It's often in the logical form 'if x, then y' -- so if you observe x then you can deduce y, etc.
Home 2023 › Forums › Model 1 Discussions › Ren's video on Cognitive Typology
Hi guys!
With Ren's permission I want to migrate an (already very dense) discord discussion here, for better continuation. 🙂 Starting first with a video he generously made about CT -
(comments to follow in next post)


(This is just how I see my own efforts, mythologically, as an alchemical act performed on reality itself. But I keep this largely to myself because it is pompous to say it out loud. Nor do I wish to be viewed as esoteric. However I motivate myself is, I hope, independent of the final results.)
Hi Auburn,
I am fascinated by this idea of a "meta-description of all of humanity". I didn't realise the project behind CT was that ambitious.
There are passages in Psychological Types where Jung sounds almost 'cognitively deterministic', in the sense that he seems to say our points of view are bound to be determined by our cognitive functional alignments. He even goes so far as to suggest that widespread disagreements between theorists/theories might boil down not to who's right and who's wrong, but to people talking past each other because they operate within different, incommensurable ontologies, with different conceptions of what constitutes validity, etc.
So an interesting question to ask you would be something like this: how can you succeed in developing a meta-description that is not, in the last analysis, a reflection of a TiNe ontology? It sounds as if CT aims at a final elaboration where the cognitive functional alignment of the theorist (i.e. yourself) is neutralised or bracketed. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl tried to do that with epistemology, and is widely considered in hindsight to have failed. So I am curious to hear what your stance on the matter is -- whether you think it's a pseudo-problem or something to be taken seriously.
Obviously, a lot of science doesn't seem to get overly worried about this issue. But perhaps it can get away with not being too worried because it deals with objects, not subjects. CT, however, is aimed at the subject, so the question of the theorist's own subjectivity becomes relevant. It seems to me there is an interesting methodological challenge rearing its head here, namely: how to provide a meta-description of all humanity from a neutral stance, in a language that is not always already 'contaminated' by the local ontological stance of the scientist.
Looking forward to any thoughts you may have : ) I have other thoughts regarding the bridging of physical and psychic but I might share them after you've responded to the above.
It is indeed quite a problem we have to address!
I call this the "Author Bias Problem" - I've written a wiki page about it here, with some proposed solutions, which may be a good starting-off point for us:
https://cognitivetypology.com/index.php?title=Author_Bias_Problem
Curious to know your thoughts on the article, and I will read up on Bracketing in the meantime and get back to you. 🙂
(Looking forward to your other thoughts as well)
I should have guessed you had anticipated the issue long ago!
Cool, I've had a read of the article and the two main proposed solutions. I'll come back with more possible observations once I've digested the content properly.
In summary, my essential thought on the matter is that, if type is real, there is no reason why it wouldn't be in medical literature, with a growing body of studies on each type, and facts-based descriptions that can be just as decentralized in authorship as any other important fact we know of ourselves and our constitution.
We don't have this body of literature because we don't know what type is, 'really'. We need to get there first, before we can study it. Oddly enough, if type turns out to be a biological reality, then that is actually more of the easy part.
After proper identification of type is established, whether just by vultology or also future methods involving genetic, neurological or other sorts of testing -- the question of "what it means" to be that type, what it means to be a part of this biological cross-section of humanity, is a very complex one. Essentially, every element of your human nature would be tinted with one's ontological assumptions about reality, and color that experience. And yet no specific behavior is exclusive to your type, but the manner/qualia of that experience would be. This creates a situation of infinite complexity. Getting that right is impossible without a lot of testimonies from verified individuals.
This is part of why I have focused on the quantification of type as the central and most important starting point to the proper study of types at all. You have to have clean samples, before you can extract out psychological information. Otherwise you're going to be meshing together testimonies of diverse mistypes (which is what's happening now in typology). You get a lot of Ji-leads adding in their individualism and experiences in profiles like that of the INFJ. Thus the profile takes that hybridized form.
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It's been my long-term dream to have a volume set of 16 books produced, each of which will contain the autobiographical testimonies of dozens of individuals of that type. Perhaps the books would be divided into two parts: the first part would be an editor's summary of the testimonies, while the second half would be the raw testimonies they share. Together, they would produce the most faithful archive of the types, not just described by theory, but described by people themselves.
I haven't read it yet, but I imagine your own book on your subjective experience is the kind of autobiography that would fit neatly into this collection?
This could also function as a sort of encyclopedia; a resource newly born individuals can used as a "manual" for life. I imagine a future in which medical experts can identify type early in life, and give the parents the corresponding type's volume, so they can get a sense of what kinds of life-paths and life experiences their child is predisposed to have. And perhaps it might guide their growth into the optional directions.
The idea is that these volumes would be published as a set, and be updated every few years. I'm in the process of thinking about how to gather this data, but I am pretty sure I will require the assistance of various certified vultologists practicing in therapeutic settings, who might encounter patients willing to contribute their personal accounts. So this would be a group effort. This is also why I want to get as many certified vultologists 'on the field' this year, to begin this project.
~ ~ ~
It's been 100 years and we have not developed such an encyclopedia because we have not really isolated what type is. And humanity cannot truly progress forward in the field of psychology without solving the type problem, because everything you might want to study about human psychology suffers from this baseline type-variance. Without accounting for type in human studies, your data is not as good. I personally feel that the lack of quantification of type is among the most key elements that has held back the hard-science progress of psychology, because when studies are performed, not accounting/adjusting for type leads every study they perform to be muddled and inconsistent in its outcomes. If humanity was more psychologically homogeneous, we'd be more advanced now.
Your idea for an anthology of volunteer autobiographies does sound like a solution to the author bias problem, but it occurs to me that you could end up with another bias, namely success story bias. By "success", I mean both subjective and objective: A bias toward both people who are satisfied with their lives and those who are at or near the apex of society in terms of social status. It's not impossible that you could get autobiographies from suicidal drug addicts, but I think it would take a focused effort to get participation from the "Soft White Underbelly" of society. The bias would arise not only among those who volunteer to write their stories, but also among the psychotherapists and other vultology practitioners themselves who solicit their stories for publication in the first place.
One could argue that the mentally unhealthy are a minority, and that it makes sense to orient CT toward the broader population first while dealing with harder cases later, but I wonder how relevant typology is to most psychologically normal people (my guess: not at all). In my observation, the people most drawn to typology, and the people most in need of whatever benefits it has to offer, are precisely those in mental distress seeking company and comfort among those fighting the same demons they are. Many of them are people for whom psychotherapy has either failed, or is just barely keeping them afloat.
Furthermore, I think psychological diversity is much greater at the unhealthy end of the spectrum than at the healthy end, so if the goal is to illustrate the diversity within type, then "failure stories" is where you're going to find it. I could be wrong about that though.
@lapislazuli - That's a fair observation. Part of my motivation for writing the 8 function profiles in two sections (regular then an "under stress") is precisely for this reason. The totality of personhood and typehood includes what the type looks like under stress, so I wouldn't omit that, nor should we omit what they look like in healthy states. I think Jung's descriptions were quite biased towards the unhealthy versions, given his patients were those seeking therapy. What may solve this problem is making sure the anthologies have a roughly equal number of entries taken from psychotherapy on mentally ill patients, and healthy civilian volunteers. Fortunately we have the fallen affect signal to help us sort between these two groupings vultologically.
Hi Auburn,
Just reacting to a couple things you said. Busy week at work, glad it’s the weekend at last. If haven’t been able to find a quote function so I’ll have to rely on the old-fashioned inverted commas, lol.
“In summary, my essential thought on the matter is that, if type is real, there is no reason why it wouldn't be in medical literature, with a growing body of studies on each type, and facts-based descriptions that can be just as decentralized in authorship as any other important fact we know of ourselves and our constitution.”
I agree with that. In principle this should be possible, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be possible in fact as well. As you already know well, with scientific theories it’s usually a matter of making them as robust and faithful as possible to the facts of the matter; the “ideal super-transparent-to-the-facts” scientific theory is just this, an ideal, dreamt of by philosophers perhaps. In practice I think that considering such methods as Integrative Perspective/Multi-Authorship to address the author bias problem is really interesting and just what needs to be done – though I think, reading and thinking on it, that I have a slight preference for the multi-authorship approach with some, restricted, curation.
It seems to me that there is a difficult condition to the Integrative approach, namely that the author would succeed in integrating his own unconscious processes. If I understand correctly, this means that e.g. the TiNe author would TiNe IIII (tell me I’m not understanding this properly). This condition is really difficult to satisfy, and in any case, like the article says, it would not be sufficient to cover the 16 types. The other concern I have is that a fully integrated TiNe would still be a Ji-lead; in other words, they would still think like a Ji-lead, even if their grasp of the other cognitive processes – here Ne, Si, Fe – is more refined. Perhaps this is not an issue. I’m just wondering out loud about it.
The advantage of the Multi-Authorship approach is that the curator could focus on a mostly subtractive method, where instead of adding content that might be tainted by his own consciousness, he instead removes content that can be shown not be specific to the type in question, until only the relevant content remains across the various self-descriptions pertaining to a given type. Whereas bias is always threatening to interfere with an additive approach, I think it’s much more easily neutralised with a subtractive approach. So I wouldn’t necessarily lean towards ‘no curator at all’, but rather for a subtractive curator. It would be fine to have an accompanying critical commentary as well, since the various testimonials/primary sources would be there anyway to speak from their own standpoint.
“I haven't read it yet, but I imagine your own book on your subjective experience is the kind of autobiography that would fit neatly into this collection?”
In some sense yes. In another sense, it is in the tradition of phenomenology, so my book seeks to isolate particular structures of the INFJ consciousness that apply across the board. I think that if I were to contribute to your collection, I would opt for a less theoretical testimonial, in order to let my natural cognitive processes express themselves as transparently as possible. Given the focus of my book, there is more Ti on display than would be shown in my everyday behaviour.
Still, it’s really cool to realise that my concept of ‘Jungian existentialism’ could actually be seen as complementary with CT 🙂 By focusing on the subjective, qualic dimension of type. Of course all of this would be a little ironic if my account ended up being reflective of FeNi instead of NiFe!
“I think Jung's descriptions were quite biased towards the unhealthy versions, given his patients were those seeking therapy. What may solve this problem is making sure the anthologies have a roughly equal number of entries taken from psychotherapy on mentally ill patients, and healthy civilian volunteers. Fortunately we have the fallen affect signal to help us sort between these two groupings vultologically.”
Quick question from a CT newbie: is the Fallen Affect component of vultology the method whereby to identify the type of an unhealthy individual, roughly speaking?
A subtractive curator! That's a brilliant idea, hah! 😀
I like it. Thanks for bringing that up, it makes the most sense to me too. A curated anthology sounds like the right plan. I'll see if I can come up with a way to start gathering that collection, from volunteers.
Regarding your case, I just got your book, and am about a third into reading it, and am really enjoying it! Both for its own contents, but also as a way to understand you better. As I mentioned in the first video of my lecture series, vultological information is meant to add/support psychological information, rather than override it. And what you seem to be describing in this book does appear to be the same thing that I call NiFe -- which is by no means an obvious thing! I'm quite amazed, really.
I find your description of things, and functions, to be quite in harmony with my own take on things; Pe being information gathering, Pi being information mapping, and so on. While it may be tempting to consider this a canonical view in typology, it's by no means obvious to me that such agreement exists. So we seem to have quite compatible views even among disparate Jungian interpretations. (I also appreciate your mention of CT at the start of the book)
As for the predicament of Ni you describe, again I am not fully done with the book but I've read your outline of the Problem, and.. I can see that same problem manifest in those I've typed as NiFe as well. Much of this can be seen in the NiFe video I made, although it requires some breaking-down of the contents. What amounts to the Ni-leads inclination towards pansychic thought, the inclination to believe in the interconnectedness of all consciousnesses (which the videos described) is essentially an expression of this very problem of Ni's non-separateness, that you also describe. Indeed, a discrete "I" is rejected, philosophically, by such people as NiFe Ekhart Tolle, and (as will feature soon in the NiTe video) Adi Da Samraj. They frame it as succumbing to the illusion of separate-self, of ego, of differentiation. This could very well be an effect generated by the very nature of Ni's perception which disallows world-differentiation, especially in standard development (l---) which has no reason-based (i.e. J=rationality) countermeasures to that implicit intuition's automatic perception.
I have many more thoughts about this, but perhaps I will save them for a separate thread, once I finish the rest of your book.
Quick question from a CT newbie: is the Fallen Affect component of vultology the method whereby to identify the type of an unhealthy individual, roughly speaking?
Yes, 'roughly speaking' as you say. The fallen affect signal seems positively correlated with low mental health, or aberrant psychologies of some form. But we don't yet have as much information on it as we'd like. What we do know is that it alters the 'flavor' of the type-- often towards a more introspective and depressive angle, but it can also manifest as mania. People with lower functions developed are somewhat more likely to show it, and it partly goes away when people's mental health improves.
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