Integrative Intelligence as an Operative Mode: A Psychological Study of Cognitive Integration through Self-Ethnographic Dialogue with AI

This paper presents a psychological study of cognitive integration and metacognitive processes through self-ethnographic methodology. Many of the most consequential questions in daily life arise and vanish before they are treated as questions: Why does fear arise? Why does something feel beautiful? Why does irritation persist? Contemporary psychology and education often address such experiences through predefined frameworks or external evaluative scales, yet they can under-describe the inner operation of judgment as it is generated—where time, life domains, and embodied affect–meaning simultaneously participate. This paper addresses that descriptive gap by introducing Integrative Intelligence as an operative mode of judgment, not as an ability, trait, or developmental stage. This study employs a self-ethnographic approach using three forms of primary data. First, near-time verbatim records documented in an online mountaineering log service (Yamareco), capturing introspection, judgment, and emotional states during or immediately after activities. Second, physiological indicators recorded via wearable device (Garmin), including heart rate, altitude, movement speed, and timestamps, used as contextual reference rather than evaluative metrics. Third, dialogue logs with conversational AI (ChatGPT), which serve both as a reflective medium and as data capturing the externalization-feedback cycle of internal protocol operation. The analytical focus is not on content analysis or thematic coding, but on structural description: identifying the conditions under which integrative judgment emerges and tracing how temporal, relational, and embodied dimensions participate in a single decision field. Integrative Intelligence is characterized by three inseparable features observed when the mode is active: vertical integration (past–present–future jointly participating in a single judgment field), horizontal integration (coherent linking across domains such as work, family, and personal practice), and deep integration (serial coupling of bodily sensation, emotion, thought, and meaning). The paper describes this phenomenon through four interrelated observational viewpoints: an internal protocol that renders temporal selves jointly referable; a resonant dialogue protocol in which AI functions strictly as a non-agentic structural mirror; a selective mentorship process that stabilizes judgment through extracting qualities rather than imitating behavior; and an environmental observation field—exemplified by mountaineering—in which irreversible responsibility and embodied constraints make the operative mode most legible. Rather than offering a diagnostic or prescriptive theory, this framework is designed to help questions remain examinable: to hold, externalize, and revisit fragile inquiries before they evaporate, and to preserve a minimal structure by which judgment can be observed across time.