Qualities of the Compass

Ti’d up in knots: grappling with a baffling function

After reading around, I think I’ve formed a more relatable picture of Ti in my head, as compared with the distant, austere, almost mystical sense I had about it before. Despite various overstatements I made here & there (I admit that I'm prone to relying on impressions a bit too much), it seems clear enough I do have Ti and Fe, although I still think my judgment oscillation is pretty quirky in a lot of ways. I can definitely relate to a parts of the Ti description in the stages of consciousness articles (although I relate much more to the Ne and Si ones).

There are still plenty of things I find a bit confusing about the agenda and motivation of Ti. So my purpose in writing this is:
--Look more closely at some of these confusing aspects of Ti, and
--Offer a non-lead perspective (haha, I should say probably non-lead as my CT-identity has shifted several times)—one that seems somewhat different than what I’ve read about it so far.

I guess I never got to specifically answering any of Erifrail's original questions, but I sort of address them in a roundabout way during the course of this lengthy text below.

Can Ti self-deconstruct its own agenda?

Ti seems to be a function that’s thoroughly grounded in logical thought. Yet I’m curious about whether it can apply the same rationality to its own agenda and priorities. Can the function deconstruct away its own agenda, so to speak? It apparently has no passion for life, but does it have a passion for preserving its own ‘life’ & goals? Does it have a need to rationally justify them?

Let me try to explain what I mean. Ti apparently desires little more than to generate an understanding of reality that’s unfettered by sentimental or ethical bias. This can lead it, for example, to dismiss the whole idea of meaning and purpose. Yet if Ti starts reflexively realizing that its own very operation is meaningless, what motivates it to keep on Ti-ing? In other words, wouldn’t trying to understand reality just be an exercise in futility at that point? If the Ti recognizes that it has no real rational purpose for its own truth-seeking but is merely being impelled by some primeval instinct, wouldn’t that undermine its desire for convergent rationality?

I went through a phase in my early adulthood when I worried that maybe reality was meaningless. It made me feel quite bitter and resentful toward the universe for being so indifferent to life, and that made me generally feel disinclined to keep thinking about such topics at all. I shoved them to the back of my mind, where they caused me a dull, ever-present sense of unhappiness for several years till I finally found the strength to resolve them in a way that was more psychologically fulfilling. I’ve also felt like trying to intellectualize ephemeral things like purpose or beauty feels sort of like trying to catch a ghost in a jar. It makes me think of Thomas Aquainas calculating how many angels would fit on the head of a pin.

Yet I don’t know if I’ve always felt this way. When I think back to my early adolescence, I feel like I identified a lot more with the esoteric, knowledge-hungry philosopher. Granted, I felt pretty safe in my worldview at that time and hadn’t yet brushed up against the terrifying specter of nihilism.

As I grew older I wonder if my Ti gradually declawed some of its own agenda by asking “what’s the point?” a few too many times.

Runaway Ti

Along the same lines, I’ve wondered about a rampant Ti that self-deconstructs its own deconstructions. For instance, let’s suppose the Ti is parsing out some concept into neat categories. But at a certain point, maybe it starts asking, “why these particular categories? Do they somehow uniquely reflect the natural contours of this object I’m deconstructing? If not, then surely I’m imposing my own bias rather than understanding it just as it naturally is.” Eventually, any particular method of deconstruction begins to seem arbitrary & futile, and the Ti short circuits itself trying to decide what to make of it. At the worst, all of reality itself starts to seem completely nonsensical.

I feel like I’ve had one or two experiences of this sort before—they’re rather disconcerting. They tend to take up all my psychic energy, making me inwardly sort of manic (i.e. my mind is overactive) and outwardly pretty spaced-out and dysfunctional. I wonder if it’s overmodulation.

Over time, this kind of experience, as well as the more nihilistic kind, has tended to make me more content to leave more things whole & mysterious.

So because of my tendency to be drawn into this kind of circular thinking, I have a pretty visceral instinctual guardrail against certain patterns of thought: “Don’t go here—this path leads nowhere good.” Granted, occasionally the Ti will still bubble to surface and upset my apple cart. In these instances, its agenda can sometimes seem to the rest of my psyche like it should be trivial or meaningless. Ironically, even though the Ti itself may be dispassionate, its disruptive quality can put me into a state of agitation or internal tumult.

Ti neutralization

As I’ve mentioned here & elsewhere, the Ti neutralization and lack of ethical bias were always sort of difficult for me to relate to. For one thing, I expected that the visual signals of neutralization would somehow correlate to moments of internal obliviousness to my own emotional state. But I can guess about why that isn’t be the case. The functions are constantly oscillating between each other, so even if I’m showing strong Ti signals at a particular moment, the other functions would still be picking up input from the emotional register, even if it were Ti that was being emphasized—(if I’m not mistaken). Like other somatic experiences associated with the inner body, the experience of emotion seems to be continuous, and even when it’s not directly in conscious focus it’s at least on the periphery. It just varies greatly over time in quality and intensity.

Detachment and self-contextualization

In the book it says:


This aspect of Ti has always been rather mystifying and difficult to relate to—perhaps related to the fact that I seem to have natively strong Si. I can’t ever remember having a sense of disassociation like this, except maybe in a half-asleep, half-awake state. I can sometimes get very intently focused and momentarily become oblivious to the surrounding world, but I always feel connected with myself. I’ve long found narratives of out-of-body experiences rather fascinating, but I can’t say I’ve had anything even remotely like one.

By the way, this sort of makes me wonder if shamans in indigenous cultures were often Ti-leads. In pre-contact times one of the main roles of shamans, at least in the North, was to locate herds of animals using methods like inducing out-of-body experiences.

However, I can relate to Ti’s approach more if I see it as a sort of self-contextualization: recognizing that I am just one character in a much larger story.

I can also relate to Ti as a way of detaching from whatever I’m caught up in at a particular moment attaching instead to a long-term sense about what I believe to be good & true in life. I can often do that with day-to-day trifles. For instance, if someone upsets me, I might be tempted to react, but then think “oh, but what’s the point of reacting? It’s already heated so I won’t get through to them and I’ll probably just escalate the situation, making us both feel worse.” Once the emotion of the moment has passed, I can carefully consider whether I should let the issue go altogether or whether I need to calmly broach the topic at a less emotionally-charged time.

But if I’m preoccupied by a more serious, longer term problem it can seem impossible to disconnect or disassociate from it, I guess because the Ti itself is so heavily involved in trying to resolve the issue.

Ti’s self-bias toward its own agenda?

In the original post it says:


If Ti can so easily dismiss, doubt and deconstruct anything & everything, wouldn’t it sometimes turn its own judgment on itself? I guess this is probably what “reviser doubt” refers to. More importantly, wouldn’t it see holding itself more right as a form of self-bias?

Philosophers have been debating the same old topics for millennia, typically using airtight Ti logic yet coming to wildly divergent conclusions. Why would I think that my logic is more correct than those of philosophers who invested their lives into trying to argue these topics? (I guess that attitude is probably a logical fallacy) … It seems like logic can lead every which way unless it’s solidly anchored by lots of empirical evidence. In other words, I don’t see that much appeal in trying to use meticulous logic to derive things like metaphysical truths.

I actually have a number of abstract beliefs that I have no real interest in logically justifying or defending because that’s not their point. They don’t have to be 100% logically vetted to help me make sense of the world in a holistic way. At the end, any sort of belief or truth is about telling a story that meaningfully reflects some aspect of reality. For this reason, even though I’m not religious myself, I can relate a lot to the psychology of being religious.

Mostly, I’m just mentioning this because it seems like another way that Ti might differ when it’s in more of a supportive role.

Convergence versus self-fragmenting

This sort of leads me to this next part. If tried to rely solely on Ti to dispassionately deduce a perfectly logical cosmology, I’d still have probably have no compelling reason to be convinced that I was actually somehow uniquely right. More importantly, I’d likely make myself unhappy because the cosmology wouldn’t reflect the holistic needs of my psychology, but only the narrow, intellectualized viewpoint of one function. The result might be that I became a worse person because of feeling perpetually cynical and uninspired. So perhaps I’d have a worldview less biased by my own quirks & caprices, but at the cost of being able to pursue a more convergent alignment between thought and action.

For instance, let’s say I allowed my Ti bully me into believing that free will is only an illusion. Well, for all intents & purposes I’d still have to pretend as if free will existed because that’s how life works. Perhaps I’d still feel the compass idealism tugging at my heart, impelling me to align myself toward its other ideals. But behind every action, there’d be a sinking feeling of futility. Why bother going to all that effort? There’s no ghost inside the machine, and I’m really just doing what my genes programmed me to do.

And here again it gets back to the issue of pretending my own biases don’t exist. On the one hand, Ti apparently wants to work in isolation from the rest of the self, ignoring all its whims and desires. Yet on the other hand, it wants the whole self to be aligned toward a convergent ideal. Well, the whole self includes all these whims and desires. So it seems like the Ti user would have to find some balance between truth and alignment.

Ti and inductive reasoning

In the book and elsewhere, all reference I’ve seen to the logical functions describe them as operating by making deductions—i.e. determining whether or not something is true based on a given set of premises. I definitely use deductive reasoning quite a lot in certain contexts, but just for general use for navigating day-to-day life and whatnot, I think my logical process tends to rely rather heavily on induction. For example, because I’ve generally seen X under these circumstances, it seems quite likely that in this context I’ll also encounter X. I’m sure that has to do with the fact that much of the time, Ti is under the wing of Ne and Si.

Similarly I feel like Ti for me can often work in a somewhat statistical way. Based on what I know or have experienced, what are the most significant trends I can pick out? How likely are these trends to continue? What’s the most consistent general pattern I can find that connects all these datapoints? I get a sense that Ti leads are often trying to decipher absolute truths underlying reality. In my own experience, I find using Ti is often more about trying to describe and structure the various patterns and processes that I encounter in the world. In this mode, it’s not overly concerned about perfection or making inferences that are 100% correct. It’s more just helping to build models that paint a general picture of how the world works.