Functions & Dimensions/Levels of Analysis
Feb 8, 2018 18:06:52 GMT -5 by Auburn
Alerith, Amsterdam, and 2 more like this
Post by Auburn on Feb 8, 2018 18:06:52 GMT -5
This is a difficult (yet very simple) concept to communicate. I'm gonna fail and ramble... but I'm gonna try my best. I think it may be relevant to many recent discussions.
There is something Jordan Peterson always likes to say which I couldn't agree more with, and that's how reality exists at different levels of analysis simultaneously. One of the ways to explain this is via the phenomenon of 'emergence' which is intrinsic to our universe. The video below explains it very well:
H20 is incapable of 'wetness' on its own, with wetness being an emergent property at the wider level of magnification. So H20 is not wet, but many of them together are. H20 is not white, but yet snow (a certain organization of it) is white. H20 does not have surface tension, but a sea of H20 does, and that surface tension creates reflectivity, and all sorts of emergent properties not part of H20 "in itself."
How to Define the Functions
I have yet to see a compelling, complete definition of the 8 functions because there's often a focus on one scaling/magnification. Michael Pierce excels at the metabolic scale, where functions are defined by the cognitive processing styles they have. The Myers-Briggs has decades of effort towards defining the temperamental/behavioral properties which loosely arise from certain functions. These two are often at odds and/or people don't know how to frame (in their minds) the matter of behaviors and their correlations to cognition. Is behviorism hogwash? Should we just rely on the sterile definition? What does that leave?
With the launch of the new site, new 8 function pages are being made which I hope transcend these problems. I'd like to explain how I see this maybe happening. The phenomenon of emergence is also deeply true with the functions which start out as metabolic pathways. Although they haven't yet been written, the 8 function profiles will be titled "Metabolism, Vultology, Behaviorism, Mythology" for this reason - and will be divided into sections accordingly. In a rough sense, this is the map/layout:
First we start with how the function is a metabolic pathway, and then proceed to how that pathway produces micro-expressions in the body, and then how that produces sets of typical behaviors, and lastly how that produces long-life motifs that permeate a person's narrative and social-scale phenomenon (i.e. Je and governments, Pe and entertainment). All of these layers are part of a function, not just one. So far as I can tell, none of these can be excluded from a full definition of the function, and all of them are tied to one another forwards and backwards. Briefly, I'd like to go into these sections:
1 - Metabolic Level
At this level we are describing the function's participation in the processing of information. This is a bit like software or circuitry, where a rather simple function [function() in the programming sense] cascades across the brain to produce different aspects of 'thought'. This level is the most precise, but it is also the most useless. For example, if you say to someone:
Ti: J(subject(-object) - emotionalRegister) / P
Fi: J(subject(-object) / emotionalRegister) / P
It is useless unless the equation plays out in action. Likewise, describing water as 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom tells us little. If water was just defined at the atomic level, we would misunderstand a lot about it. But then if someone says:
A: "well, water is wet" it opens up the discussion to say
B: "well, oil is wet.. does it make it water?" to which one can say,
A: "well, no... i guess i mean water is a liquid"
B: "is it always though? is ice a liquid?"
A: "well, no, i guess... umm..."
The person may be forced or pushed back to just defining water as H20 because that's the only unquestionable definition there is. Everything else about water is an emergent property. But it's no good (impossible) to try to understand reality through one lens of magnification and forego all others, and this is for several reasons which I'll get to below. Comparing this briefly again to Fi and Ti, questioning into the efficacy of emergent properties between the two will invariably push us always back to their definitions at the metabolic level -- which is the most unquestionable.
But at this level, we can sum up in a few words or one sentence all the qualities of a function. It remains precise and clean. And yet it tells us little about it overall.
2 - Vultological Level
At this level the activity of the brain produces micro-expressions as a result of its metabolic activity. For primates and social mammals - but especially humans - brain activity appears to also be deeply linked to facial expressions both as forms of social signalling and as vestigial automatic acts (i.e. 'searching' for an idea with one's eyes, as if searching for objects in the environment). This is the intermediate level which CT capitalizes on. But it is already one step removed from the sterility of the metabolic. So just like H20's wetness being an emergent but not exclusive property, we can conflate signals. The way I see it, signal mixing is a result of the fact that there is overlap in the manifestation of the metabolisms at this scale of magnification. But it would be incorrect to take that overlap to mean the presence of opposite processes. Sometimes Fe and Te look the same, but it's not because the person has Fe and Te. It's because the metabolisms of Te and Fe are producing a similar effect through different channels.
This is naturally hard to justify since at the vultological level of resolution, (which has become fuzzier than the metabolic level) it's not possible to precisely trace the algorithmic pathways and confirm/deny whether said visual signal indeed emerged from Te + learned coordination or from Fe. Or if what seems like Te is emerging from a disenchanted Fe individual who has lost the desire to gracefully influence or impact his audience.
The current iteration of the ctvc likely has a signal mixing margin of some 10%-15%. But this is a fault with the tool. If the accuracy of the tool was taken to be 100%, then we'd be forced to conclude that some people have 15% Fe alongside their 85% Te. But that's erroneous. It makes much more sense to trust the phenomenon behind the fuzzy glass, and doubt the incompleteness of the instrument used to observe it. If the margin of error is low enough, it can be attributed to instrumental noise, which is how I see it, rather than to the observed information.
3- Behavioral Level
At this level we enter into the behavioral effects produces by a certain metabolic process. This is now two steps removed from the origin, so that many many many of the same behaviors can emerge from different metabolic pathways. Anything said broadly here will likely be false in any absolute sense, such as "FiNe's like science and TiNe's like philosophy". You'll always find a TiNe exception that likes science more than philosophy, and so forth.
This is where many people get tripped up. They either take the behavior to be an indicator of the metabolism, and thus ascribe the metabolism to themselves, ...or they reject the metabolism because they don't relate to the behavior. The problem here is that everything is a matter of degrees at this level of resolution. All can only be said in terms of "more likely" and "less likely"; statistics. Indeed, the behavioral level can excel and be remedied from its fallacious tendencies by being framed/seen as a probabilistic set. And many great and informative things can be said of the functions if the framing is correct here; for example one can take statistics on the career choices of those with a dominant function, or their political orientation, habits, etc.
We can say with some conviction, "Te users prefer business and entrepreneurship more than life coaching, while Fe prefers life-coaching by 10% more" as a sort of statistical fact [if indeed it is], and worry not that the presence of outliers will dismantle the base of argument. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, things can be placed in proper perspective. The "well not every [x] type is like this" argument can be met with "yes agreed, but [x]% are".
4 - Mythological Level
Just as the video above mentioned that an "ant colony" is not a thing programmed in the ants, but an emergent property from simple operations - things like societies, memes and social movements emerge the same way. This relates to how we've been discussing things like The American Dream as a collective Te myth, ...or disney princesses being Fi stand-ins for a Te culture, (the idolization of FiSe Marilyn Monroe, FiSe Jackie Kennedy & FiSe Aubrey Hepburn as 'ideal' woman for so long.. also being a sort of cultural anima projection). Or the myth of Honor/heroism in Japan, ...and so forth. It's a long list!
There is something Jordan Peterson always likes to say which I couldn't agree more with, and that's how reality exists at different levels of analysis simultaneously. One of the ways to explain this is via the phenomenon of 'emergence' which is intrinsic to our universe. The video below explains it very well:
H20 is incapable of 'wetness' on its own, with wetness being an emergent property at the wider level of magnification. So H20 is not wet, but many of them together are. H20 is not white, but yet snow (a certain organization of it) is white. H20 does not have surface tension, but a sea of H20 does, and that surface tension creates reflectivity, and all sorts of emergent properties not part of H20 "in itself."
How to Define the Functions
I have yet to see a compelling, complete definition of the 8 functions because there's often a focus on one scaling/magnification. Michael Pierce excels at the metabolic scale, where functions are defined by the cognitive processing styles they have. The Myers-Briggs has decades of effort towards defining the temperamental/behavioral properties which loosely arise from certain functions. These two are often at odds and/or people don't know how to frame (in their minds) the matter of behaviors and their correlations to cognition. Is behviorism hogwash? Should we just rely on the sterile definition? What does that leave?
With the launch of the new site, new 8 function pages are being made which I hope transcend these problems. I'd like to explain how I see this maybe happening. The phenomenon of emergence is also deeply true with the functions which start out as metabolic pathways. Although they haven't yet been written, the 8 function profiles will be titled "Metabolism, Vultology, Behaviorism, Mythology" for this reason - and will be divided into sections accordingly. In a rough sense, this is the map/layout:
First we start with how the function is a metabolic pathway, and then proceed to how that pathway produces micro-expressions in the body, and then how that produces sets of typical behaviors, and lastly how that produces long-life motifs that permeate a person's narrative and social-scale phenomenon (i.e. Je and governments, Pe and entertainment). All of these layers are part of a function, not just one. So far as I can tell, none of these can be excluded from a full definition of the function, and all of them are tied to one another forwards and backwards. Briefly, I'd like to go into these sections:
1 - Metabolic Level
At this level we are describing the function's participation in the processing of information. This is a bit like software or circuitry, where a rather simple function [function() in the programming sense] cascades across the brain to produce different aspects of 'thought'. This level is the most precise, but it is also the most useless. For example, if you say to someone:
Ti: J(subject(-object) - emotionalRegister) / P
Fi: J(subject(-object) / emotionalRegister) / P
It is useless unless the equation plays out in action. Likewise, describing water as 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom tells us little. If water was just defined at the atomic level, we would misunderstand a lot about it. But then if someone says:
A: "well, water is wet" it opens up the discussion to say
B: "well, oil is wet.. does it make it water?" to which one can say,
A: "well, no... i guess i mean water is a liquid"
B: "is it always though? is ice a liquid?"
A: "well, no, i guess... umm..."
The person may be forced or pushed back to just defining water as H20 because that's the only unquestionable definition there is. Everything else about water is an emergent property. But it's no good (impossible) to try to understand reality through one lens of magnification and forego all others, and this is for several reasons which I'll get to below. Comparing this briefly again to Fi and Ti, questioning into the efficacy of emergent properties between the two will invariably push us always back to their definitions at the metabolic level -- which is the most unquestionable.
But at this level, we can sum up in a few words or one sentence all the qualities of a function. It remains precise and clean. And yet it tells us little about it overall.
2 - Vultological Level
At this level the activity of the brain produces micro-expressions as a result of its metabolic activity. For primates and social mammals - but especially humans - brain activity appears to also be deeply linked to facial expressions both as forms of social signalling and as vestigial automatic acts (i.e. 'searching' for an idea with one's eyes, as if searching for objects in the environment). This is the intermediate level which CT capitalizes on. But it is already one step removed from the sterility of the metabolic. So just like H20's wetness being an emergent but not exclusive property, we can conflate signals. The way I see it, signal mixing is a result of the fact that there is overlap in the manifestation of the metabolisms at this scale of magnification. But it would be incorrect to take that overlap to mean the presence of opposite processes. Sometimes Fe and Te look the same, but it's not because the person has Fe and Te. It's because the metabolisms of Te and Fe are producing a similar effect through different channels.
This is naturally hard to justify since at the vultological level of resolution, (which has become fuzzier than the metabolic level) it's not possible to precisely trace the algorithmic pathways and confirm/deny whether said visual signal indeed emerged from Te + learned coordination or from Fe. Or if what seems like Te is emerging from a disenchanted Fe individual who has lost the desire to gracefully influence or impact his audience.
The current iteration of the ctvc likely has a signal mixing margin of some 10%-15%. But this is a fault with the tool. If the accuracy of the tool was taken to be 100%, then we'd be forced to conclude that some people have 15% Fe alongside their 85% Te. But that's erroneous. It makes much more sense to trust the phenomenon behind the fuzzy glass, and doubt the incompleteness of the instrument used to observe it. If the margin of error is low enough, it can be attributed to instrumental noise, which is how I see it, rather than to the observed information.
3- Behavioral Level
At this level we enter into the behavioral effects produces by a certain metabolic process. This is now two steps removed from the origin, so that many many many of the same behaviors can emerge from different metabolic pathways. Anything said broadly here will likely be false in any absolute sense, such as "FiNe's like science and TiNe's like philosophy". You'll always find a TiNe exception that likes science more than philosophy, and so forth.
This is where many people get tripped up. They either take the behavior to be an indicator of the metabolism, and thus ascribe the metabolism to themselves, ...or they reject the metabolism because they don't relate to the behavior. The problem here is that everything is a matter of degrees at this level of resolution. All can only be said in terms of "more likely" and "less likely"; statistics. Indeed, the behavioral level can excel and be remedied from its fallacious tendencies by being framed/seen as a probabilistic set. And many great and informative things can be said of the functions if the framing is correct here; for example one can take statistics on the career choices of those with a dominant function, or their political orientation, habits, etc.
We can say with some conviction, "Te users prefer business and entrepreneurship more than life coaching, while Fe prefers life-coaching by 10% more" as a sort of statistical fact [if indeed it is], and worry not that the presence of outliers will dismantle the base of argument. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, things can be placed in proper perspective. The "well not every [x] type is like this" argument can be met with "yes agreed, but [x]% are".
4 - Mythological Level
Just as the video above mentioned that an "ant colony" is not a thing programmed in the ants, but an emergent property from simple operations - things like societies, memes and social movements emerge the same way. This relates to how we've been discussing things like The American Dream as a collective Te myth, ...or disney princesses being Fi stand-ins for a Te culture, (the idolization of FiSe Marilyn Monroe, FiSe Jackie Kennedy & FiSe Aubrey Hepburn as 'ideal' woman for so long.. also being a sort of cultural anima projection). Or the myth of Honor/heroism in Japan, ...and so forth. It's a long list!
This happens because they don't want inaccurate typings based on behaviors. Someone comes along and says "well i don't do that... i must not be Te" -- as if not aligning to a given end-effect were a legitimate reason to reject the metabolism beneath. 
