Functions of Fast Reflexion in Bipolar Choice

Our view of "reflexion" has been essentially broadened during the last twenty years. Traditionally we have considered it to consist of the conscious constructing of images of the self and others by human beings. Now we have evidence that there is a reflexion of another nature as well. It is as if an inborn informational processor is built in into human psyche whose function is to automatically create these images together with their subjective domains. This processor generates a specific specter of human responses not controlled consciously and running extremely fast (onetwo milliseconds). This type of reflexion, as distinct from the traditional concept is called fast reflexion (Lefebvre, 1987). In this paper we will decipher the mathematical laws governing the automatic functioning of this inborn processor and show how they reveal themselves in human behavior (Adams-Webber, 1996a). The result of this analysis will be a formal model of the subject with fast reflexion. Ideally, global theoretical models ought to possess two properties: integrity and uniformity. Integrity means that the model must be able to reflect simultaneously the subject's perception, behavior, and inner domain. Uniformity requires that different aspects of the subject's activity must be described in terms of the same theoretical language. The general method for attaining these two properties is to represent the subject as a composition of mathematical functions. Various elements of this composition are interpreted as "inputs" and "outputs" and as images of the self and of other subjects. These images can have their own inner domain containing images of the next order. As a result, we succeed in producing a unified functional description of the subject's inner and external activity. A composition of mathematical functions is also a function. It describes the subject's behavior. Therefore, the composition's structure reflects not only the subject's inner domain, but also the macrostructure of a computational process generating behavior. In the simplest cases, when the "global" function of behavior is known in advance, information about the mental domain can be obtained from a purely mathematical analysis of the properties of the function.