Originally Posted by
jxrtes
Given what you've written, wouldn't the terms 'catabolic' and 'anabolic' themselves suggest that dynamics don't break down information further into more basic constituents, but see any piece of information of arbitrary size as an irreducible building block?
Suppose for arguments sake that you had two lego blocks of different sizes.
Lego Block A [oo] and
Lego Block B [o]
A static type would focus on the fact that [oo] can be broken down into [o] + [o] and that, therefore, [oo] is twice as big as [o]. This is the essence of analysis - breaking things down ('catabolizing' them) into their most basic constituents, understanding their essence, which therefore is the only thing that allows us to formulate a comparison between them. In this case, the basic contituent of both of them is this single unit: [o]. This is Ti or logic of external relationships because we're dealing with strict classification; it would be Fi if the lego blocks represented something ethical or internal, as if we were breaking down two people's values to compare what attracts and what repulses them.
A "synthetic" dynamic IM Element would focus on how the blocks are arranged to get to some pre-destined, desired or necessary end-point: [o][oo], [[o]o], etc. A dynamic IM Element, in this case, wouldn't focus on what the individual blocks are made of, but on how to use them and how they operate together to form the bigger picture, hence "synthetic". It would be odd for it to try to conjure up a singular "essence" because the focus is on how the blocks can be arranged in different ways depending on the context, requirements or day of the week, not on any permanent static value that all the blocks would share.
It's an admittedly imperfect example because we've all played with lego blocks and learned to understand both their static and dynamic aspects (we have the luxury as humans of using all the functions, and of being particularly receptive to all valued ones), so you might need to abstract it to more ambiguous and complex information or to look at intertype-relation-related personality traits, where weak and strong functions do matter, to see the point.