In the process of reading a lot of different definitions of Ni and finding them to be lacking, I decided to come up with my own definition that worked better than anything else I've found. It describes the style of communication I've seen in Ni types, and I think works well to see how they think without making Ni into some mysterious, mystical, or possibly even "superior" function.
Without further introduction, Ni is most simply this: an awareness of the process underlying a string of mental associations.
Ne, contrarily, is aware of the content of the mental associations themselves.
Cat, bat, rat, frog, dog, fog, etc.
That's an example of a chain of mental associations. Ne sees each one of those individually and recognizes them for what they are, their identities as things and concepts in themselves.
Ni is a process-oriented function that observes such a chain of association as the one I listed above, and it understands why one association often leads to the next. Rather than focusing on associations, it focuses on the process of how people make associations. This awareness of how people make associations often results for many Ni-oriented writers in what's called a stream of consciousness style, the king of which was James Joyce. (Read Finnegan's Wake or Ulysses to understand Ni. Remember that it's Ni + Fe. Jose Saramago will give you the Ni + Te version.)
Any definition that says that Ni predicts the future is wrong. Ni is not about predicting the future or about time. Time is just an analogy for the abstractness of Ni, because Ni is the most abstract function that exists. People who define Ni as an understanding of time or the passage thereof have gotten lost in the analogy. Each function has predictive ability depending on its dimensionality, but this predictive ability comes only from past experience and is dependent on that.
The process I used to obtain this definition is generalizable. That is, all introverted functions are processes that operate on their respective extroverted counterparts, which are discrete things that have content of some kind. Fe is feeling, Fi the process of feeling itself. Te is about facts, Ti how we arrive at those facts, Se is about sensations and the most concrete aspects of thought (the signs that refer to the symbols), and Si is about the process of sensation itself and an awareness of how people sense things.
So there you go folks. No more mystery.


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to me is plain linearity. Just like
is a web, for instance. So of course
and
. I do say it predicts more easily than other elements given that it extrapolates and "aims" skillfully, and after all it is intuition i.e. conceptual and event-based. I call it the bow and arrow of the IMs. Pull back, then go forward. Or a broken record, that's also an image that came to mind.
I'd rather watch Dwayne Johnson running through a forest screaming: "ORANGES!!!" for no apparent reason.
? Scandal. I'm offended. 


