “full of shit” and that he “let his emotions get in the way of his intellect”, culminating in his girlfriend-ish-thing accusing him of “intellectual arrogance”, etc. etc. etc.

He responded to my message with “Who to believe? Stephen Hawking said last night that philosophy is dead!”

I just sighed and once again resigned myself to the fact that arguing with my father is impossible because he gets so caught up on connotations of words that he neglects to spend any time thinking about the actual intention behind them.

I’m familiar with this statement. It was this one he was referring to?

In his book, The Grand Design, Hawking opens with the idea that “philosophy has not kept up with modern discoveries in science, particularly physics.”
 
More specifically he asserts that science, in place of philosophy, has moved into position to be responsible for answering such questions as, “How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?”

I realize his stance makes a lot of people angry while stating the obvious, and would like to help clarify. When we want to know more about something, we turn to science and its methods, not philosophical ponderings, to learn empirically verifiable information. Can it be wrong? Yes. Can it get you closer than philosophy alone? Yes. This is the hard-to-argue obvious notion he’s stating, but when you call something people are attached to “dead,” they tend to get fairly upset. Of course, I’m referring to none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, another INTJ. His version, I will include for reference.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Ok, some plot twist this is, right?
Nietzsche was a philosopher, and Hawking says philosophy has died!

For the sake of understanding, let’s keep going. Nietzsche lived in a time when knowledge about reality, about the universe, when empiricism was at an all time low. With the same set of cognitive tools as Hawking, he did the same thing Hawking did. He pointed out that which will not last.

God is dead, and we no longer need to use religion to explain the universe, just as philosophy is dead, and we no longer need to rely on it to explain the universe. Scientific empiricism solves all of these things. If we don’t know, we can approach that unknown. With philosophy, we’re left to our own devices, at the mercy of our imagination, ability to reason, knowledge, assumptions, and worst yet: left to decide. This is not so with scientific empiricism. If you think you can decide how the universe works for even a second, the universe is there to show you complete indifference to your conclusions, as it continues onward as it always has: regardless.

This is what Stephen Hawking is referring to, and if anyone is interested, he is a fantastic writer. As for arguments with your father. Don’t bother. Aim to enlighten and inform, rather than persuade and disagree. You might be delighted to find that’s all he needed. Disarm the argumentative with genuine openness while asking the right questions they need in order to get there.

ikenbot:

Evidence of a Past Universe? Circular Patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background

Stephen Hawking has said: “We should look for evidence of a collision with another universe in our distant Past.” Some experts believe that what we call the universe may only be one of many. Is there any conceivable way that we could ever detect and study other universes if they exist? Is it even falsifiable?

This was a key question Hawking was was asked in an interview with the BBC. “Our best bet for a theory of everything is M-theory —an extension of string theory,” Hawking continued. “One prediction of M-theory is that there are many different universes, with different values for the physical constants. This might explain why the physical constants we measure seem fine-tuned to the values required for life to exist.”

It is no surprise that we observe the physical constants to be finely-tuned. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to observe them. One way of testing the theory that we may be one of many universes would be to look for features in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) which would indicate the collision of another universe with ours in the distant past.

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background shown above suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of “aeons,” according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA’s WMAP satellite supports his idea of “conformal cyclic cosmology”.

Penrose made the sensational claim that he had glimpsed a signal originating from before the Big Bang working with Vahe Gurzadyn of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia. Penrose came to this conclusion after analyzing maps from the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe.

These maps reveal the cosmic microwave background, believed to have been created just 300,000 years after the Big Bang and offering clues to the conditions at that time. Penrose’s finding runs directly counter to the widely accepted inflationary model of cosmology which states that the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged.

That expansion is now believed to be accelerating due to a scientific X factor called dark energy and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe. Penrose, however, reports Physics World, takes issue with the inflationary picture “and in particular believes it cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born – an extremely high degree of order that made complex matter possible. He does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang but that the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each big bang marking the start of a new “aeon” in the history of the universe.”

Full Article

latemailplatemail:

thealecdelgado:

asongofopposites:

nevver:

Calvin and Hobbes

The spirit indeed. Pascal anyone?

This is what I mean when I say that people with higher Ni don’t really do belief. It seems so foreign and nonsensical to them. Accept something as absolutely true? Right… I’ll just work with what works and leave acceptance and rejection to that. As far as I care, something can be simultaneously true and false, and it has no impact on me. Does it work? Okay then.

This is with regard to Pascal’s Wager:

I’m Catholic, though admittedly not a staunch one as far as the religious institution is concerned (i.e. I don’t agree with many of the Church’s views and have always been more inclined to an individualist Christianity rather than a collectivist/institutionalized one). That aside, I’m not quite convinced by the strength of Pascal’s Wager simply because if there is a God, given his omniscience, I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to tell a rationalized belief (which is what the Wager essentially is) from an authentic one, whereupon the gambit will fail utterly. Unless of course the God in question is Greek, in which case we can just offer sacrifices and appear pious, and the god(s) will be pleased and bestow good harvests and demigod children. Of course other gods will get jealous and turn you into nasty things like spiders, trees, marble etc. a la Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So perhaps the Wager remains inefficacious after all.

To address the point about Ni-dominants not doing belief, I think we do hold certain principles (moral or value-neutral) and subscribe to certain belief systems BUT we know that these systems are just models - they are not indispensable and are perhaps in fact constantly changing and being updated, as it were. This accounts for our hmm… belief that there is no absolute truth. Well, I think I just demonstrated why as knowing beings, we can never escape commitment to beliefs, from an epistemological point of view. At any point of time, there are certain things that we - consciously or unconsciously - take as truth. If we didn’t believe, it’d be hard to survive out there in a world of dangerous flux.

As an Ni-user, I was never always like that though - accommodating or integrating new possibilities. I remember that as a kid, I always wanted to be sure of the things I believed in; and when I finally found enough reason for myself to invest in a particular model, I’d genuinely take it as the Truth, capitalized. It perhaps explains why for the greater part of my academic life I was very ideologically involved with the sciences. Although I enjoyed and flourished in the languages, I always wanted/preferred water-tight answers that could withstand any sort of skeptical interrogation. I’m thinking it might due in part to my high Judging-orientedness, or else an unhealthy use of an underdeveloped, framework-obsessed tertiary Ti. Things changed when I started college though, in particular when I started taking Philosophy classes (which have been killing me due to its high demand for Te especially during discussions). It effectively deconstructed/decentered a lot of theoretical models that I’d been personally invested in, and Science was one of them. For awhile, I wasn’t sure if I believed in anything, haha. Later I realised that I could still continue subscribing to certain frameworks - I only had to be aware that there are many theoretical paradigms through which one may experience/understand the world, and our idiosyncratic worldview is essentially a constantly updating synthesis of many.

So yes, in short I generally agree with your formulation of the Ni philosophy of belief:

I’ll just work with what works and leave acceptance and rejection to that. As far as I care, something can be simultaneously true and false, and it has no impact on me.

although it sounds a tad utilitarian (that might just be my Fe alarm), and I might disagree a little with the part about the Schrodinger phenomenon not having any impact on myself, hehe.

[obligatory smiley face here: =) ]

“This accounts for our hmm… belief that there is no absolute truth. Well, I think I just demonstrated why as knowing beings, we can never escape commitment to beliefs, from an epistemological point of view.”

     I didn’t quite mean that there is or isn’t absolute truth, but that we aren’t preoccupied with validating it. Belief requires judgement, as do principles and psychological scripts, which Ni simply doesn’t do. It merely sees things for their quintessence, as their components, as their timeless, boundary-less, meaningless entities of perception. Since Ni looks at perception itself, rather than perceiving directly (as Se does), it can take something such as (to use your example of deities) and see it not as real or not real, but as things introduced by other humans who may or may not see it as real, themselves. There is no judgement, merely observation of judgement itself. To make a judgement, you’d have to use a judging function.

“I remember that as a kid, I always wanted to be sure of the things I believed in…”

     This section is describing the nature of NiTi (and TiNi for that matter) and the matter of belief is being left to Ti, not Ni, as you’re describing it. Ni is simply responsible for the pull to investigate in the first place.
     When I was very young, I was introduced to all sorts of things, from magic to ghosts to religions to tips and tricks in video games (hold B to make the Pokeball more likely to catch ‘em all!), but I merely just heard the things, and recorded them in memory as thing’s I’d heard of, without regard to their validity. If somehow holding B did impact my ability to successfully capture a Pokemon, then I’d do it. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t, if I didn’t know, I’d leave it to Te and make a tally mark chart of successes and failures out of 50 Pokeballs to figure it out. Parallel to Pascal’s Wager, you’ll find, if it didn’t interest me enough to delve into, and cost me nothing to potentially increase the success rate of the Pokeballs with the “hold B” method, I’d merely do it when I could, without conviction or care. (Because really, it doesn’t matter unless I decide it does.)

Within science and psychology, there are often contradicting and alternative hypotheses and explanations I find, and merely remember as not true or false, but for what they offer and why they contend one another, in doing so, I see what can arise from understanding rather than believing in either. Are they both making the same implicit assumption? Are they differing on something that a perspective shift would instantly resolve? Is their attachment and belief in their Truth preventing them from achieving their goal? While this is merely my perspective on these things, I’m always interested in what my other Ni counterpart sees. Without Te, how does Ni still have its characteristic Agnostic Nihilism?

“although it sounds a tad utilitarian (that might just be my Fe alarm), and I might disagree a little with the part about the Schrodinger phenomenon not having any impact on myself, hehe.”

     Utilitarian due to Te, Fe is more Humanistic. So far, this makes sense, however even Fe is Utilitarian in a sense. All Je is housed by the structures responsible for cause and effect, induction, prediction, etc. It would reasonably follow that while you can have an “Fe operating system” or a “Te operating system,” it is essentially the same “hardware.”
     You’d have to explain yourself more about Schrodinger. In case it is a misunderstanding, I’ll add that I meant that the concept isn’t too foreign to the nature of Ni’s perception. Whether or not it makes an impact is another story.

I laughed when I saw the obligatory smiley face.

asongofopposites:

Because I don’t know yet. 

Because she doesn’t believe. She just watches and learns. Her conclusions are without conviction, her humor stems from her disbelief of your belief and conviction. She is Daria, an INTJ learning how to not just be an Ni ball. She is still growing.

asongofopposites:

nevver:

Calvin and Hobbes

The spirit indeed. Pascal anyone?

This is what I mean when I say that people with higher Ni don’t really do belief. It seems so foreign and nonsensical to them. Accept something as absolutely true? Right… I’ll just work with what works and leave acceptance and rejection to that. As far as I care, something can be simultaneously true and false, and it has no impact on me. Does it work? Okay then.

hipsterintj:

MBTI Senior Bests

Hahaha not too far off.