MindFacets

Exploring thought, emotion and personality

[Draft] Defining the Roles: Text and Context, Expressive and Receptive

Nov 12

Posted by Jared in The 4 Roles | No Comments

The 4 roles can be defined in terms of whether they are expressive or receptive:

  • The Constructor contributes, builds, and adds to a flow of activity, so it is expressive.
  • The Reformer proposes something new, or does something to break the mould and established pattern, so it is expressive too.
  • The Focuser welcomes activity to be nurtured, so it is receptive.
  • The Brainstormer just loves ideas, and loves to find the most interesting ones, so it is also receptive.
In any situation, there is both a context and a text.  The text is the details of what’s going on.  Text is at the forefront, the main thing.  Context is the backdrop, or the background situation, or the rules by which details abide.  The 4 roles are also defined by whether they are expressive or receptive in context:
  • The Constructor learns about the situation in which it can contribute.  Therefore it is receptive to context.
  • The Reformer proposes a new overall situation, so it is expressive in context.
  • The Focuser wants to see a place for details to flourish, so it doesn’t mind expressing and even imposing a set of rules for this to happen.  Therefore it is contextually expressive.
  • The Brainstormer is not only attentive to specific ideas, but to the situation, and is therefore contextually receptive.
The Brainstormer is the direct opposite of the Reformer — it does not push change, but rather gravitates to the most interesting ideas within reach.  Whereas the Reformer pushes (expresses) its ideas on others, the Brainstormer pulls, or draws in, or seduces others to follow what it thinks is interesting.  Both have the power to affect change, but with opposite strategies: the Reformer with strength (presents a strong and forceful argument), and the Brainstormer with beauty (paints an appealing picture).
This distinction is a classic one.  You may have heard this expressed as yin and yang.  It could also be called masculine and feminine styles, although men and women use plenty of both, even if men are generally more known for strength and women for beauty.
I will go into much more discussion about both context and text, and expressive and receptive.  For now, notice we get a nice chart:
[TODO: chart]
The 4 roles are no more and no less than this chart.  I tried to give them nice names, but they are imperfect.  These roles encompass all human behaviour, and therefore single word names aren’t going to be enough!  It’s practicality that

Introducing The 4 Roles

Nov 12

Posted by Jared in The 4 Roles | No Comments

In any given situation, people are capable of taking on different roles. Often, we help contribute to a workplace or family or social situation, by joining in and enriching your little community with our own contributions.

Sometimes, though, the group starts to become dry and needs something to spice things up.  Perhaps work is slow or inefficient. Perhaps our friends or family are bored.  Contributing to the status quo isn’t going to help – someone needs to brainstorm a bright idea.

Other times, there may be a lot of contributors and ideas. Perhaps there are even too many.  There may be chaos, disorder, and disunity.  In this case, what’s needed is someone to see what’s going on and set some constructive boundaries and focus for the group, in order to channel everyone’s energies in a positive direction.

Lastly, in a worst case scenario, the group may be struggling to function at all, and even when it manages to, it is headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps a workplace is rife with arguments, and in between conflicts, everyone goes off on their own and does work that creates more problems than it solves, making the next conflict even worse. Yet another bright idea isn’t going to be welcomed, and re-channeling focus of the group wouldn’t do it either when the attitudes are so hostile. What’s needed is a total reset, a total reformation. Someone needs to say “everybody just hold on a minute,” go back to the drawing board, and re-think through how things should be.

 There you have it!  These are the four major roles of personality in MindFacets:

Read the rest of this entry »

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INTJ Profile (Preview)

Oct 30

Posted by Jared in Uncategorized | No Comments

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Personality Profiles

If there is such thing as a “most independent type,” it would definitely be [INTJ]. Our thoughts must be reasonable to us, and we value the freedom to think for ourselves. We are the boldest type when it comes to refusing to be forced to do anything we don’t want to do. We will just not do it, and are offended by the idea that anyone can control us. We can respect being under leadership if it is intelligent, competent, and enlightened. But for anything important to us, we ultimately must go in the direction we have come to consider to be best. We do like to believe in people, but for many areas in life, we quickly learn that there’s no substitute for figuring things out for ourselves, and not trusting anyone else who has not thought things through as much as we have.

This often makes us pioneers, and sometimes leaders, not that we seek to gain followers. We are not flattered by a following, as it can be a burdensome responsibility, although there are times when the benefits from a coordinated group effort can be worth it. We will fulfill the role of leader if we must, but have no problems surrendering the role to a more natural leader, unless of course, the group effort has become our pet project, and handing it over to someone else would lead our precious vision to its doom, in which case we will not let our control be diluted by those who are less competent.

We are often seen as visionaries, iconoclasts, and insightful, but we are not inherently ingenious per se, we just don’t make assumptions, and like to challenge those of other people. We are visionary in the sense that we start with a blank slate and get a picture of how things should be, and then can be able to see the best route to get there, assuming there is one. Direction is something we pretty much always have in our lives, and this sense of direction can sometimes be of help to others, assuming they know what they want.

Unless we allow or force ourselves to be expressive (and some of us are naturally quite expressive,) we are the hardest type to read. Our facial expressions give nothing of our thoughts away, so we often leave people guessing what we are thinking.

We have high standards of reason and logic. If something does not make sense, we will not put up with it, at least not in any place that we care about. This includes the parts of our lives in which we feel ownership (perhaps our homes, our jobs, our families,) and especially in our own minds, and minds of people we care about. If it is too inconvenient to fix, or we just don’t care enough, it’s much easier to leave it alone. We know the vast majority of the world is hopelessly beyond our control, and the more we take on, the more effort we have to invest to fix things. So if we are ever critical of you, it usually means we care about you and accept you enough to include you in some aspect of our world. Criticism is the greatest flattery you can receive from an [INTJ], and the lack of it is possibly the worst insult that can be given.

In general, we do like to see people reach their potential. And for ourselves, we place a lot of value in reaching our own potentials. Therefore, we often set for ourselves very high standards in reason and logic, and in performance for our areas of expertise. We don’t expect others to meet these standards we hold ourselves to, but when people are around us, they soon become aware of our standards for reason, and often subconsciously start judging themselves by our tough standards. The end result is that we can often be perceived as intimidating without even doing anything. Sometimes this is convenient, but in general it serves to put a gap between us and other people.

On the other hand, one kind of gap that we are less likely to have are those from gaining “social status.” While we can be practically minded in respect to those with whom we socialize, we tend to, moreso than any other type, ignore things like job position, social class, or ethnicity when deciding whether or not to talk to a person or how to treat them. We are too practical to assess people by artificial grades of worth. Instead of rating a person’s worth, we assess the worth of correspondence with that person. This may still be cold, but at least it makes sense.

We are real people. We have to be logical — it is who we are. But somewhere, whether deep down or not so deep down, after all the necessary logical criticisms and “reasonability repairs” are done (euphemisms for the eradication of stupidity,) we long to be able to love and accept other people. After being forced to be the cold-hearted bearers of reason in our world, we [INTJ]‘s are probably the last kind of people that love and warmth is expected to come from, so it can sometimes be difficult for us to get people to be think of us as people who need to love, but it’s true. Every type has something that you would least expect from them, and that’s ours. We often must be critical and non-accepting towards many things, but for when we don’t have to be, now you know a need you may have assumed never existed.

While our most pressing attention is devoted to logic, we are all really artists, and logic is the coldest manifestation of this artistic drive in us. We have appreciation for aesthetics, whether it is in the musical, visual, or culinary arts, clothing, architecture or spatial layout, elegance of system design or computer program structure, a nice sports play, an elegant dance, or martial arts. We value being creative in these ways.

Contrasting We and Wi

Dec 29

Posted by Jared in Cognitive Processes, MindTour Series | No Comments

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

Portraits through Contrasts

Now that the acronym housekeeping is out of the way, I think a great way to quickly get a feel for the perceiving processes is to compare and contrast them with one another, by discussing differences that I have already mentioned for M vs W and N vs S, as well as new ones for internal (i) and external (e) focuses.

I like to be concise when explaining the basics of personality to keep things to the point, but don’t mind being a bit repetitive in examples like this if it gives different angles and ties things together, and helps round out a feel for things. If you’d like more or less examples, feel free to leave a comment.

 

Contrasting We and Wi

I vs E

There are two kinds of webbers (people who like to web): the brainstormers, who see the web as an opportunity to make new connections within the web or to grow the web, and problem solvers, who see the web as situation to be solved. The brainstormers are looking outside the currently known information, or in other words have an external (e) focus, and are therefore using We. The problem solvers are looking within the situation, to try to see the bottom line of the web, and their introspective (i) focus means they are using Wi.

N vs S, Openendedness vs Closure, Spontaneity vs Tradition

We, as an N process, doesn’t care so much about any particular idea, like an S process (such as Wi) would, but instead enjoys the process of seeing connections and making new ones. To We, the web is an open-ended collection of connections. In contrast, to Wi the web as a whole is a set thing, a problem that is usually defined by its solution.

To Wi, it is not important how the problem is solved, but simply that it is solved. We, on the other hand, may appreciate the creativity involved in solving a problem. We may be bored by solving simple problems, but Wi may take satisfaction in having an ordered and serene environment in which all problems are solved.

If the web consists of words and music to a song, the Wi solution is to sing the words in order. If a song is started, the solution is to finish singing the song – seeing it through to its proper end can bring satisfaction. To We, the words and music may be seen as an opportunity to change part of the song to relate to the present situation in a funny or clever way. Success to We is to relate to the song somehow, or to relate the song to something, and if this involves changing things up a bit, it can seem like a good thing, whereas Wi is more likely to see tradition as valuable and sacred.

When We tweaks something, like a song, there are now two similar ideas that are different somehow. We, as a divergent process, tends to appreciate this, but Wi feels more comfortable with convergence, and can sometimes be more bothered by many instances of things that are almost the same, but not quite. Because of this, Wi is good at contributing order and predictability, and is a good complement to the randomness of We.

Personal vs Impersonal

The We process may be used to appreciate cleverness, the value, or the humor of connecting ideas, contrasting with how Wi appreciates the significance of a particular idea. However, We, since it is an extraverted process, it is actually an impersonal and does not appreciate anything on its own (an introverted Judging process has to team up with We to do that.) With this in mind, We is strictly speaking just an impartial “noticer” of ideas that come and go, while Wi creates a sort of inner encyclopedia for understanding the world.

People like to understand things, so people who use Wi like it when ideas can be understood in terms of their inner encyclopedia, and don’t like it when definitions of things are off or distorted somehow. Therefore, Wi has a subjective opinion of what a good way to understand the world, and likes it when it others use it as well, since it establishes a common ground for shared internalized understanding (something that has been coined “inter-subjectivity.”)

Summary

We Wi
Novelty-seeking Closure-seeking
Chaotic Ordered
Impersonal Opinionated
Detached from
familiar		 Attached to traditional
ways of thinking
Exploring Problem-solving

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The Perceiving Processes

Sep 5

Posted by Jared in Cognitive Processes | No Comments

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

A Recap of Concepts and Some Useful abbreviations

So far I have discussed two distinct types of ideas: objects (or instances), and relationships, and two distinct ways of organizing them: in webs and in maps. I hope the distinctions are obvious, since if you understand this, you already understand a great deal of styles of thought that make up personality.

Since these are important concepts that are used over and over, they have been assigned abbreviations:

W – Webbing

M – Mapping

S – inStancing

N – relatiNg

Also, since perceiving information is something the mind does, these activities are called cognitive processes, or just processes.

Side note on naming: N and S are the traditional abbreviations for the concepts that millions of people are already familiar with. I have thought of breaking with compatibility and using R for Relating, and O for ‘objecting’, (which isn’t really a good word, and I is already used for something else). Feel free to leave a comment to tell me what you think. I have thought about this a lot, delved through a thesaurus several times and there seems to be no obviously ideal answer.

The 4 combinations of Perceiving Processes

The mind does not just focus on webbing or mapping, or on instancing, or relating, but on some combination of both: webbing with a focus on instances, or mapping with a focus on the relations, for example.

There are four possible combinations, and they also have abbreviations. Here I also introduce the concept of an internal (i) or external (e) focus:

We – Webbing with a external focus – on the relations that reach out to connect to more ideas

Wi – Webbing with an internal focus – on the instance ideas, using the web to converge upon an answer

Me – Mapping with an external focus – on the mapped object as a whole, the meaning of a particular instance’s existence

Mi – Mapping with an internal focus – on the relationships charted within the object that give it its shape and characteristics

For this blog series, I will for the most part stick to the above abbreviations to keep things simple, but many others are possible. The alternate names I may use are Ne, Ni, Se, and Si, which are the traditional names known by many. These are just as valid, but I thought I would take the opportunity to place more of an emphasis on the M and W concepts, which have received very little attention, and may also be easier to understand. However, I will use the alternate name if I want to emphasize the N or S characteristic.

Another quick note is that the letter x is a fill in the blank letter to indicate something is unspecified. Wx refers to both We and Wi, for example, and Xe refers to both We and Me. The abbreviation for all four perceiving processes is Px, and will be useful later.

Here is a table of the four perceiving processes:

Webbing Mapping
inStancing Wi Me
relatiNg We Mi

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Mapping

Sep 5

Posted by Jared in Cognitive Processes | No Comments

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

The alternative to perceiving the world as webs is to see it as maps. Instead of finding ways to connect all sorts of different things, like webbing does, maps focus on only one thing and chart it out to create a mental blueprint of it.

Example: Map of a Room

Imagine being inside a room in a house, and wanting to remember what it looks like. The first thing you might do is look towards one of the walls. For this example, this is what you would see:

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The above diagram contains all of the objects we will consider in the picture, but it does not contain any connections yet. When mapping something, the connections of the map are all the internal relationships among that thing’s defining sub-aspects. So when mapping a wall of a room, the connections must show how each object is related to every other one:

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In the above thought net, the instances are connected to their closest neighbors. Names for the connections are omitted in the diagram, but they could have names such as ‘about 5 inches to the left of’ or ‘just above’ or ‘on top of.’

Many times, maps will have a topology to them, especially ones that map spatial environments, like the room shown above. Instead of remembering names for each of the relationships, the mind usually gets a general feel for how far apart things are from each other.

From this thought net, you can understand various things: the chair is on the floor and below the picture; the picture is a bit to the left of the upper part of the door; and the door is above and in front of the mat, and the mat is on the floor.

Now let’s pretend you leave the room, and all you remember of the room is the map thought net above. Then let’s pretend someone asked you to tell them from memory where the mat is in relation to the chair. Since this is a map, there should be a way to connect every object of the room to every other object. However, when creating the map, you didn’t explicitly remember how the chair was related to the mat.

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Fortunately, you can still figure it out, because maps are transitive, meaning everything in the map is somehow connected to every other part, although you may have to traverse through several objects to get from one to another. In this example, the chair is below the picture, which is a little left of the door, which is above the mat. Therefore, the chair is a little left of the mat, and its height is somewhere in the same neighborhood as the mat, but we can’t tell exactly from this information.

However, from the map, you also remembered that both the chair and the mat are both resting on the surface of the floor, so you can quickly figure out that the bottoms of each object are parallel to one another, and you now have a pretty good idea of how the mat and the chair are situated with respect to one another.

Maps Summary

This was a simple example of how mapping works. The map is created by remembering the relationships between key landmarks of some topic, such as the view of a wall. Afterwards, this map can be recalled from memory to reconstruct a mental view of the wall, with all of the features (including the chair, picture, door, and mat,) in their correct places. If the map is thorough enough, it should be possible to connect every part of the map to every other part.

Maps are Only About One Thing

Maps can only be about one thing, or one instance idea. In this example, the map is for a specific instance of a ‘wall’ or view of the wall.

Of course, we could pick out instances from within this map, such as the chair, and start a web, using chair as a starting point to brainstorm related ideas: people sit on them, some are hard, some are soft, some are made of wood, some are wide enough for two people, etc.

Or we could create a map of the chair, which would allow us to draw it from memory if we had to, but again, this map would only be about the chair.

We could also take this map of one wall, and combine it with maps of the views of other walls to get a map of the entire room, and then combine maps of all the rooms to get a map of the building. Still, the map would only be about one thing: the building.

Different Kinds of Maps

The example map of the room is a mapping of its features in physical space. Maps are very useful for charting physical space, but they can also be used to create maps in abstract spaces. As an example, let’s make a map of the idea ‘colors’ or, phrased differently, of ‘color space.’

How can we make a map of colors? Well, in the room example, we made a map by saying how far one object was from another object, so let’s do that with colors, by considering two colors at a time:

Red & Green:

“I don’t know how red and green are related.”

Red & Blue:

“I don’t know how to relate red and blue either, but it does come to mind that mixing red and blue makes purple, so I will try that.”

Red & Purple:

“Purple has red in it, and the more reddish the purple, the closer to red it gets.”

Purple & Blue:

“Purple has blue in it too, and the bluer purple becomes, the closer it becomes to blue.”

From this we can say red and blue are both close to purple, and that to get from red to blue, or vice versa, one can go through purple. Therefore, it can be said that purple is somewhere in between red and blue in “color space.” Color space is an abstract space, and not a spatial one like the room, but we can still make a map out of it.

Here is a picture of a color wheel, where you can see how close colors are to one another based on their hue, and what colors you have to “go through” to get from one to another:
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And here is a mapping of the color wheel:

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As you can see, there are connections connecting all along the color wheel, with a few extra connections that aid in remembering the relationship colors that are not directly next to each other. As before, since maps are transitive, any colors that are not directly connected can be related to one another by going through multiple connections.

The Internet and Maps

While websites can consist of many web pages, they usually focus on one thing or theme. Nearly every website has a menu for navigation, representing a high-level map of the site, and often submenus to navigate a segment of the site. This makes it easy to get an idea of all the information that is on the site, or on some segment of the site, and saves the websurfer the trouble of reading every page and clicking every link on every page in order to find all the webpages.

While some maps are not topographical, and it would not matter if the order of items was changed on a website’s menu, the mind still often likes to think of where each menu item is in relation to another. People often like to have things arranged in a certain way, such as icons on a computer desktop, or items on a real desktop, so that they can take advantage of mental maps to locate items faster.

One very important map is used in alphabetical sorting, which allows people to use their sequential mapping of letters in the alphabet to quickly find something. Imagine how long it would take to look up a word in a dictionary if the words were not in alphabetical order! Without maps, a dictionary would not be practical to use.

The idea that maps are about one thing holds true for navigation menus, desktops, and the alphabet. Since there are only a few things in a map, it is possible for the mind to picture where everything is, and drill down into sub-maps when necessary, such as submenus on websites, or going to the 2nd and 3rd letter in a list of alphabetically sorted words.

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Webbing

Sep 5

Posted by Jared in Cognitive Processes | No Comments

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

Two Kinds of Thought Nets

In the tangible world, information can be stored and represented in many different ways: quick notes on a piece of paper, a structured legal document, a map of a geographical area, a painting, or an audio or video clip. There are many kinds of information, and there are usually some methods of representing that information that are better than others. If someone were to write their legal will, for example a legal document would be better than than trying to somehow encode the information within an artistic painting. If a person wanted to make a list of items to buy at a grocery store, jotting it down on a piece of note paper would make more sense than filming a video.

Likewise, thoughts are organized in the mind in different ways to suit different kinds of information.

Webs

Webbing is one way to construct networks of thought. The name comes from what would happen if you were to pick out one instance idea, such as “cat,” and brainstorm as many connections to other instances as you could, and then connected those instances to other instances. Very quickly, you would get something resembling a spider web of ideas.

All of the examples so far have been webs, so let’s revisit an example:

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We could start branching off of any one of these instances, or make some new branches from Cat. The thought net below shows what someone might come up with after a little brainstorming:

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As you can see, after brainstorming and branching out to add a few more ideas, it is starting to look like a web. After brainstorming some ideas related to ‘Cat,’ it was possible to connect some of those to each other. For example, dog, mouse, lion, and tiger can all be connected to animal since they are all animals.

Sometimes, when looking at one or more instance ideas, it becomes apparent that a new instance idea could be added to join the two. Since ‘bark’ and ‘meow’ are both animal noises, the ‘animal sound’ idea was added and connected to both, using the ‘is an’ idea. This prompted the addition of more animal sounds, like ‘roar,’ and the animals that made them, and their relationships to other animals, like the bear being bigger and more powerful than a dog.

Many more ideas could be quickly brainstormed and added to the web in similar fashion – it is easy to see how interconnected things are. ‘Lion’ and ‘bear’ can be connected to animal, and more lines could be added to show which other animals they frighten, or perhaps what frightens them, such as loud noises or a hunter that is shooting at them. From there, you could branch off into guns, or hunters, or people in general, and things related to them: types of guns, gun lobby groups, politics, voting, ballots, paper ballots, trees, squirrels, storing nuts for winter, winter, snow, skiing, mountains, and on and on.

How Webs can be Useful

Webs interconnect many different things together as it is interesting and useful to do so. Purely random brainstorming is usually not useful, but brainstorming can be useful when there is a focus. For example, if you are considering traveling to a location with a zoo, then brainstorming a web with a focus on animals you like might help you make a decision. After you come up with a list of animals you like, you could find out how many of these animals are also at the zoo at each potential travel destination, which would help you form an opinion about where you would like to go.

Webs are Not About Any One Thing

While webs may have a certain focus, a complete web is not constrained to be about any one thing in particular. In the webbed thought net above, we could have included things ranging from politics, your local political leaders, to skiing, ski jumps, snowboarding, winter, summer, and so on. If you pick a starting point and traverse your own mind’s web long enough, you will discover that everything you know can be connected to one massive web. No web can be about any one thing in particular, because webs have to be able to connect to every idea conceivable by the mind.

The Internet and Webs

The Internet, or more specifically, the World Wide Web, is an excellent example of a web. Each web page could be likened to an instance idea, since it is typically about one thing, and describes that thing. The links on a web page link are like relationship ideas, because they form a relationship from the page being viewed to another page. The idea that webs are not about any one thing holds true for the WWW, as there are millions of topics discussed on the Internet, and no prevailing theme.

Search engines like Google try to make the vast amounts of information more accessible by acting as a central hub to as much of the Internet as possible. Still, there can be islands of information that are not reachable by Google or another search engine, requiring you to find the site address on your own.

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Visualizing Thought: Objects and Relationships

Aug 31

Posted by Jared in Cognitive Processes | No Comments

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

In the mind at any one time, there are many conscious and subconscious thoughts present. There are many kinds of thoughts, ranging from short-term awareness to long-term memory, from basic sensory perceptions to deep personal opinions and values in which there is a vested emotional interest.

What is thought, exactly, and how can it be visualized? The picture below is an example of one way to picture thought.

Diagram 1: A simple thought net

Diagram 1: A simple thought net

The picture above shows a few instances of concepts, represented by dots, interconnected by lines to form a thought net. This thought net could exist within someone’s mind, and this person could use this thought net to understand the things covered in the network. For example, it would be understood that both a dog and a squirrel are animals, and that cats and tigers are both animals and felines.

The thought net drawing consists of two things: dots, and the arrows that connect them. The dots represent specific instances of objects, or instance ideas, and the arrows represent relationship ideas. Practical thought requires both kinds.

To demonstrate this, if all the relationship lines were to be removed, and the thought network was left with just 6 dots, it would become useless:

Drawing 2: A useless thought net

Drawing 2: A useless thought net

In this thought net, the notion of ‘animal’ is not connected to anything and is therefore useless (as are the other 5) since nothing is known about what ideas are related to animal. In the first thought net, there were some examples of animals available, but with the connections taken away in Drawing 2, that understanding has been broken.

Likewise, if all of the dots are taken away, the lines mean nothing:

Drawing 3: Another useless thought net

Drawing 3: Another useless thought net

 

In this thought net, the lines are still there, and they still mean ‘is a’, but since they don’t connect anything together, they are useless.

From this perspective, in order for thought to exist, there must be both components: relationship ideas, and instance ideas.

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Introduction: Personality and a Direction for Exploration

Aug 30

Posted by Jared in MindTour Series | 1 Comment

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

Personality

What is personality?  Since it is a primary focus here, it is important to define how I define it. On one hand, we have awareness and will, and on the other, we have a human existence with a mind and body and everything else that goes with it. Personality is a lens that translates human existence into terms we can have a direct awareness of, and a bridge for our will to express ourselves in our world.

Personality is a term that is used for a variety of meanings. One could say that a person has a lot of personality, or no personality. Robots and machines may mimic people, but have no personality. Someone who is a big personality has a lot of charisma to project to people around them. In general, personality is a good thing. If we have a personality, it means we have unique personal traits and characteristics. The more we have to express, the more in touch with ourselves we are, and the more we are able to articulate ourselves and make choices in life that are more deeply meaningful and satisfying to our existence. Likewise, the more we are aware of the world around us, the more in touch with experience we are, being able to understand and appreciate it.

Temperament vs Personality

Temperament is different than personality in that it can change from day to day, and evolve over the span of a person’s life. While there are many ideas of what individual personality is, for the purposes of this blog, it is something integral to a person that does not change. As temperament changes, it can highlight or bring out the many different parts a person’s personality, but the personality itself is what anchors a single life in a pervading continuity, from beginning to end. It is a core part of what makes you you.

How much of a person’s personality is fixed for life is a big debate. However, I think that the question can be answered in a satisfying way with the ideas presented here. After all the ideas are presented, I plan to revisit this topic. For now it is enough to know that my goal is to account for human identity, not just human whim.

Where to look

The bridge between our will and the human experience is vast, so it is helpful to have a strategy for understanding what is going on. I think Carl G. Jung’s 8 “function-attitudes” are a great place to start. I call them cognitive processes or processes, and think they are key to understanding what is going on in the mind that gives rise to personality.

Whether someone is acting logical, cold, and calculating, or acting relational, warm, and sympathetic, he or she is employing a particular mental activity. This can seem like a simplification, but once clearly defined, Jung’s 8 processes are very powerful tools for understanding how people think, feel, understand, and express themselves.

Therefore, it is important to clearly define them. The next few pages will delve into the processes, and hopefully start giving you an idea of both how the mind works, and also personality can be typed, at least as a momentary mental activity.

  • An approach to understanding thought: ob jects and relationships

  • Perceiving Processes: 4 ways to be aware of information

  • Judging Processes: 4 ways to understand the significance of information

  • Process Pairs: combining awareness with significance to create the simplest forms of thought, producing the 16 thought styles

Since the building blocks of thought is such a foundational topic, I am always looking for ways to further an understanding of the processes, and to better explain them, whether in terms of psychology, logic (philosophy), or cognitive science. I have created a forum for ongoing discussion in this topic, and may blog more about other ways a fresh or more accurate perspective can be attained.

Note: If you are already familiar with Jung or 16-type systems, you may notice I have switched things up and present the processes in a non-traditional way, by offering alternative names and groupings. I hope this can inspire you to look at them in a fresh way.

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Welcome to the MindFacets Blog

Aug 29

Posted by Jared in MindTour Series | No Comments

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the MindFacets blog! Here I will be discussing the investigation I have been doing into personality typing and how the mind works. As some of my friends and acquaintances know, I have been compiling this kind of information for a while, and I will be sharing parts of it here.

Where I’m coming from

I started learning about personality type theories since 1998, and the ones that sparked my interest were Carl G. Jung’s Personality Types, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Millions of people take the MBTI® every year, you may have seen it or one of the other similar type systems, which I call “16-type models”. In this school of thought, there are 16 personality types, and as an example, mine is INTJ, which stands for Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Judging, and you can find profiles of the types on sites like http://typelogic.org.

In 1998, I came across a brand new school of thought created by Tim Miller, tentatively called the Miller Cognitive Systems Inventory (MCSI), which aims to add some more layers of depth and also remedy some issues some people have with the MBTI and other 16-type models. I explored these ideas with Tim Miller and a few others until around 2001, and then for the last 8 years, I have been working further to refine my understanding of the mind while integrating other systems of thought, in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy.

My formal education background and work experience is software engineering, which involves making technical sense out of very complex and sometimes chaotic computer programs. People often think that is a long way from personality, but since the mind is in many ways such a computer, I have found the world of software very helpful for relating to how the mind organizes and processes information. Just as there are different styles of processing or “thinking” in a computer program, individuals also have a preferred way of thinking, and a personalized toolbox of mental tricks that they reuse over and over. In this regard, architecting software and reverse-engineering the mind (a goal of personality psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science) are similar in many ways. Since the comparison to computers may sound cold and robotic, I also should mention that I also believe emotion is very closely linked to these styles of thought, and individualized personality.

Soft vs Hard Science and Descriptive vs Definitive Models

Personality models often tend to be very descriptive. This can be good – personality described in practical terms is often more easy to apply to in real life. But when the goal is to understand more about the workings of the mind, understanding based on descriptions can be weak if it lacks specificity. When descriptions of personality are too easy to relate to and everyone can be fit into every category to some extent, and things become muddled.

I believe the 16-type models like the MBTI can be a valid and meaningful categorization of people’s personalities, especially as applied by its experts with one on one consultation. I believe that it captures a part of our identities and a facet of a primary type preference that does not change throughout our entire lives.

However, in day to day practice, when 16-type quizzes are applied as an unofficial self-assessment, they have a reputation for being somewhat wishy-washy, subject to tainting by several factors such as environment or mood or momentary preferences, and this leads to questionnaires producing different type results, raising concerns of validity, reliability and usefulness.

Another concern is how personality profiles can be vague and tend towards charicatures and stereotypes that, while useful rhetorically, are oversimplifications that always leave all people out some of the time, and some people all of the time. Talented authors may be able to capture the essence of each type, but since it is descriptive, it is very hard for people to hold this rich understanding in their minds. Since it is not something concrete that can be pinned down, like mathematics, it is a difficult topic to discuss or apply with specificity and confidence.

My hope is that the field of personality typology can be advanced by making it more rooted in specific definitions rather than descriptions, and in concrete mechanisms rather than general patterns of behaviour. I hope to see answers to the questions of how we think and emote, in terms of the style of our personality, and where the multifaceted nature of our personalities come from, and this blog exists to be an exploration of these topics, as does the open forum.

Preview of Upcoming Blog

I am not sure where this will go, and want it to be explorative and influencable by the whims of me and whoever might read or discuss. Feel free to email me questions or start discussions in the forum. If there is interest in a topic, I may move more in that direction.

On the other hand, there are already several advancements in theoretical models of personality and how the mind works, I believe, and I would like to bring them up here, starting with a different perspective of the 8 Jungian function-attitudes, which I believe are very interesting, important, and satisfying for understanding both personality types and how the mind works.

I would also like to describe the MCSI, which adds a great deal of important understanding of the structure of human personality, although I have agreed to hold off on publishing anything myself until the originators of that model get to publishing their information.

Here is a rough list of avenues that I may go down at some point:

  • Intro to Personality vs Temperament, and the angle I take to understand people

  • Workings of the mind: The building blocks of thought styles

  • Personality Structure: Where does our multifaceted nature come from?.

  • Personality Dynamics: the Mixing of personalities

  • Emotion: How thought and emotion intertwine

  • Deep Logic & Philosophy: Flows of information, Abstracting logic

  • Science: Validity of personality models, Approaches and Biases in Personality Psychology

  • Applying Personality to Specific Topics: Relationships, Software Engineering, Politics

  • Discussions of Existing Models: Socionics’ ‘j/p’ vs MBTI’s ‘J/P’ and other arbitrary categories

Fast Track to Understanding

If some of the first entries seem short and to the point, it is because I want to get you up to speed in the fastest time possible. These ideas have their value in how they empower you to understand people, so my goal is to empower you as quickly as possible in this blog, and leave more flowery discussions and examples for a later time better suited to pondering with more verbosity.

What’s Next:

I will start with a brief discussion of personality vs temperament, so that we know what I mean by personality. After that, I will begin a series on the simple building blocks of thought, that, once assembled, constitute what we can recognize as personality type.

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