Si

[Wisp]

I more or less know what Si is, but I wanted to here other's thoughts, as tertiary functions have always interested me. The shadow is the shadow, and the Primary and Auxiliary are obvious, they work more or less together, albeit in different areas, and with an emphasis strongly on primary...

I know what it DOES, I'm looking for something more...


(Decaf, LoR, I'm looking at you...)

 

[Decaf]

This is gonna a briefer reply than normal but I'm tired and about to go to bed...

Your tertiary function while in your inferior mode acts as a point of obsession (the opposite of our auxiliary function which acts as our creativity). We start focusing on unimportant details. Unlike people that use that function maturely, we don't know how to use it to bring in the right kinds of information, so we obsess on meaningless stuff. I'm sure you can think of examples in your own life if you think hard enough (I'll come back tomorrow and flesh this out).

Oh, and the patient, controlled use of Si is a good way to get out of being in inferior mode (I do something mindless like dishes or sometimes proof read). Getting out of a funk is all about building back up confidence in yourself.

 

[loveofreason]

So I've dragged myself here from the depths of a funk just so I can admit to knowing nothing about Si.

I can, however, verify Decaf's explanation with my own life experience. When I'm under harsh stress (as now) I become insanely focused on detail... like to mm detail. I micro-manage my environment in some futile effort to rid myself of stressors and to create something perfect. It has to be perfect! If everything was perfect I wouldn't be stressed!!! Grrr!!!

See. Insane.

I have a favourite Si (I think?) activity that I resort to like a drug - it is calming, it engages the problem-solving mind and the body, while allowing over-complex thought to roll quietly away, and it is productive. It produces something tangible while giving the mind a victory over matter. I can obssess as much as I like over the detail without impinging on anyone else's world. It involves a meditative, somewhat repetitive motion that helps reconnect me to the real world when all I want to do is float away...

I build rock walls. Seriously.

Putting a bunch of rocks together is a heavy-weight three dimensional jig-saw. I just love stone.

Now washing dishes (as Decaf's example) I find to be very useful in limited and not too entrenched circumstances. I'm way past the point where washing dishes used to help me... but can remember that time. Singing also, I would add. Washing and singing. Is singing an Si activity?

 

[Kuu]

and where do you get the rocks from?

 

[Decaf]

Remember there's argument as to whether our tertiary function is introverted or extraverted. I don't know because frankly, I also have a hard time determining the difference between the two.

 

[Wisp]

I was about to say, wouldn't Si be nit-picking your mind, while Se would be nit-picking your surroundings...?

 

[Decaf]

Well that's the problem for me. Introverted Sensing seems like it would relate to personal experience. Its sensing, so it relates to what has been gathered by the 5 senses (what IS, so to speak), but that can't be future oriented so it must be present or past. Extraverted sensing would deal with present senses and introverted with the past. So it seems that introverted sensing should be memory of the way things were. Maybe that would explain why ISTJs are such traditionalists. Their dominant function deals primarily with remembering how things used to be.

So that sounds fine to me, but the problem arises when I realize how limited a view of a person that is. There has to more to it that I don't grasp, or maybe its just because that is the complete opposite of my NP and thus seems like a terrible focus to have.

 

[Wisp]

Ah ha! our Si gives us a moderate gift at remembering the past and using our more dominat functions to come up with better ideas for the future!

 

[zxc]

Interesting posts.

I find that when I'm under stress, I'll focus on fixing irrelevant, small details; during an English exam, if I'm stuck for words and conscious of the fact that what I am about to say is crap, I start writing really slowly to make my writing neat; if I'm stressed out during a chess match in a tournament, I start to adjust the pieces to the very middle of their squares.

 

[loveofreason]

and where do you get the rocks from?

I am a baroness of rocks. I own acres of them.

Ok, so that's not quite the truth. But close enough. Thanks for asking.


Back to Si/Se, I too am having trouble getting my head around the essential differences. I can accept that Si is assigned the backward sensory perspective, but how can the collection of data from the environment via the senses (an external endeavour!) be in any sense introverted? Wouldn't retroverted be a more accurate description?

Why doesn't introverted sensing actually signify collection of internal sensory information - and what on earth would this be? The sound of our own pulse in our ears?! A stomach-ache? Am I being just too literal?

I get nostalgic, but for things that never where. Nostalgia requires thinking of something the way we wish it were, not the way it actually was. There is a necessary distortion. Before events become nostalgia they are clouded by our internal lenses.

Perhaps this is what is meant by Si. Sensory information that has become distorted by internal processes with the passage of time. Maybe that's how the nomenclature reflects reality.


Well, if that's the case I think my physical rock therapy is an Se activity.

Sorry Wisp, if my ramblings have in any way clouded your epiphany.

 

[Dissident]

Could it be introspection? Perceiving and analizing your own feelings, fears, motivations, the origin of these, etc. Or is that Ni?

 

[loveofreason]

I would have thought that was Ni, but am happy to hear more qualified thoughts than I can offer.

 

[Decaf]

I was looking over the profile description on intp.org and it has a lot of good insight into how each function expresses itself, and a much better understanding of how introverted sensing works than I do.