Introducing Some Operational Characteristics of Mind—The Human Outlook and the Dynamics of Society

Abstract

For the engineer to deal with social questions, it is necessary that he have some basic view of how human behavior is governed in a technical sense. A foundational view is presented for the outlook of mind. This view is based on a neurophysiological abstraction regarding thought and action, not a sociological abstraction. Sources for the neurophysiological abstraction are proposed, but not herein detailed. It turns out that the neurophysiological characterization agrees with a philosophic-sociological truism, the law of the wings. It is offered here as the polar axis of response from radical to reactionary, as a generalized transform characteristic of the mind joined to the body and to the body of society. This axis of response is not simply a political polarization. It represents the transform by which any input set of impinging information hurls the mind-body into thought and action. This paper is concerned with the nature of that transformation.